Peter Scheer

Police need a warrant to rifle through papers in your desk drawer, so the same should go for sensitive digital data like email, text messages, location history and stored documents of all kinds. Tell your assemblymember to support S.B. 178 (text of bill), the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), to protect our private digital lives from government overreach. California’s electronic privacy laws were written in, and for, the digital ecosystem of the  1970s and 80s. CalECPA is

BY PETER SCHEER—Local officials talk a good game about government transparency and accountability. And while city council members and county supervisors often go through the motions of conducting official business in an open and public way, on the biggest, most costly and consequential issues that come before them—issues that dwarf all others by orders of magnitude—those same elected officials revert to total secrecy. I am referring to decisions on compensation and benefits for public employees–which,

BY PETER SCHEER–Inglewood CA doesn’t have much to commend it. To the various reasons not to live there–like high crime rates and bankrupt schools—the city government has added this threat: if you criticize the mayor or other officials, the city will hire lawyers to censor you. That is the clear message to be drawn from Inglewood’s recently filed lawsuit in federal court against one Joseph Teixeira, a city resident. (City of Inglewood v. Teixeira.) Teixeira, who

BY PETER SCHEER–Across the country literally thousands of state and local political officials, from governors to local school superintendents, use their personal email accounts for sending and receiving messages about government business. Hardly surprising. All public officials support government transparency in the abstract, but when it comes to their own communications, most opt for secrecy. They have been watching Hillary Clinton’s handling of her email travails with more than passing interest. While they operate under