Every week I do a roundup of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me.

• TOP MUST READ: How an activist journalist’s commitment to a poor Chicago community led to a big FOIA win.

• FOIA requests to Federal Election Commission about the Internal Revenue Service Tea Party targeting scandal results in backlogs. What’s more, IRS emails reveal huge loophole in federal open-records practices

• Speaking of which: Want public documents from the IRS? OpenSecrets.org has a handy flow chart to show you how.

• In the world of delayed FOIA response excuses:  Dozens of public information requests filed with a New York City’s county sheriff went unseen because they were being diverted to outdated email addresses.

• A lawsuit filed by Florida’s largest teachers’ union and the case of a local teacher accused of producing and distributing child pornography have put a spotlight on a controversial statewide program that allows students to attend private schools on the public’s dime — but doesn’t hold those schools to the same standards and level of transparency required of public schools.

• The argument for why philanthropic non-profit foundations for colleges — designed to supply the school extra funding in times of state budget cuts — should open their books. This editorial is why the University of Connecticut Foundation should be more transparent.

• Journalism groups appealed a decision Thursday that is keeping thousands of pages of documents from full public view in litigation over an investigation into groups supporting Gov. Scott Walker.

• A rejected FOIA request gives ProPublic reporters a whole other scoop.

• The Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued the United States Customs and Border Protection to compel the agency to produce documents relating to a relatively new comprehensive intelligence database of people and cargo crossing the U.S. border.

• New Jersey judge rules that state agency wrongly denied an open records request for open records request logs.

• All the critical material in an 81-page 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s opinion on NSA surveillance has been declassified and made public, a federal judge ruled, rejecting the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s request for an unredacted copy.

• The Des Moines Register wins access to video and audio records of a Taser death incident under a settlement reached Tuesday with the Iowa Department of Public Safety.

• Small business websites being sued for publishing open records.

• Clerks in one central Illinois town got so bogged down with requests from one person that they spent most of their days searching for and copying records.

• House Republicans and Senate Democrats may finally have found something on which they both agree needs improvement: transparency.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Every week I do a roundup of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me.

Special congrats to the FOIA advocacy website MuckRock, they got a shout out from the Daily Show this week for one of their FOIA requests:

• New Mexico’s Veteran’s Administration insists that its own congressional delegation file an official Freedom of Information Act request in order to learn more about its health care policies.

• FOIA find: Apple’s top legal executive points the finger at Google a week after it settled charges, brought by the Federal Trade Commission, that it failed to provide adequate disclosures for in-app transactions. In an email Apple urged the FTC to investigate Google for similar issues in Android.

• The City of Ann Arbor now publishes its FOIA request log online — no need for official request.

• The City of Albuquerque changes its records policy — announcing that will charge no more than $6.75 for DVDs and $2.75 for CDs for public records requests — in response to complaints.

• Local Pennsylvania county government ordered to release an unredacted report on county government prepared by a private investigator.

• Wisconsin State Senator turns to the Attorney General to compel the Government Accountability Board to open up its books after it applied that open records laws do not apply to it.

• Barely a week after Riverside launched a new Web portal with information on city finances, police and fire calls, and access to thousands of other records, the portal has been viewed nearly 16,000 times.

• If you ask for copies of public records from North Canton, Ohio, you’ll be waiting on snail mail because they refuse to email them to you.

• A hopeful Wyoming Governor promises to prohibit her employees the use of a public records “loophole,” known as the deliberative process privilege, if elected.

• Boston Globe reporter looks at campaign finance data and finds that Massachusetts candidates spent thousands of dollars a year on coffee and doughnuts.

• Opinion: The new bipartisan FOIA reform doesn’t go far enough. Congress should exempt Environmental Protection Agency from FOIA b(5).

• New Mexico has a new plan to give wider public access to court records via Web database.

• Virginia Supreme Court ordered the nonprofit Energy & Environment Legal Institute to pay $250 in damages to a former University of Virginia professor and the school following the institute’s failed legal bid to obtain emails regarding climate change research via FOIA.

• US Department of State denies FOIA request for emails of former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, citing that it could be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

• New members of Olympia, Washington city councils, county commissions, school boards, fire commissions and special districts as well as statewide elected officials will be required to take FOIA and open meetings training.

• Bad FOIA news: South Carolina Supreme Court rules that autopsy reports are not public records.

• Interesting twist, two Rhode Island state agencies are being sued by the state’s own Attorney General for failing to respond to a reporter open records act request.

