Transparency News, 4/13/2022

Wednesday
April 13, 2022

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state & local news stories

Students, politicians, faculty and community members filled Old Cabell Hall on Tuesday night to hear former Vice President Mike Pence share thoughts and advocate for freedom at a speech at the University of Virginia. People gathered hours before the speech waiting to get inside the venue. Matt Walker and Charlie Watts, students at Liberty University, were among the first in line. “He’s the former vice president,” Watts said. “We couldn’t miss the chance to hear him speak.”
The Daily Progress

Leesburg will not be accepting a proposed settlement from developer David Gregory over ongoing lawsuits against the town and county after the county refused on Friday to hold a private joint meeting, according to Mayor Kelly Burk. Burk said to the Times-Mirror that Gregory offered to settle his lawsuits against the town and county if Leesburg initiated a boundary line adjustment, which would have brought the Graydon Manor property into the town, rezoning it for use as a data center. The offer would have required approval from both the town and the county and would have had to go through a public review process, Burk said. Based on a March 30 email exchange between Town Manager Kaj Dentler and County Administrator Tim Hemstreet, the proposed meeting would have included both of them, two supervisors, county attorney Leo Rogers, two Leesburg Town Council members, town attorney Chris Spera, Gregory and his attorneys.
Loudoun Times-Mirror
 

editorials & columns

In Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy, the legal scholar Amy Gajda links our present struggle to an underappreciated tradition in American law and thought. She argues that although the right to privacy may have been a 19th-century innovation, privacy sensibilities have since the nation’s beginnings served as a durable counterweight to the hallowed principles of free speech, free expression, and the right to know. Ranging across several centuries, her account of the determined fight to protect privacy sounds like just the sort of road map we could use right now. But legal victories won in the name of privacy have often been sorely inadequate. What’s more, they have historically favored the privileged over the vulnerable. A realistic defense of privacy in the digital age isn’t a lost cause, but it will require grappling with new social as well as technological challenges. It will also entail reckoning with privacy’s past uses and abuses.
Sarah E. Igo, The Atlantic