Peter Scheer

Listening to the surreptitiously-recorded conversation between octogenarian Donald Sterling and his much younger girlfriend, I felt doubly sickened: first, by the casual racism of Sterling’s comments; and second, by my own participation in an invasion of privacy on a truly massive scale. We are experiencing viral voyeurism. I can’t figure out, and don’t much care, why Sterling repeatedly pressed his girlfriend to end her association–on Instagram and in public–with black men. His words were bizarre,

Regardless of what they say to the contrary, government agencies are in the business of withholding information from the public (or, what amounts to the same thing, disclosing only that information that the agencies want the public to have). This tight-fistedness about information is written into government’s DNA. But some efforts to withhold information are more dangerous to democracy than others. The most dangerous are government lying (about the existence of documents, for example), particularly

In an amicus brief filed in the US Supreme Court this week, the First Amendment Coalition urged the Court to clarify and expand the free speech rights of government employees when speaking out on matters that relate to their job. The case is Lane v. Franks, which will be decided in the next three months. FAC’s brief, focusing on the importance of protecting true speech in First Amendment jurisprudence, was written by eminent First Amendment

Tim Draper, the legendary venture capitalist  (Tesla, Baidu, Yahoo), also dabbles in politics—albeit at a much lower rate of return. His latest foray into the political arena is a ballot initiative to subdivide California into six states of roughly equal size. This proposal faces serious hurdles, not least that the federal government would say no, even if California voters, against all odds, endorsed Draper’s mini-Californias idea. By raising the state’s US senator count from two

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