Transparency News 3/30/15

Monday, March 30, 2015

State and Local Stories


A move by Virginia legislators to limit the police use of data from automated license plate readers, and “any surveillance technology” used by law enforcement, hit a bump Friday afternoon when Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) amended the General Assembly’s bill, provoking an angry response from the bill’s sponsors and setting up a showdown next month in Richmond. The General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a bill last month which would require police to purge the data from license plate readers within seven days, unless they have a warrant or a pending criminal or terrorism case. The readers, typically installed on the back of moving patrol cars, photograph hundreds of license plates per minute and record the time and location each shot was taken. An instant check of databases can determine if a car is stolen or otherwise wanted, but police can also save the data and review it later to see if a suspect was photographed near the scene of a crime or to locate a missing person. Friday, McAuliffe changed the seven-day limit to 60 days, and changed “any surveillance technology” to “license plate readers.” Brian Moran, the Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security, said Friday that he had “been informed by numerous law enforcement agencies that license plate readers result in salient and compelling information.
Washington Post

At the request of the governor and prosecutors, the Virginia State Police are investigating the arrest of University of Virginia student Martese Johnson by Alcoholic Beverage Control agents, but it’s unlikely the public will have access to much of the investigation. The Virginia Freedom of Information Act allows nearly all aspects of a criminal investigation to remain private, even after the investigation has closed. Law enforcement agencies can choose to release information from investigations but state police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said that rarely happens in her agency. Megan Rhyne said keeping information private that can jeopardize investigations is justified, but law enforcement agencies need to evaluate each case instead of just using the exemption automatically when someone requests information. “Far too many departments use denial as their default position without looking over the files to see if any of the concerns they have are actually present,” she said. “I’ve heard of plenty of departments who just say no without looking into it and I wish there was more review on a case by case basis to see if a file should be released.” The state police do evaluate each request, Virginia State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller said.
Daily Progress

As former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s use of a personal email account has recently come under scrutiny, Charlottesville Tomorrow has evaluated the email practices of Charlottesville’s City Council and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. Two of the 11 elected officials on these bodies advertise personal email addresses on their government website, and neither locality has made it a practice to routinely archive communications from personal email accounts. “Having a government email address is important from an accountability standpoint because it offers immediate accountability,” said Megan Rhyne, associate director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. “It’s a citizen’s right to see what their government is up to.” Local public bodies are subject to Freedom of Information laws so that government records, even emails sent from a private system, must be made available upon request when they relate to public business. Rhyne said that even though private email systems are allowed, and there are some officials who could manage it perfectly, most, she believes, are not trained in records management.
Charlottesville Tomorrow

More whites than blacks who are charged with probation violations get a break when they go before circuit court judges, case status records from 2014 suggest. Del. David Albo, R-Springfield, who chairs the House Courts of Justice Committee, said any racial disparities in handling probation violation would be a concern. He said it is important to look at the underlying charge, past records and how exactly an individual violated probation. To determine if there is a problem it is important to compare apples to apples, Albo said. State Sen. Thomas K. "Tommy" Norment, R-James City County, who is co-chairman of the Senate Courts of Justice Committee and actively practices in criminal courts across the Peninsula, said looking at the overall pattern of probation violations was outside his area of expertise. He said he was reluctant to talk about his own experiences because of his concern to protect clients' confidentiality. "However, I do believe in greater transparency and accessibility of criminal records that are already public records," he added.
Daily Press

In Southside Virginia, the town of Waverly in Sussex County has seen unusual political tumult this year, leading to a court case and suggestions of a recall election. Much of the tumult surrounds actions taken by the new mayor. The town, which registered 2,149 residents in the last census, is in a slow decline. It’s littered with defunct shops and derelict buildings. The school is shuttered, and the only supermarket in town recently closed as well. Critics are upset by a host of issues, including a town budget and tax burden that have surged, a pair of water tower maintenance contracts the mayor signed, and a Freedom of Information Act case last week that cost the town about $7,000.
Times-Dispatch

