The incredible wall of secrecy erected by law enforcement agencies around their use of "stingray" devices (cell tower spoofers) continues. Harris, the manufacturer of most of these devices, gets the secrecy ball rolling with non-disclosure agreements, which law enforcement agencies have liberally interpreted as a right to refuse public records requests and, in one case, an excuse not to seek warrants before deploying the devices.
The reason the ACLU wanted to dig deeper into the Sarasota PD's files presented itself in the first response.
The Sarasota Police initially told us that they had responsive records, including applications filed by and orders issued to a local detective under the state“trap and trace” statute that he had relied on for authorization to conduct stingray surveillance. That raised the first red flag, since trap and trace orders are typically used to gather limited information about the phone numbers of incoming calls, not to track cell phones inside private spaces or conduct dragnet surveillance. And, such orders require a very low legal standard.
Trap and trace/pen register statutes are routinely being abused as a way to route around warrant requirements. The NSA's bulk record collection was partially "justified" by a very liberal reading of pen register statutes. What once was a warrantless, targeted, limited-time collection has now become a catch-all for stingray surveillance and NSA programs.
The Sarasota Police set up an appointment for the ACLU to view its stingray files (as is required under Florida law), but that meeting was cancelled shortly before it was supposed to take place.
[A]n assistant city attorney sent an email cancelling the meeting on the basis that the U.S. Marshals Service was claiming the records as their own and instructing the local cops not to release them. Their explanation: the Marshals Service had deputized the local officer, and therefore the records were actually the property of the federal government.
This interdiction by the US government to lock up documents the ACLU is seeking is astounding enough, but what every other entity involved did is even more so.
Nathan Wessler at the ACLU points out that, US Marshals or no, the police department is required to hold onto any documents requested for at least 30 days. Instead, it allowed the US Marshals to move the records off-site to an undisclosed location. With those files out of reach for an undetermined amount of time, the ACLU approached the court which would have signed off on trap and trace orders requested by the Sarasota Police only to find out that no such records exist.
The court doesn’t even have docket entries indicating that applications were filed or orders issued. Apparently, the local detective came to court with a single paper copy of the application and proposed order, and then walked out with the same papers once signed by a judge.
Another breach of records requirements and, again, tied to the Sarasota PD's stringray usage.
The ACLU has now filed an emergency motion seeking to block the Sarasota PD from turning over any more files to the US Marshals Service. It also asks the court to find that the department violated state law by turning over the requested documents to the US government.
The obvious question here is why both of these agencies are so reluctant to turn over these documents. If they're willing to break state records laws (the local court being complicit in this activity), the information contained must be pretty damaging. What has been discovered already points to the department's deliberate avoidance of a paper trail, what with the single document requests and the misuse of the trap and trace statute to avoid filing warrant requests.
If you've got nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear, as the saying goes. The government expects us to live by that adage as it deploys warrantless surveillance, but it seems unable to hold itself to the same standard.
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 Georgia Board of Regents University System of Georgia for "failing to produce public records." In the meantime, he published what he has acquired, which drew the attention of the State AG.
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.
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).
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.
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.
There's nothing like a little bad publicity to make would-be censors rethink their tactics. Obviously, the Board of Regents University System of Georgia needs to have a little more thrown its way considering its own uncooperativeness during this process. Maybe the lawsuit will provide the extra push it needs to stop treating members of the public with such complete disdain. The fact that it would take the time to print out and rescan documents simply to prevent them from being searchable indicates that its public records response team completely resents transparency -- much like so many other entities at all levels of government.
More than 1,900 pages of e-mails and documents help tell a story about what’s happened to people with mental health issues in King County in Washington, and what the county’s doing about it — not bad for a collection of documents the county couldn’t seem to find.
The Seattle Times has more details on the county's attempt to bury its involvement in allowing potentially dangerous people to wander the streets (literally, in some cases) by not performing timely mental health evaluations. Reporter Brian M. Rosenthal had discovered that the county's mental health facilities were allowing people deemed a threat to themselves or others to walk free simply because they were either unable or unwilling to perform evaluations within the state-mandated time limit: 12 hours for those brought in by third parties or 6 hours if brought in by a family member.
