Transparency News 7/2/15

Thursday, July 2, 2015

State and Local Stories


The City of Chesapeake lost library records spanning five decades during a computer server upgrade in 2013 but did not report the problem to the state until last month. The files - many of them digitalized from paper documents - included patron and volunteer records dating to when Chesapeake was incorporated in 1963. The library staff was able to reconstruct a majority of them using paper and tape backups, but the original data could not be recovered. The loss is estimated to be as much as six terabytes of data - enough to store 6,000 hours of video or 510 million pages of text. The destruction happened on Feb. 19, 2013, when a contract worker was performing an upgrade to increase capacity of hardware within the Chesapeake Library, where the records were stored. The contractor hit a wrong command and the data was erased. Even the disaster recovery files were destroyed.
Chesapeake Clipper

In an open letter, a Portsmouth city government observer is calling for James Bridgeford to step aside as School Board chairman, citing the board's secret meetings late last year to hire a superintendent. Today, the board will vote on its chair and vice-chair positions. Mark Geduldig-Yatrofsky said that while he likes Bridgeford, he must be held accountable. "I do think that the board does need to acknowledge that they didn't do their best and they need to do better, and I feel that the buck stops with the chair," he said.
Virginian-Pilot

An attorney who notified law enforcement about potential criminal activity at BVU Authority while serving on its board wasn’t reappointed to another four-year term Wednesday. Doug Fleenor, who served a single term as a citizen appointee to the authority board, was passed over in favor of business owner Frank Goodpasture during the Bristol Virginia City Council’s annual reorganizational meeting Wednesday. The BVU seat was included in a series of app
Herald Courier


National Stories
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An expansion of Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on Wednesday is not being met with a lot of excitement by Midland County officials. “Last year, the legislature, in its infinite wisdom, passed significant revisions to the FOIA,” said Midland County Attorney L. William Smith at a recent Midland County Commission Executive Committee meeting. “In my view and essentially everyone else I talked to, the revisions were punitive. They treat municipalities like bad stepchildren and they are onerous and are going to be very costly to the county and every municipality in the state of Michigan.” Proponents say the expansion will provide greater transparency at less cost. “Openness of government is the goal,” Smith added. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it was written by somebody, who A, didn’t like municipalities and B, it’s media driven because all the design is to shove information while it is hot to the media in a quick fashion regardless of the time it takes for the government to prepare and present it.”
Midland Daily News

Days after McKinney, Texas, police officer Eric Casebolt was filmed pointing his service weapon at a group of unarmed black teenagers at a pool party this month, Gawker submitted a Public Information Act request to the city of McKinney asking to see Casebolt’s records and any emails about his conduct sent or received by McKinney Police Department employees. Today, we received a letter from the city’s attorneys claiming that fulfilling our request would cost $79,229.09. The city arrived at that extraordinary figure after estimating that hiring a programmer to execute the grueling and complex task of searching through old emails would cost $28.50 per hour, and that the search for emails about Casebolt would take 2,231 hours of said programmer’s time. That only comes to about $63,000; the bill also includes $14,726 “to cover the actual time a computer resource takes to execute a particular program.” In other words, the operating cost of the computer used to search the emails is nearly 15 grand on its own. Another portion of Gawker’s request, for copies of Casebolt’s personnel file and any internal investigations into his conduct, costs $255.04.
Gawker

Sherry Smith sent a Freedom of Information request to Goodrich (Mich.) Area Schools for 14 months of emails that mention her son, after the school changed her son's individual education plan for his disability. "I never in a million years would have imagined it would amount to $77,000 worth," Smith said. Specifically, Smith asked for "emails between Goodrich Area Schools employees, Genesee Intermediate School District employees, Michigan Department of Education employees, etc." Michelle Imbrunone, superintendent of Genesee Intermediate School District, said in an email that the high price tag was due to the wide scope of Smith's request. "Goodrich Area Schools exercised its right to charge reasonable costs for staff time and materials to compile the information requested," Imbrunone said. "It was been determined by the district that it would be necessary to hire someone to assist us with sorting through the email content requested." Imbrunone said that they estimated Smith's request would take 4,687.5 hours at the hourly employee rate of $16.58 per hour to complete.
Michigan Radio