• Government transparency expert Eric Gillespie, founder and CEO of Govini, has been appointed to the newly formed FOIA Advisory Committee and will chair the subcommittee on proactive disclosure.

• CIA refuses to hand over its records on notorious East German Stasi head Erich Mielke.

• Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general released an audit that concluded the agency did not show bias in denying fee waivers on open-records requests from conservative-leaning groups while approving those from liberal-leaning groups.

• Check out how federal agencies fared in this Freedom of Information report card.

•  Watchdog.org resorts to FOIA request for info on immigraiton crisis, claims Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is stonewalling and not returning press calls.

• The ACLU is criticizing Washington D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray for unprecedented delays in turning over data sought by the public through Freedom of Information Act requests.

• FOIA lawsuit dismissed after Michigan Attorney General releases documents sought by T.V. news crew (don’t know if I’d call this a win, it saddens me that it takes a lawsuit to force compliance).

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

I’ve noticed a few interesting improvements at various local governments across the country that are taking a more proactive approach to Freedom of Information Act requests — and I’m impressed.

Gainesville, Fla., recently opened its commissioners’ (as well as the mayor’s) emails through an online database. No need for a FOIA request, just click and search away. Ann Arbor, Mich.,— along with Greensboro, N.C. — now publishes its FOIA request log online (something every city should do). A new plan in Albuquerque, N.M., could give wider access to the state’s court records like PACER does at the federal level. Riverside, Calif., logged almost 16,000 views in one week on a new database it launched containing “information on city finances, police and fire calls, and access to thousands of other records.”

While these are to highlight just a few of the good examples, I think (and hope) that we will start to see a trend where local governments realize that relying on technology to assist them in handling public records requests will ultimately cut down on their cost, increase transparency and make for more satisfied citizens. Anything that public officials can do to utilize tools already in existence for open government purposes should be mandatory. Legislators create laws, in most cases, for our own good. We ought to insist the same logic be applied to state agencies and officials by forcing efficiency on them.

Freedom of information laws should first operate on the principle that all information should be readily available to the public at low or no cost, and then work backward (i.e. exemptions for security reasons, etc.).

On the federal level, a bipartisan bill known as the Freedom of Information Improvement Act was recently introduce in the Senate and would, among other things, restrict the use of FOIA’s “deliberative process” exemption — an overused and, in some cases, purposely misapplied exemption. Additionally, Andrew Becker, a reporter with the Center for Investigative Reporting, will serve on the federal FOIA Modernization Advisory Committee.

Local governments should be working with local news outlets and journalists in the same way. We have plenty of ideas on how they can improve their open records processes from low-cost fixes, to minor tech training for open records officers, to other solutions that would just require the use of free third-party tools (not being able to receive records via email should is ridiculous). Government agencies should not be waiting on complaints or lawsuits before deciding that their FOIA processes need updating.

Many of the basic documents that journalists often request — FOIA logs, emails, official memos or documentation — should be readily available and searchable online. There’s no good reason to keep the antiquated status quo.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Every week I do a roundup of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me.

• A CIA employee with the highest level of security clearance tried to get the agency to release info that was a decade old. They told him no, so he submitted a FOIA request and it “destroyed his entire career.”

• Residents of Ann Arbor, Mich., submitted more FOIA requests than their own local news media.

• How the FOIA Improvement Act of 2014 would help ordinary requesters.

• California has a decades-old law that restricts public access to viewing records of water wells.

• The Center for Investigative Reporting is collecting ideas on how to improve the FOIA request process. Have ideas? Fill out the form here.

• Two local activist groups file suit against a Florida county claiming that the commission skirted state open-government laws in allowing a controversial business park to go forward.

• Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council is reviewing each one of its 100 plus exemptions in its states FOI act to determine whether or not it is needed.

• After FOIA suffers setback due to South Carolina Supreme Court ruling, editorial urges public officials not to use FOI ruling as a means to shut the public out of government affairs.

• 20-year-old Rwandan genocide documents withheld under B(5) FOIA exemption forces researchers to look abroad for transparency.

• Illinois High School Association resists calls for greater transparency in its handling of extracurricular activities and the millions of dollars they generate each year.

• North Carolina State University official claims the state’s open records law is costing them opportunities for research contracts.

• An Oklahoma city, which was ordered to pay attorneys’ fees in an Open Records Act case last year, is again facing another lawsuit over its alleged failure to provide documents under the law.

• U.S. federal judge orders the Internal Revenue Service to explain how it “lost” two years worth of a former IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails.