The law is potentially a good one, preventing anyone (like say, the police) from simply dumping someone into an extended stay at a mental health facility simply because they didn't want to deal with the person anymore. Clearing people not deemed harmful for release within a short period minimizes the chance of wrongful detention. Unfortunately, the King County mental health system is short on qualified examiners and long on potentially harmful people.
“There are people who are psychotic, in need of help, and they get off on a stupid technicality, which essentially means that this poor person walks out barefoot and is in the middle of the street,” said Arpan Waghray, mental-health director at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center, adding that, “You’re just waiting for someone to fail.”
Waghray isn't offering conjecture here: this actually happened, and the following wasn't an isolated case.
At 10:40 p.m. the night [Gregory] Benson was released from Fairfax, his parents heard a single knock on the door, a long pause, then another knock.
Their son stood on the porch, disheveled and shivering in 30-degree darkness. He had walked from the Kirkland hospital to their Redmond home, some seven miles.
The parents were relieved, confused and angry.
“We had been waiting almost two years to get him into a facility so he could get help. We kind of thought, ‘This is our chance,’ ” Maria Benson said. “I couldn’t understand what happened.”
Hospital records show it clearly: Benson was admitted to Overlake at 7:47 p.m. on Jan. 28 but not formally ordered to be detained by an evaluator until 20 hours and 41 minutes later, far more than the 12-hour limit for patients brought in by police.
But when Rosenthal went looking for more information on how often this deadline was surpassed, he was stonewalled by the county. First off, everyone he spoke to on record denied there was a problem, or even being aware such a time limit existed. Those who actually worked with the patients told a different story. Not only that, but there was evidence the rule was only selectively enforced -- some were sent out into the night to wander seven miles home while others were involuntarily held for days or weeks before being evaluated.
A few weeks later, he was told there were no responsive records. Maybe he’d asked for the wrong phrases, he thought, so he tried again, requesting all communications between the head of the involuntary committment system and the head of the prosecuting attorney’s office.
“And the response was, we have no responsive records.”
So, he submitted another request. This time, documents began to appear. At that point, his employer stepped in.
In March, the Times’ lawyer, Eric Stahl, sent a demand letter and “threatened to sue the agency unless it explained the failure, conducted a thorough search and paid for legal costs and penalties…"
This seemed to work. By the end of the next month, the Seattle Times had obtained over 1,900 documents, many of which showed the problem was far more pervasive than country officials admitted. According to Rosenthal, this situation -- the release of someone potentially dangerous -- was happening on nearly 200 times a year. What the documents didn't show was any attempt by the county to acknowledge the problem, much less discuss how to fix it.
Now, with everything forced out into the open, legislators are finally aware of the issue and working towards fixing the law and its unintended consequences. But to get anyone to move on the issue, the newspaper had to threaten a government agency with a lawsuit, something few journalistic entities are willing to do. Not only are there costs to consider, but there's also the chance access will be severely stunted or cut off.
That a newspaper has to threaten its own existence in order to obtain documents a government agency improperly withheld is more than disappointing. It's a travesty. Publicly-funded entities have the financial means to outlast many private entities. And even when they concede and cough up damage awards, the money comes out of the public's pockets. As has been noted here before, government entities are swiftly turning the former last resort -- a court battle -- into just another step in the public records process.
Adopting a tactic that has been used by officials ranging from Sarah Palin to staffers of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, aides to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo are sending emails from private accounts to conduct official business.
I know because I got one myself. And three other people who interact with the governor's office on policy or media matters told me they have too. None of the others wanted to be named.
The tactic appears to be another item in the toolbox of an administration that, despite Cuomo's early vows of unprecedented transparency, has become known for an obsession with secrecy. Emailing from private accounts can help officials hide communications and discussions that are supposed to be available to the public.
