SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
California's top court agreed Friday to decide whether government employees' personal texts and e-mails are subject to disclosure under public records law. At least one other state high court, Alaska's, has already required disclosure and preservation of those communications if they deal with government business. Arizona's highest court has ruled that private communications with a "substantial nexus" to government activity are subject to disclosure.
Still, there's been a hodgepodge of lower-court state rulings nationwide on the topic, leaving much of the country's public officials across the 50 states to conceal their official communications ( http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/15/when-are-public-officials-calls-and-emails-public-records/ ) from public review. Federal officials' private electronic communications, however, are subject to the Freedom of Information Act ( http://informationrightsandwrongs.com/2012/04/12/when-are-emails-subject-to-foia/ ) if they concern government business.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 30 2014, @01:16PM
There's a very good reason that your granddad wasn't able to just invite the other alderman over for beer and brats to discuss government business: The general public has a right to know not only what decisions are being made, but why they are being made. Municipal zoning can cause significant disputes in a lot of places, and after the fact the public has every reason to want to know whether the conversation that set up that zoning looks like this:
"The local Chamber of Commerce suggests that retail businesses would do well to cluster around the junction of highways 511 and 203. I consulted with the town planner, and she said that this seemed viable provided we would be willing to adjust the traffic from downtown to that junction ..."
Or like this:
"So Bill wants to open up a diner here, and he said he would make it worth our while as town officials if we approved it."
Or like this:
"I'm tired of that family of [offensive epithet] living in this town. Let's rezone their residence to commercial uses, use eminent domain to force them to sell for peanuts, and then I'll talk to all the realtors to make sure they can't find any other property in the area."
All three of those discussions could very well end up with the same decision, but I want the people having the first discussion running my government. The trouble is, if the alderman are meeting privately to discuss town business, the voting public has no way of knowing which discussion actually happened.
So yes, it's a pain to follow all the rules, but it is absolutely the right thing to do.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 30 2014, @02:28PM
Well, yeah, and another example I can think of is the .gov is supposed to have, say, 9 participating members on a council in order to get 9 people worth of good ideas or 9 people worth of oversight, but if my grandpa only invited over 5 of them to a private party where all business was conducted, then there's only 5 participating members despite the law requiring 9 participants as designed, even if 5 is technically a majority vote anyway, which means all 9 would be ripping off .gov off by only providing 5/9ths of the service as designed.
And there's procedural stuff, as an opiate of the masses you have to have public hearings where the general public can say stuff that will almost certainly be ignored, in order to pacify them, so skipping right to the vote violates one core goal of the system. The zoning board has to at least pretend to care what the neighbors think to pacify them, even if they already made up their mind before the hearing they have to appear to care about the citizens.
There's also the presumption of guilt thing, there are innumerable other situations in life of innocent until proven guilty. His situation was an educational example for a kid of the difference between mere toleration of a situation vs happy agreement. Or a living example of tradeoffs where he still thought it was worth it, even if parts of it kinda sucked.
The overall point stands that the .gov rules are extremely different from how .com operates and I can't think of any common .com examples where meeting participants are so highly regulated. Perhaps client attorney privilege, kinda sorta comes close in terms of special regulation at least compared to random .com meetings. So a .com outlook toward phone privacy might just not make much sense in a .gov situation. Not for good or bad reasons, but because its just simply different.