Two professors are entitled to lower processing fees for a public records request because its purpose is educational and journalistic, a federal judge ruled. Syracuse University professors Susan Long and David Burnham filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in November 2013, seeking electronic data from the ICE database. Long and Burnham's request was filed on behalf of Syracuse's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC. The specific information sought included all data from a shared ICE operational database, an "integrated decision support system," and a full legal case management database. The professors also asked for Customs and Border Protection data libraries, the ruling states. ICE denied Long and Burnham's request to be classified as representatives of an educational institution or news media for the purposes of reduced FOIA fees. ICE had previously treated TRAC as both an educational and news media requester but denied the professors' request this time, claiming they did not adequately explain how the information they sought would further TRAC's educational and journalist missions, according to the ruling.
Courthouse News Service

Florida Circuit Judge Pamela Campbell decided today that reporters and members of the public will not be allowed to view a sex video at the center of a multi-million dollar invasion-of-privacy lawsuit between Hogan and Gawker Media. The courtroom will not be closed while the evidence is shown, Campbell ruled. Instead, monitors showing the tape will be pointed away from the gallery where the press sits, restricting the tape’s viewability.
Poynter

The White House lifted a 40-year-old ban on taking photos during public tours of the executive mansion on Wednesday, delighting tourists who immediately began posting pictures on social media. First lady Michelle Obama announced the change in a video on Instagram. "If you've been on a White House tour, you may have seen this sign," she said, holding up a placard reading "No Photos or Social Media allowed." "Well, not anymore," Obama said as she tore up the sign, laughing. Tourists were greeted by the video as they entered the White House on Wednesday. They pulled out smartphones and digital cameras as they passed photos of the Obamas and signs reading, "PHOTOGRAPHY IS ENCOURAGED."
Reuters

WHEN YOU SEND A PUBLIC RECORDS REQUEST to a government agency, you might expect a delayed response or high costs to fulfill it, even a denial—but you probably don’t expect to be sued by the agency. Yet that very thing happened recently in New Jersey, prompting a judge last week to dismiss the suit and conclude that a public policy enabling the authorities to sue a requester would be the “antithesis” of open government. It’s not common for a public agency to sue a records requester, but it’s also not unprecedented. The agencies, fortunately, have not fared well in court, though the suits appear to have become more frequent in recent years—and in some cases they have targeted a news organization. So, to get a better sense of how these cases arise and get resolved, let’s unpack the New Jersey one and put it in context.
Columbia Journalism Review

A State Department spokesman said Wednesday that details from 25 emails were deemed classified and withheld from the 3,000-page trove of Hillary Clinton documents released overnight -- despite the former secretary of state claiming she never sent classified material on her personal email. State Department spokesman John Kirby acknowledged at a briefing that details from the 25 emails are now considered "classified." The messages were released, with those portions redacted. However, Clinton declared in March that she "did not email any classified material to anyone" on her account.  The State Department's decision to withhold the records, though, doesn't necessarily mean Clinton knowingly sent classified material -- as it was classified after the fact. 
Fox News

Editorials/Columns

Police are right to be sensitive to the feelings of family and friends when a loved one takes his life. Death investigations often include gory photographs, heartbreaking goodbye notes and details, and disseminating any of that can exacerbate pain. But when parents are seeking answers about a child’s death, those files may help. Virginia’s open records laws specifically provide authorities with discretion to release that information. City attorneys argue that the police department’s policy not to release criminal investigative materials for apparent suicides is “largely out of respect for grieving family members.” Outrageously, city attorneys also claim the courts have no authority to review the decision to withhold records, effectively making the Virginia Beach City Attorney the highest authority in Virginia. That contention correctly prompted the Virginia Coalition for Open Government to intervene.
Virginian-Pilot

York-Poquoson Sheriff J.D. "Danny" Diggs deserves a great deal of credit for how he handled a fatal shooting by one of his deputies last week. He quickly gathered the facts of the incident, in which 26-year-old Damien A. Harrell of Newport News was killed in York County following a confrontation with deputies investigating a car accident. Sheriff Diggs then provided that information to the media in a timely manner, so that the facts of what happened would be known to the public. In officer-involved shootings elsewhere, a sluggish dissemination of such details can lead to misunderstanding and, in some instances, unrest. That was not the case here. Sheriff Diggs also took the extraordinary step of showing video of the shooting captured by the deputy's body camera. Prior to doing so, however, he asked that the images not be recorded or broadcast. It is here we must object. Prohibiting media members from recording or broadcasting the video denies citizens a full understanding of what happened. This is a mistake. It is not for the sheriff to decide what the public can stomach. The video was created by a public employee using taxpayer-funded equipment. We believe it's a public record and filed a request under Virginia's Freedom of Information Act to obtain it.
Daily Press