Peter Scheer

For years government officials in California have known that their emails about official business are subject to disclosure as public records. Although mayors, city managers, supervisors and superintendents may not like this, the applicability of the public records law to email messages is settled. You will not be shocked to learn, however, that many government officials try to avoid disclosure by using their personal email account to send and receive emails about government business. Whether

Ever since Edward Snowden began leaking classified documents about NSA surveillance, Google and other tech companies have wanted to reveal the extent of NSA’s access—pursuant to orders of the secret FISA Court—to their customers’ accounts. They have wanted to disclose specifics on NSA access not just because they care about transparency, but because they expected the information to be reassuring: showing the actual incidence of court-sanctioned surveillance to be much lower than customers feared, based

Some government officials have been pushing the theory that journalists who write stories based on leaked classified documents—think Glenn Greenwald, for example—are engaging in the “fencing” of stolen property. Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, made this point yesterday when questioning FBI Director James Comey at a congressional hearing. Rogers asked,“So if I’m a newspaper reporter for — fill in the blank — and I sell stolen material, is that legal

Although America may be more divided, more politically and ideologically polarized, than at any time in the last 50 years, on at least one issue—the National Security Agency’s surveillance of phone and internet communications—there appears to be a near consensus of disapprobation. Everyone distrusts the NSA and wants to see its activities curbed. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, nerds and Luddites, all share a high level of discomfort about the federal government gaining access

In a long-running test case about government transparency and public access to government data, the First Amendment Coalition recently won a big victory. The California Supreme Court sustained FAC’s claim that the State Bar—an arm of the judiciary that regulates lawyers—must disclose extensive data on applicants for admission to the Bar (minus their names and other identifying information, as we had urged). Although these data are not covered by California’s open records law, the Court