"Government business should never be conducted through private email accounts. Not only does it make it difficult to retrieve what is a government record, but it just invites the suspicion that a government employee is attempting to evade accountability by supervisors and the public," said Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, a frequent requester of records under the state's Freedom of Information Law.
Emailing from private accounts also may violate state policy. State employees are not to "use a personal email account to conduct State business unless explicitly authorized," according to a policy bearing the governor's name published by the Office of Information Technology Services.
The Cuomo administration declined to comment on whether any employees are authorized to use private accounts.
Back when he was running for governor, Cuomo pledged, "We must use technology to bring more sunlight to the operation of government."
The governor himself uses a Blackberry messaging system that does not save messages to communicate with aides, the Daily News reported in 2012. Under the Freedom of Information Law, those records would typically not have to be released because there is an exemption for internal deliberative material.
But emails with anyone outside of the administration – such as lobbyists, company executives, or reporters – usually have to be made public upon request. It is for those communications, with people outside the administration, that private email accounts have been used.
Last year, I was poking around on a possible story and filed some public records requests that sought emails from Director of State Operations Howard Glaser, a top Cuomo adviser. One day in October, just hours after filing a request with the governor's office, an email appeared in my inbox from Glaser himself.
The email, inquiring what I was working on, was sent from a @glasergroup.net address rather than a government account. The note had a signature line about not using the email address for official business (even though it appeared to be doing just that). My interest was piqued.
So I filed a request under the state's Freedom of Information Law, asking for all records sent to and from Glaser's private account. It is not supposedto matter if an email is sent from an official account or a private one: If it pertains to government business, it typically has to be released.
A couple of months later, the Cuomo administration responded with a terse denial: "Please be advised that the New York State Executive Chamber has conducted a diligent search, but does not possess records responsive to your request."
I appealed, noting that I had in my possession a record responsive to the request – Glaser's email to me – and included it as an attachment.
The administration upheld its original denial, now citing a retention issue.
"[T]he fact that this record is in your possession does not mean that the Chamber failed to produce a responsive record in its possession. Emails and certain other correspondence are not required to be preserved indefinitely," the March letter said.
When I asked about the email this month, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi took a different tack, now disputing that Glaser was emailing me in his official capacity at all and calling the email "informal." "It would be inaccurate to characterize Howard's email as official business – as he noted, your official business was being handled by the FOIL office, not him," Azzopardi said.
But I have no personal relationship with Glaser, and my Freedom of Information Law requests focused only on his activities as a state official. When I recently asked Glaser about his email practices, he said, "I don't use personal email to conduct official business." He would not say how he defines "official business."
In its letter denying my request for emails from Glaser's private account, the administration cited the general retention policy of the State Archives. That policy says that "many email communications are not records and are therefore suitable for immediate destruction" but also that those emails which are records must be preserved.
So how does one determine which emails are "records"?
The governor's office seems to take a particularly narrow view. The governor's policy says that emails are only "records" if they are formal documents like press releases and nominations. Azzopardi, the Cuomo spokesman, said: "Official email is not required to be retained unless it meets the definition of a particular kind of record (eg – contract), consistent with the State Archives policy."
But the Archives, which Cuomo's office itself cited, takes a more expansive view, even as state law gives the governor leeway to determine which records should be kept.
Quoting the official definition of records, Archives spokeswoman Antonia Valentine said an email is a record if it is created "in connection with the transaction of public business (and provides) … evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities (of an agency)."
In practice, Glaser seems to be either eschewing his official email account or promptly deleting messages of substance. When I asked for a 10-day sample of emails from Glaser's official account, I got back little actual communication: 147 pages that are largely filled with newsletters, press releases, and the occasional terse email to set up a phone call.
The use of private accounts can result in even more roadblocks when an official leaves the government. (Glaser is reportedly leaving the administration in June.)
The issue has come up before.
In 2007, executives from the insurance giant AIG filed a public records request with the Office of the Attorney General, seeking, among other things, former Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's communications with the press from the period when he had sued the insurance giant. That request was resisted for years by Spitzer's successor as attorney general: Andrew Cuomo.