The legal fight over sectarian Christian prayer led by the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors has dragged out over three and a half years. Through legal setbacks — including a federal court injunction against board-led prayer in place since 2012 — and related court rulings in other districts, supervisors have tenaciously stood their ground. They have refused to give up. For Rebecca Glenberg, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, the board’s resistance has been unusual. “It’s atypical in my experience,” Glenberg said. She did not want to speculate on the board’s motives, but she said other governing bodies have wanted to get their legal troubles out of the way.
Register & Bee

At a single page apiece, the volume of bills and resolutions filed in this year’s General Assembly session would surpass the length of Leo Tolstoy's voluminous classic "War and Peace." Lawmakers introduced 1,919 bills and 857 resolutions — for a total of 2,276 — in the 45-day session that ended Feb. 27. The first printing of "War and Peace" numbered 1,225 pages, or just over half the number of bills and resolutions. The topics in the General Assembly are generally less intriguing than Napoleon's march on Moscow -- they range from ethics reform to truck weight limits -- and likely far less read by the legislators whose votes help cast the words in bills into law. “Legislators do read some legislation, but they typically have an aide or two who assists because it would be difficult to read all of it otherwise,” said Geoffrey Skelley, spokesman with the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “This is true at the federal level as well though members of Congress have much larger staffs.”
Star-Exponent

Agents working for Virginia’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control issued more arrest warrants to minors for buying or having alcohol than to stores for selling to underage drinkers in 2014, agency records show. The statistics, which The Washington Post obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, shed some light on the ways in which the agency in charge of the state’s liquor monopoly also cracks down on crimes ranging from shoplifting to child abuse.
Washington Post


National Stories
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The National Security Agency considered abandoning its secret program to collect and store American calling records in the months before leaker Edward Snowden revealed the practice, current and former intelligence officials say, because some officials believed the costs outweighed the meager counterterrorism benefits. After the leak and the collective surprise around the world, NSA leaders strongly defended the phone records program to Congress and the public, but without disclosing the internal debate. The proposal to kill the program was circulating among top managers but had not yet reached the desk of Gen. Keith Alexander, then the NSA director, according to current and former intelligence officials who would not be quoted because the details are sensitive. Two former senior NSA officials say they doubt Alexander would have approved it.
AP, via News & Advance

The D.C. Office of the Attorney General has dismissed some cases and requested continuances in others as it works through a review of about 14,000 criminal and juvenile cases that were potentially compromised by a flaw in the city police department’s data management system. Attorney General Karl Racine provided an update of the ongoing review of cases to determine the scope of information from police reports that may have been inadvertently withheld from criminal defense attorneys, but he declined to say how many cases have been dismissed as a result. He did note that his office is bringing in outside help to assist in the large-scale review. Prosecutors are required by law to share with defendants any evidence that could be favorable to the accused; however, officials worried that flaws in the police data system could have caused prosecutors to withhold evidence from defendants.
Washington Times

Mobile ticketing isn’t the only feature available for riders with smartphones. A growing number of agencies (and third-party providers) offer bus and train arrival time via apps. There are different ways agencies can calculate when a bus arrives at a stop, but the most popular and ubiquitous is automatic vehicle location (AVL) technology. AVL, part of the constellation of intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies that have been developed in recent decades, consists of two major components: Onboard GPS that tracks the location of each bus in real time and software that displays the location of the buses on a map. The technology has been a boon for commuters who want to know when the next bus or train will arrive. But it also helps transit managers respond to unplanned service disruptions as well as monitor distance between buses and on-time performance.
Governing

Human services agencies have never really been on the technological cutting edge. These are organizations where the ways of doing things have often been entrenched for years, and these agencies typically have been slow to adopt innovative technologies to improve the way services are delivered to the poor. But as with the rest of government, unrelenting tight budgets have human services agencies up against the wall, forcing them to adopt changes, including new technologies, in order to survive with fewer resources. One of those changes is the adoption of self-service delivery using mobile technology -- akin to some of the more innovative practices already taking place in the private sector, including retail, banking and insurance companies. What makes this change promising is the fact that so many of the clients served by human services -- the poor, the out of work, the disabled, even the elderly -- already have the technology needed to make self-service feasible: a smartphone. 
Governing