CPRA not safe from the shredder yet! Brown revised budget due next week

May 8, 2013 — In March, FAC issued a Threat Watch on the new fees and funding cuts hidden in Governor Brown’s budget that will seriously weaken citizens’ rights of access to public records.

Last month both Senate and Assembly Budget Subcommittees rejected the court’s’ proposal to raise fees on court documents. Unfortunately, this proposal — in fact, all suggested cuts — will get a second chance at adoption when Governor Brown submits his revised budget to state legislators next week.

Find out what you can do about these looming threats by clicking the take action button now!

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Judge plugs “private email” loophole in CA public records law

Update!April 12, 2013/ San Jose appeals email disclosure ruling  (Read More)

March 20.2013 /In a big victory for open government, a Superior Court judge in San Jose has ruled that the state’s Public Records Act applies to government officials’ emails and texts about government business–EVEN IF those messages are sent or received using the officials’ private email or text accounts, rather than accounts belonging to the government.

The decision by Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg rejected San Jose’s argument that local governments can’t be held legally responsible for digital messages that reside in computer servers that they don’t own, lease, use or control. Judge Kleinberg reasoned that government officials, when emailing and texting about government business, are functioning as agents of the city. The officials’ ownership and control of the messages is imputed to the city. P. Scheer   (Read More)

Media heroism turned on its head: The real Manning scandal

March 20, 2013/BY EDWARD WASSERMAN–In media mythology, the years from the mid-‘60s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.

Mainstream journalism marinated in adversarialism. Little Southern newspapers infuriated their own readers by staring down segregation. Foreign correspondents forced upon an unwilling public the realities of a brutal war. Network news ignored official disdain and showed the bottomless suffering the war inflicted on the innocents it was supposed to save. With the Pentagon Papers, newspapers defied secrecy rules to expose government lies. With Watergate, reporters forced out a corrupt president.

True, that retelling is a bit of myth-spinning; the media never were quite that gutsy. But myths illuminate. They remind us of values and aspirations. What we’d like to think was true then reflects what we hope might still be true now. (Read More)

Apple v Samsung appeals court signals interest in transparency issue

March 14, 2013 /Like the Vatican puffing smoke, a federal appeals court–in a case involving FAC–has signaled that it is taking seriously the issue of transparency in patent infringement litigation.

The case is an appeal from the massive Apple v. Samsung suit. Both parties have appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to void rulings by the trial judge that order the companies to unseal–that is, make public–financial and other records that they filed with the court. FAC joined the case as an amicus to advocate the unsealing of the records, and for greater transparency in patent cases generally.

The appeals court today granted the request of FAC and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (also an amicus) to participate in oral argument in the appeal.  (Read the Order). The granting of argument time to amici in Federal Circuit cases is almost unheard of. P. Scheer (Read More)

Let’s sequester Congress and shut down the airports serving D.C.

Commentary by Peter ScheerMarch 5, 2013/U.S. aviation officials are warning of severe flight delays due to furloughs of air traffic controllers triggered by the sequester’s across-the-board budget cuts. I have a better idea.

Instead of furloughing controllers across the country, the Federal Aviation Administration should just shut down all major airports for the nation’s capital: Reagan National, Dulles and Baltimore-Washington International. This will achieve the same cost savings while trapping members of Congress in Washington until they do what they were elected to do: make the strategic, if difficult, choices on spending and taxes necessary to bend the curve of the U.S. deficit.

Why should the whole country suffer for the failure of Washington’s political class to do their jobs? The point of the sequestration provision — enacted with bipartisan support in 2011 — was to create a “poison pill” so painful that Congress would be compelled to agree to a rational package of spending cuts and tax hikes, no matter how distasteful (in different ways) to both major parties.  (Read More)

FAC files suit for logs showing who visited LA’s County Assessor in jail

February 28,2013/The First Amendment Coalition (FAC) has filed a Public Records suit to find out who has visited LA county jail inmate John Noguez, the embattled LA County Assessor who faces twenty-four felony counts for bribery, perjury and related public corruption charges.

Noguez was arrested in October, along with an aide and a political contributor, following a political corruption probe into allegations that the Assessor’s Office lowered property tax bills in exchange for campaign contributions.

FAC’s suit is against County Sheriff Leroy Baca, who administers the county jail. Baca denied two public records requests–one submitted by LA public television station KCET, the other by FAC–for portions of the jail’s visitor logs showing the names and visit-dates of visitors to see Assessor Noguez.– P. Scheer (Read More)

Find Answers to Brown Act and CPRA questions using these tools:

Asked & Answered, a great resource for researching access-to-government and free speech issues, is a database of our lawyers’  answers to legal questions submitted by FAC’s users and members through the Legal Hotline consultation service. The questions and answers cover the whole waterfront of free speech and open-government issues. Go to Asked & Answered.

Legal Hotline offers our members and users free, ready access to FAC’s lawyers, 1st Amendment & media law experts at the Bryan Cave law firm in San Francisco, for questions about government access—to government records; to agency and local government meetings; and to court document and proceedings. Go to Legal Hotline.

FAC uncovers LAPD use of “Stingray” cell-phone monitoring tool 

February 15, 2013/Records released to the First Amendment Coalition (and published below) by the LA Police Department confirm LAPD’s use, in criminal investigations, of a controversial technology for tracking cell phones.

Devices using this technology, “International Mobile Subscriber Identity” locators, operate by mimicking a cellphone tower, causing cell phones that are within range to connect to the device.

Their use raises privacy and free speech concerns because they obtain information, not only about a specific phone belonging to a suspect whom police are legitimately targeting, but also about the cell phones of potentially hundreds of innocent persons who happen to be in the vicinity of the devices. — P. Scheer (Read More)