While Cuomo's office eventually released emails sent from official accounts, it maintained that Spitzer's use of a private account put any of those emails beyond its reach.
"[T]he reality is that the Office of the Attorney General lacks access to this account and possession of whatever e-mails it may contain, thus rendering them beyond the scope of petitioner's FOIL request both practically and legally," Cuomo's office said in a 2009 court filing.
A judge ruled against the attorney general's office, which has appealed. Seven years since the original request, the case is still in the courts and Spitzer's private email account – which he was known to use in his capacity as a state official – has never been searched for records.
Lawyers for Spitzer joined the case this year, arguing in a March filing that because Spitzer is now a former employee and a private citizen, the Freedom of Information Law doesn't apply.
Beyond the governor's office, the state is reportedly moving toward an email system that would automatically delete emails after 90 days except for those marked by users to save.
It's not clear how that process would work or how the state will ensure that records are not destroyed. The Office of Information and Technology Services declined to provide the memo describing the new policy, requiring that I file a formal public records request to get it.
Transparency advocates have criticized 90 days as too short a period because emails may only become relevant months later after a scandal or other event.
A document on the IT office's website references the possibility in a state email system for "recovery of deleted mailbox contents for the length of the retention period" – another capability that would not exist for officials using private accounts.
Across the river in New Jersey, private email accounts are at the center of the Bridgegate scandal.
The infamous "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email was sent from a Christie aide's Yahoo account to another official's Gmail account. That tactic held off public access to the email for a time.
In December, the Christie administration claimed it did not have records in response to a request from the Record of Bergen, N.J. The emails became public later, only after the officials were subpoenaed by the state Assembly.
If you have gotten emails from the private account of an official in the governor's office or other state or city agencies, email me at justin@propublica.org.
Reposted from ProPublica via its Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license.
The Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded more than a million files of historic documents that should have been declassified and handed over to the National Archives, the Guardian has discovered.
The files are being kept at a secret archive at a high-security government communications centre in Buckinghamshire, north of London, where they occupy mile after mile of shelving.
Most of the papers are many decades old -- some were created in the 19th century -- and document in fine detail British foreign relations throughout two world wars, the cold war, withdrawal from empire and entry into the common market.
They have been kept from public view in breach of the Public Records Acts, which requires that all government documents become public once they are 30 years old -- a term about to be reduced to 20 years -- unless the department has received permission from the lord chancellor to hold them for longer. The secret archive is also beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
Now that it has been forced to admit that it holds all these records of great historical -- and often great political -- interest, the Foreign Office is making them public at last. But as The Guardian reports, it seems it still doesn't quite get what that means:
The UK Foreign Office is holding a conference to explain how it will finally place into the public domain millions of public records that it has unlawfully held for decades -- but is refusing to allow members of the public to attend.
velox alerts us to the latest example of government officials abusing copyright law (or claims of copyright law) to avoid basic transparency. And this one's quite incredible. Kyle Pell, who runs the website bustedmugshots.com, is involved in a lawsuit after Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder stopped releasing mugshots by claiming he held the copyright on them. Yes, the police, claiming copyright on mugshots. Winder's heart may be in the right place, arguing that sites like that are unfair, but that's no excuse for his own actions.
"I believe that the practice of using these mug shots to belittle and abuse our citizens is immoral and repugnant," he said when discussing the websites in general during an interview Tuesday.
"A compassionate society does not utilize the scarlet letter," he said
In other words, he's admitting that his copyright claim has nothing to do with what copyright law is for, but everything to do with censoring a website. Yeah, that's probably not a good idea.
This is not what copyright law is intended for, and the use as such is a clear abuse of the law. Of course, whether or not there's even a legitimate copyright there is a bit of somewhat unsettled law. While it's clear that works created by the federal government are automatically public domain, it's a little fuzzier when you get down to local governments. Many local governments, smartly, take the position that they face the same rules as the federal government, and assume that such documents are public, but it's not entirely clear under the law if this is necessarily the case. Go down to the level of a sheriff's department, and he could potentially argue that the prohibition on copyrighting works created by government don't apply. It's a weak argument, to be sure, and one that I doubt would hold up in court, but it's not entirely settled.