• Why I love FOIA: Department of Homeland Security released hundreds of pages of documents not related to original request for “Operation Aurora attack on Google,” but instead provides info on the Aurora project run at Idaho National Lab years earlier in which engineers destroyed a generator with a cyber attack as a demonstration

• Which U.S. agencies sprung for the extra legroom provided by first class? MuckRock obtained Agency Premium Travel Reports, which show how millions in upgrade fees were spent from 2009-2013.

• In case you missed it, FBI released documents in May showing they had spied on Nelson Mandela during his first trip to the United States in 1990, four months after his release from 27 years in prison. Now, new documents show that Mandela’s release triggered FBI anti-communist paranoia.

–

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Every week I’ll be doing a roundup of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me (Missed last week because of 4th of July, so you’re getting a double dose this week.)

• No moving targets in FOIA denials: Missouri judge rules that government agencies cannot give a different exemption than the original one used to deny the FOIA request after being sued.

• The Red Cross is fighting a FOIA request from ProPublica about how the charity spent its money during Hurricane Sandy, claiming that information is a “trade secret.”

• Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn listens to FOI advocates and vetoed a bill that would’ve placed extra burdens on people filing public records requests.

• The California Supreme Court will review whether government workers must disclose email, text messages and other electronic communication about government matters on their personal smartphones, email accounts or other private devices.

• Judicial Watch, a government accountability group, filed a legal motion about the “lost emails” of ex-IRS official Lois Learner.

• New FOIA protocol for Texas college: send every open records request to attorney (who bills at $195 an hour).

• After claiming it didn’t exist, the NYPD releases “Freedom of Information Law guide” — which its records officers use in processing FOIA requests.

• FOIA suffers setback in South Carolina at the hands of the legislature and Supreme Court, which recently ruled that public bodies don’t have to issue agendas for regularly scheduled meetings.

• The Better Government Association is suing Cook County after it allegedly claimed that logs detailing potentially illegal county employment inquiries were exempt under the Freedom of Information Act.

• Is President Obama worse in transparency than Nixon? The Obama administration is accused of hiding public information.

• U.S. District Court grants hearing for case filed by Judicial Watch over the “missing IRS emails.”

• The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that people who win open-records lawsuits can be reimbursed for legal fees — even if they win access to only some of the records

• Greensboro, N.C., has opened its open records request log by putting them all online.

• FOIA story idea: How do your state agencies differ in storing emails?

•  Massachusetts SWAT team claims they’re immune from public records requests, ACLU sues.

• Four Arkansas city directors and one city clerk are being sued by another city director for FOIA and open meetings violations.

• Opinion piece: Inside the Department of Veterans’ Affairs “spin-‘n-stonewall machine”

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency seeking information about the extent to which the NSA might exploit software security flaws (in addition to the lawsuit they have with the Justice Department over access to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court records)

• Murder convict claims that a missing tape he requested under FOIA would prove his innocence. It was originally withheld from him by the Justice Department.

• Georgia man arrested for trying to make public records request at local sheriff’s office, documenting the whole occurrence on his GoPro camera.

• Illinois county judge dismissed a lawsuit seeking to remove a mayor from office, but could fine the city for violating FOIA.

• CIA employee forced out for using the Freedom of Information Act to get his own agency to release documents to him.

• Boston’s Department of Children and Families hunkered down and stopped responding to many requests for information after coming under siege last fall for losing track of a young Fitchburg boy who was later found dead.

–

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Every week I’ll be doing a round up of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me.

• Two senators are proposing the most significant reforms to the Freedom of Information Act in four decades

• We’ve got a journalist at the adult table! Andrew Becker, reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting, will be serving on the federal FOIA Modernization Advisory Committee to, let’s hope, make FOIA stronger for journalists and the public.

• FOIA from the “budget” perspective answers the following questions: How much are we spending on FOIA oversight? How does that compare to the costs of litigation? How much does the government spend on FOIA administration overall.

• The FBI’s 83-page guide to Twitter shorthand. FMTYEWTK (Far More Than You Ever Wanted To Know).

• “Existence or Nonexistence” was written in a sky message over New York City to mock a CIA response to a FOIA request that said the agency can “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of records responsive to the request.

• A federal judge ruled that the Freedom of Information Act trumps an Internal Revenue Service policy for handling data requests after an advocacy group, Public.Resource.Org, filed a lawsuit against the IRS to make Form 990 returns available in a format that can be read by computers so the public can more easily search them for critical information about non-profit finances, governance and programs.

