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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 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.