State AG Tries To Order Removal Of Public Records From Journalist's Blog, Resulting In Records Being Posted Everywhere
from the my-god...-it's-full-of-files dept
Georgia state Attorney General Sam Olens recently decided to play hardball with a journalism student who published certain documents at the Society for Professional Journalists blog network. Needless to say, it backfired. (via Jim Romenesko)
First off, University of Georgia student David Schick made a public records request for documents concerning names of candidates for his university's president, as part of an investigation into the school's Georgia Perimeter College's $16 million budget shortfall. According to Schick, the obfuscation began there. The published part Olens objected to is only four of the 700 pages Schick ended up with -- but he had to fight hard to get anything at all.
First, the school charged him $2,963 to forward him emails. When he got a volunteer lawyer who threatened to sue, the price tag was knocked down to $291. But then administrators printed out each email and then re-scanned them – which meant Schick couldn't search them for keywords.Schick is still awaiting a decision for his lawsuit brought against the
According to Olens, the information (which was released as part of a public records request) wasn't supposed to be made public.
"The four pages of documents," says the motion Olens' office filed last Wednesday, "contain the names of a number of individuals who applied for the position of president at one of the Board of Regents' colleges or universities. None of these individuals was selected as a finalist for the position for which they applied."So, rather than deal with the entity which (allegedly) "improperly released" the information to the student, Olens went after the student instead, using a little attempted prior restraint. News of this bullying behavior spread quickly -- as did the offending documents themselves.
Michael Koretksky, another blogger for the SPJ, posted 21 pages (including the four Olens was seeking to take down) at his blog and encouraged others to do the same. Many others did, including the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, David Cuillier.
Olens says the names should not have been released, so the student must take them down. Sorry, Mr. AG, but you can't do that. There's something called case law (e.g., Pentagon Papers), and we in America don't care much for prior restraint (or post restraint, for that matter).With the documents being quickly spread around the internet, Olens either realized a) fighting this would require all-day sessions at the courthouse or b) he looked completely, ridiculously thuggish because he has decided to withdraw his legally unsupportable request.
Also, the idea that candidates for university president should be secret is silly, and unfortunately more states are incorporating this exemption into their public record laws. A shame when it involves something so important. We need to push back against efforts to make that process hidden from public view.
There's nothing like a little bad publicity to make would-be censors rethink their tactics. Obviously, the
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Filed Under: david schick, freedom of information, georgia, public records, sam olens, streisand effect
Companies: society for professional journalists
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That would also eliminate metadata such as IP addresses and sources and routes the emails took.
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/s
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This form of deliberate obfuscation has been increasingly used to bury journalists and the public in a pile of unsearchable, unusable paperwork -- it's an obvious ploy to hand over the requested information but to make it too unwieldy to process.
Email gets stored in various formats (depending on what kind of mail system is in use) but most of those are interconvertable via open-source tools. The lingua franca that most of us use is "Unix mbox format", which has been around for decades. It's simple, it's supported by every sensible mail client on the planet, and there exist a plethora of tools to deal with it. (For example, grepmail, which is something everyone who deals with email should have in their toolkit. grepmail makes searching enormous mail archives easy.)
Anyway, my point here is that a simple process like "convert all email to mbox format, search it for relevant/matching messages, extract those, hand them over in mbox format on a USB stick/CD/whatever" should be straightforward, fast, and cheap. If it's not: then either the people doing it are technically incompetent or -- more likely in this case -- they're deliberately stonewalling.
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This is a burden yes, and could be intentional. It could also be someone who knows that documents contain metadata and is trying to provide these without that attached meta info.
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Can't be searched?
So it's a hurdle but not by any means a big one.
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Once someone does learn how easy it is then yea... its not a big hurdle, but still simple does not mean quick.
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Some quick corrections--This is not about UGA
The University System of Georgia oversees a number of universities in Georgia, including UGA, Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, Valdosta State University, Kennesaw State University, and the university/college whose records are at issue in this matter: Georgia Perimeter College. (I grew up within walking distance of the GPC main campus, which was then called DeKalb College.)
UGA does not have a budget shortfall. However, mismanagement, possible corruption, possible theft, and possible fraud has left GPC with a significant budget shortfall. An investigation into this is still ongoing to the best of my knowledge.
In short:
1. The University System of Georgia is being sued;
2. The records pertained to Georgia Perimeter College (GPC);
3. The records did not pertain to the University of Georgia;
4. Sam Olens can be ridiculous in his court pleadings (which is me editorializing).
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Re: Some quick corrections--This is not about UGA
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Public records exemption coming up
Expect a call for a special session next week.
It is truly amazing how everything a government can do these days is too dangerous or private to be exposed to the public eye.
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Re: Public records exemption coming up
"For all Freedom of Information Act requests, there is an exemption from said FOIA requests any and all public records, and said records are further exempted from the First Amendment. But not the Second Amendment. Because we like it if a gun is involved."
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What's sauce for the goose...
When Ledar Levinson does this, he's threatened with jail time...
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Put that fire out
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AG should be fired
The result of that gaff was entirely predictable!!!
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Disagree on one point
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