• An Oklahoma County judge ruled that Gov. Mary Fallin can lawfully withhold public documents — relating to a decision on Obamacare  — which are covered by a “deliberative process” privilege.

• The Florida Supreme Court will hear a case regarding the payment of attorney fees to a local activist who challenged the Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund over public record laws and won (but not attorney’s fees).

• A bill “rushed through” the Illinois General Assembly spring session is drawing the ire of a good-government group that contends it will restrict the ability of citizens to get information about their governments.

• Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy proposes new legislation to open up Vermont’s FOIA laws, but the governor wants no part in that.

• In response to a long-running FOIA lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, U.S. releases “targeted killing” memo.

• Tulsa World editorial calls for the legislature to strike down the “deliberative process” exemption. A judge recently ruled that Governor Mary Fallin was allowed to withhold 100 pages out of 51,000 concerning her state’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

• North Carolina legislators are proposing legislation that will prevent the public from accessing mugshots.

• Pennsylvania court backs the power of its state’s Open Records Office to order governments to surrender records for private review — to determine whether they should or shouldn’t be released to the public

• The “FOIA Warriors” (Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro) are at it again and have filed a lawsuit against the CIA compelling the agency to release documents about its spying on Senate lawmakers who were tasked with investigating CIA torture.

• The National Rifle Association is happy about a new Michigan law that exempts gun records from public disclosure.

• Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations and immune from open records laws.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Every week I’ll be doing a round up of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me.

• If you read only one FOI story, it should be this one: The Secret to Getting Top-Secret Secrets: How a journalist with a dark past learned to pry info from the government—and redeemed himself in the process.

• After transparency bill is “gutted,” the University of Delaware and Delaware State University can rest easy knowing their public record exemptions will remain intact. Thoughts from Adam Goldstein, Student Press Law Center attorney advocate: ‘It does a Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the law.’

• The Associated Press reports that the White House has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about the Stingray surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods. Let’s not forget that in recent weeks the Chicago Police is being sued for failing to provide Stingray records, and U.S. Marshals raided a local Florida police department to prevent the release of those same type of records. (Anyone seeing a trend? Or is it just me?)

• In the above link about the document seizure by the U.S. Marshals, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency motion to try and claw back those records, but the judge dismissed it.

• FOIA request reveals brutal photos of seals, dolphins, whales, and other sea life that were caught in California commercial fishing boats that use drift gillnets — one mile-long mesh nets that are intended to catch swordfish.

• Documents obtained via FOIA request show that St. Clair County in Illinois spent more than $3.3 million in settlements behind close doors. A huge range of settlements from $900,000 to a teenager who was allegedly sexually abused at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center to $1,000 to a person claiming injuries when placed under arrest by sheriff’s deputies.

• What have we lost since 9/11? A lot of the First Amendment, including the good ol’ days of the Freedom of Information Act.

• The Kentucky Court of Appeals has affirmed a Circuit Court decision paving the way for public access to court records related to a public official’s job performance and the contentious relationship she had with the former president of a local community college.

• An appeals court backs a man who made an anonymous public records request. The court ruled that the city of Greenacres, Fla., could not require the man to fill out a form before obtaining the documents.

• Ex-offenders in Forest Park, IL — who qualify to work with volunteer attorneys — filed petitions to seal their criminal records, which would remove them from public access (but at least the information can still be seen by government bodies and police departments /sarcasm).

• Reporter wonders why the Department of Education is “being so opaque” on student loan data, after filing multiple FOIA requests with “less than optimal” results.

• St. Louis police records released per a judge’s order in public records lawsuit show how vice and other drug officers scalped the scalpers. Fifteen police officers were either suspended and demoted or otherwise disciplined for giving St. Louis Cardinals’ championship tickets seized from scalpers to friends and family.

• This FOIA lawsuit could open up IRS data on nonprofits, making it more accessible.

• FOIA lawsuit win: Judge rules against a Washington state police department for wrongfully invoking the law enforcement exemption when it withheld records last year.

• The Miami Herald questions the Department of Children & Families’ “paperless” investigation into why there were originally no records — “no reports, memos, notes, emails or smoke signals” —  of the deaths of at least 30 children who were in DCF’s active case files.

• New Oklahoma law removes an Open Records Act loophole for state troopers. Since 2005, the Highway Patrol was exempt from dash cam requirement to make audio and video recordings available to the public.

