donal brown

With the government lagging behind in using technology to provide better access to public data, transparency advocates are hoping two bills S.B. 573 and 272 will improve public involvement. The bills would provide machine-readable and downloadable information from websites open to the public. (Electronic Frontier Foundation, July 6, 2015, by Dave Maass) Although several cities in California including San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego are leaders in open data, that enterprise has

Writing in The Hill, June 30, 2015, Alberto R. Gonzales reminds us that the First Amendment protects free speech rights to prevent government censorship. In the wake of the horrendous church shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, many want the Confederate flag removed from public property as a symbol of hate and racism. It is another matter for the government to ban private display of the Confederate flag or the swastica. A North Charleston police officer

A Justice Department report last week concluded that police in Ferguson, Missouri acted on orders to make protesters move on, violating their rights to assembly and free speech. Withholding information about the police shooting of Michael Brown also aggravated the unrest and increased animosity toward the authorities. (The Christian Science Monitor, June 320, 2015, by Jim Salter and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press) The report, “Press Freedom Under Fire in Ferguson,” last October also