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California governor signs bill making state university foundation records public

donal brown September 8, 2011

California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring  state university foundations, auxiliaries and bookstores to grant public access to their records. Jon Keigwin, chief of staff for Senator Leland Yee who authored the bill, said it would open a new era in accountability and transparency,  “I’ve talked to several reporters who have been waiting for this law to go into effect for several years. They basically have their … requests and are ready to hit

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Texas Gov. Perry’s penchant for privacy

FAC August 28, 2011

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose campaign for president has faulted Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for purported failure to open the workings of the Fed to public view, has “adopted policies that shroud his own office in a purposeful opaqueness that confounds prying reporters – or any member of the public questioning his policies,” the Houston Chronicle reports. Perry’s approach contrasts with another former Texas governor, George W. Bush, who revealed voluminous records of his

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Judge denies journalist information on Kentucky mining diaster

donal brown July 29, 2011

An editor for Mine Safety and Health News failed to obtain a court order for information about a federal investigation into the question of whether mine safety officials covered up a coal slurry spill in Kentucky in 2000. Three hundred gallons of the toxic waste, 25 times the size of the Exxon Vaaldez oil spill, broke from a reservoir and seeped into more than 100 miles of rivers and lands. A federal judge said the

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Federal judge punishes private school for distroying records pertaining to alleged sexual crimes

donal brown April 18, 2011

A federal judge applied sanctions against Brooklyn’s Poly Country Day School, its trustees and current and former headmasters for stonewalling access to records that a late football coach allegedly committed a series of sexual molestations on students. In 2009 a number of alums accused the school of covering up the coach’s sexual abuses of dozens of students causing them in their later lives to abuse drugs, attempt suicide and be unable to develop healthy relationships.

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‘Crowd-sourcing’ FOIA requests – political ploy or quest for openness?

FAC April 4, 2011

A conservative political group has taken a cue from WikiLeaks and is soliciting supporters to post Freedom of Information Act documents online – as long as they hold the Obama administration up to critical scrutiny. Steven J. Law, president of Crossroads GPS, told the New York Times he hoped the “crowd-sourcing” strategy would reveal the administration’s poor record of compliance with FOIA requests, among other things. But unlike WikiLeaks, he said, Wikicountability would avoid publishing “classified,

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