• The Federal Bureau of Prisons is being sued for FOIA violations by Prisology, a non-profit criminal justice reform organization. They claim that the FBOP has been non-compliant with the law, which has required for decades the Bureau post online substantial information about its day-to-day decision-making.

• A call to improve Arkansas public records laws: “Arkansas’s FOIA is not a bad FOIA. That doesn’t mean it is not in need of improvement.”

• Open records law rewrite would expand disclosure rules on Penn State, Pitt, Temple and Lincoln universities. Currently, they enjoy a broad exemption, which allows them to deny most public records requests.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Normally, I would just link to this type of piece in my weekly “must read” FOI story round up, but I wanted to draw extra attention to a recent article in Medium about Jason Leopold, the self-proclaimed “FOIA terrorist.”

The author, Jason Fagone, writes in his piece (one of the best long-form narrative stories I’ve read in a while) that he first learned of Jason Leopold through Twitter, as did I. Anyone following the #FOIA hashtag would be hard pressed to miss him. Many major stories broke as a direct result of his FOIA requests — The Abu Zubaydah Diaries.

… The military’s horrifyingly clinical description of how guards at Guantánamo are force-feeding prisoners on hunger strikes, and manuals describing how the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring Twitter for terrorist threats, and FBI records about the late investigative journalist Michael Hastings.

The story also recounts Leopold’s “dark past”: his struggles with substance abuse as well as his questionable ethics as a journalist at major news outlets. Having only been in the journalism world for three years, I was unaware of Leopold’s fall from journalism grace. But apparently after The New York Times’ David Carr wrote a story pointing out his mistakes in a major piece he published about Enron, Leopold thought his journalism career was over. Who wouldn’t?

One line that stuck out to me — when Leopold was explaining his questionable ethical decisions of bungling quotes, spelling mistakes, lying to sources about what was on and off the record:

“My whole thing was, I wanted to get at the truth by any means necessary,” he says.

I don’t know any journalists who couldn’t relate to that sentiment of wanting the truth that bad. Ethical decisions easily become clouded by those strong emotions. When you’re chasing down that big fish story, it’s hard not to get tunnel vision like Captain Ahab.

But he’s redeemed himself as far as I’m concerned.

Fagone writes, “Stories that praise Leopold’s FOIA scoops often refer to him not as a journalist but as an ‘activist.'”

I think that’s ridiculous. While the Freedom of Information Act is at the disposal of all people, no one utilizes it like a journalist (New hashtag? #FOIAlikeajournalist), or like Leopold does. And this is how he gets his stories now. No interviews. Just cold documents and hard facts.

Fagone writes:

The great thing about FOIA, for Leopold, was that it didn’t care about his past. It was just a law, an impersonal series of rules and procedures, inputs and outputs. There was hope in that.

Without giving away too many spoilers, one thing revealed is Leopold’s love for punk music, which makes sense. FOIA is the journalist’s version of a punk rock concert. The “in-your-face” attitude that comes with writing and submitting a FOIA request is akin to the thrill of being in a mosh pit, elbowing a drunk douchebag in the nose.

Above all, what I’m really happy to see is more FOIA advocacy. We could all benefit from having a Leopold in every newsroom.

On a final note, if Leopold reads this: Know that you’ve got at least one other FOIA soldier ready to do your bidding.

Mad props to Leopold, as well as Fagone and Medium, for publishing such an important story.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

Every week I’ll be doing a round up of the freedom of information stories around the Web. If you have an FOI story you want to share, send me an email or tweet me.

• City of Gainesville in Florida opens up its City Commissioners’ emails, making the documents available via an online database with no need for a FOIA request.

• Alaskan Dispatch asks Governor Sean Parnell to veto a new bill that would “impose unprecedented restrictions on Alaskans’ access to public records” by making court records secret. The op-ed says the bill will cause information already in the public domain to become confidential.

• Shane Bauer, a reporter for Mother Jones, wants to know: What did my government do when I was taken hostage in Iran? Bauer filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI, CIA, and State Department to release records that will show how it dealt with his — and other journalists’ — imprisonment.

• A new bill in North Carolina seeks to remove the requirements that require charter schools to comply with open records and open meetings laws.

• A Circuit Court Judge will decide on whether text messages exchanged between government officials need to be released under FOIA in a lawsuit filed by PETA. The first defense the city of Norfolk, Virginia, offered was that its public employees don’t save their messages, then it said there was no way of retrieving them. Maybe their next excuse will be, “The dog ate ‘em.”

