Search

Categories

Total Results

No Record Found

View All Results
DONATE

News & Opinion

California: Riverside County supervisors want union negotiations closed to public

donal brown May 16, 2011

Riverside County Supervisors are chafing at their  service employees union practice of  allowing any member to attend closed door negotiations. Labor negotiations are normally closed to the public to allow unfettered discussion of the issues. California’s Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, does not address the issue, and the union says the open door policy fosters transparency, a hallmark of their union. -db From The Press-Enterprise, May 15, 2011, by Duane W. Gang. Full

Read More »

California: Citizen alleges open meeting violation by Menlo Park school trustees

donal brown May 16, 2011

A local open meeting watchdog, Peter Carpenter, accused the Menlo Park School District of violating California’s open meeting law, the Brown Act, when it used secret ballots to rank candidates for the superintendent’s job. Carpenter demanded that the district nullify its choice of superintendent and allow the public to discuss its short list of candidates. The district denied violating the Brown Act and said that Carpenter had misread the act. In ranking candidates, the trustees

Read More »

New Yorker article critical of Obama administration in prosecuting whistleblower

donal brown May 16, 2011

The Justice Department is charging Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency executive, with espionage for taking top-secret documents from N.S.A. offices and leaking information to a Baltimore Sun reporter. The reporter, Siobhan Gorman, wrote a prize-winning series of stories about waste, mismanagement, and dubious legal practices in the agency’s counter terrorism programs. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer quotes Secrecy News‘ Steven Aftergood who has followed the Drake indictment closely and thinks the case has

Read More »

Legislator seeks to set privacy rules for Facebook

FAC May 16, 2011

A state senator from San Leandro has introduced legislation that would require Facebook and other social networking sites to let new users establish privacy settings at the same time they register. State Sen. Ellen Corbett, a Democrat, argues that users shouldn’t have to give up their private information by default. Opponents object to government imposition of privacy rules and assert that the bill could have unintended consequences that actually reduce privacy The billed, SB242, passed

Read More »

Free speech: Peabody Energy objects to parody

donal brown May 16, 2011

Peabody Energy was not amused by a website that offered a free inhaler to any family within 200 miles of a coal plant and wrote a letter demanding that its name be removed from the website. EFF attorney Carynne McSherry pointed out the weakness in Peabody’s position, “The legal analysis is not hard: the trademark fair use doctrine and the First Amendment both protect the use of Peabody’s trademarks as a necessary part of political

Read More »