• Cayman Islands legislator says trying to get answers about the government’s open records process is like “climbing a lime tree backwards.” Also wonders if information managers are trained to delay.

• Wisconsin Judge orders the release of records previously protected by a secrecy order. The documents are related to an investigation into the governor’s aides, which led to the convictions of six individuals including two Gov. Walker aides, an appointee and a major campaign contributor.

• A Tennessee appeals court listened to arguments in the legal dispute over records access in the Vanderbilt University rape case, which led to charges against four former football players.

• Newspaper fought to “touch” public records related to a college dean’s sexual harassment claim against a female provost he claims inappropriately “touched” him for years.

• Remember that Michigan bill that would keep gun records confidential and exempt from open records? It’s heading to the governor’s desk for signature.

• Delaware bill seeks to end the public records exemptions of the University of Delaware and Delaware State University. The two schools have successfully evaded open records requests for years.

• According to FOIA documents, the U.S. Army profiled nonviolent protesters, classifying them as terror threats to FBI and police in multiple states, to “deliberately disrupt planned protests and prevent activists from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

• FOI advocacy groups want to close loop holes in FOIA regulations. Advocates say “agencies lack penalties for withholding information, overuse exemptions provided within FOIA and deal inconsistently and unfairly toward requesters.”

• After 10,000 requests, MuckRock files FOIA lawsuit against the CIA. You can read all about in their editorial, “Why we’re suing the CIA.”

• The Salinas Police Department is refusing to release names of officers involved in fatal shootings of suspects. And I thought the California Supreme Court just ruled “names should generally be public” (oh, right, they did).

• FOIA request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation reveals FBI’s Next Generation Identification facial recognition program will consist of a database of more than 52 million pictures. FBI Director says he doesn’t think the agency will spy on Americans with it. (Apparently he missed the memo from the NSA.)

• Chicago Police Department is being sued for failing to provide Stingray surveillance records. Let’s hope that the U.S. Marshals don’t swoop in and snag the files like they did in Florida.

• How a FOIA request may yield “more comprehensive results” than a subpoena.

• U.S. Bureau of Land Management is being sued by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a public land advocacy group, to release public documents on the agency’s handling of the armed standoff with Southern Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.

• A test of Ohio’s response to open records requests shows that they are better than they were 10 years ago. So that’s nice.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick

This is HUGE: The City of Gainesville, Fla., has moved to make public officials’ emails available online — without the need to submit a FOIA request.

Anyone with a computer and Internet connection can scroll through any of the city commissioners’, or even the mayor’s, emails in a user-friendly database. You can search by date, specific mailboxes, or by specific words in either the subject line or body of the email. You can even export them into a ZIP file for further use.

Currently, there are over 10,000 emails searchable that date back to March. Of course, there will be some emails that won’t be available to the public that contain confidential information in accordance with state law. According to an interview between Clerk Commissioner Kurt Lannon and The Alligator, University of Florida’s student newspaper, that only applies to few emails. However, you can still view those emails by submitting a FOIA request.

I asked Lannon via email if the online email access of public officials was likely to help reduce the labor cost in fulfilling open records requests. “Yes, very much so,” he replied. The emails are automatically published to the website, except for the confidential emails that commissioners place in a “do not publish list.”

If I were a reporter in Gainesville, I would be checking the database every day for accidentally published “do not publish list” emails.

On a semi-related note, I suggested this idea of an email database to a reporter interviewing me about my open records lawsuit against the University System of Georgia. I filed suit against them last June for stonewalling and delay tactics in providing me emails. In court, their witnesses testified, and their lawyers argued, that this was the “largest request” for open records the university system had ever dealt with.

Their process for complying with an open records request for emails?

Printing out every email, reviewing and redacting them on paper, then scanning them back into a PDF file as JPEG image files (which effectively disabled the ability to perform keyword searches). This amounted to printing out a little over 12,000 pages to redact a handful of emails.

The reporter who interviewed me asked if I had a suggestion for how this process could be more efficient. Well, it seems Gainesville has come up with the solution. And they’re poised to save labor costs in doing so.

Government agencies subject to freedom of information laws need to catch up with the times. The technology is here and can make their lives easier. I would almost go a step further and say this technology needs to be legislated in other states’ open records laws.

—

David Schick is the summer 2014 Pulliam/Kilgore Freedom of Information intern for SPJ,  reporting and researching public records and FOI issues. Contact him at dschick@spj.org or interact on Twitter: @davidcschick