This is unfortunate, of course. We've long argued -- and believe strongly -- that all government created works should be public domain. They don't need the copyright incentive to be created, obviously. Furthermore, mugshots have long been seen as a part of the public record. To retroactively claim copyright on them is just bizarre. There's clearly no copyright interest in the photos. They weren't created because of copyright. The government isn't using them to promote greater public learning or to support more content creation. It's flat out using it to censor a website that it doesn't like. That should mean that even if a court unfortunately finds that the Sheriff can claim copyright, opening his mouth to flat out say that he's doing it to censor the website probably undermines his argument, as it shows a government deliberately blocking someone's speech.
The fact that the public is still charged fees to access public records already seems rather questionable. After all, the creation of these documents is paid for by taxpayers. Keeping them locked up behind a governmental paywall often seems like double-dipping.
A proposal to drastically increase fees for the public and press to look at court records is still up in the air after divergent votes from the California Senate and Assembly.
The fee, embodied in trailer bill language supported by the governor, the Judicial Council and its administrative arm, will inevitably restrict access to public documents and has raised an outcry from newspaper publishers and open-government advocates.
California courts already charge $15 for searches of court records that take more than 10 minutes.
The proposal from the Administrative Office of the Courts and backed by Gov. Jerry Brown would have the state charge $10 for every name, file or information that comes back on any search, regardless of the time spent.
$10 a search result? Granted, this would be an in-person, human-powered search at a courthouse, but this is ridiculous. Those pushing this increase have offered several different rationales for the increase (curb data mining, raise money, clerks not equipped with stopwatches), but have been completely unable to project whether this increase will offset the (apparently) increased costs.
One argument against the fee is that its advocates have not been able to tie it to an actual dollar amount, a fact admitted in a Judicial Council report that said: "The amount of revenue this proposal will bring in is impossible to estimate."
It's a government thing. Take a vague feeling that the public is draining public services of money and use this non-estimate as justification for a rate hike. Meanwhile, supporters will likely continue to count unhatched budgetary chickens without considering the worst case scenario (which is also the most common scenario associated with tax hikes). Jim Ewert of the California Newspaper Publishers Association points out what should be obvious to lawmakers at this point:
"...[I]f it's adopted there is going to be very little additional funding, because people just aren't going to make the request. There's going to be even less understanding of government court activities. It's very shortsighted."
You raise the price, you get fewer purchasers. Government services aren't that much different from retail services, especially when the "consumer" is paying directly.
So, how does something this unpopular (at least with open government advocates and the press) get as far as this did? Easy. All you have to do is move quickly and exclude interested parties from the discussion.
The votes in both houses were taken at budget subcommittee hearings dealing with a host of judicial branch issues. There was no debate or discussion at either hearing.
The Assembly committee rejected the fee increase. The Senate committee approved it, with a stipulation that members of the press be exempt. There is no language, at this point, on what a press exemption would entail.
There's an exemption, but no one outside of the involved legislators has the details. What seems to be certain is that fees will be increasing, something a cash-strapped government like California's would be unlikely to reject. At this point, the fee increase is scheduled to head to a conference committee for further discussion. Ewert hopes this one will actually involve the public.
Ewert said he hopes lawmakers will give the CNPA and other press and freedom of information groups the opportunity to provide input.
"[I]t's just a bad idea to deny access to records that the public has already paid for, and shield the public from an institution that it already has very little understanding about."
As Ewert points out, this rate hike will only increase the distance between the public and the records they should rightfully have access to. Worse, it will disproportionately affect citizens with limited income. This increase, if passed, will not only allow the state to tax its constituents multiple times for the same records, it will turn public record access into a privilege, rather than a right.
It's no secret that the latest decision by many newspapers to publish records of gun-permit holders after obtaining them via Freedom of Information Act requests is somewhat controversial. Some people are against the practice and think that such information should not be public. Wherever you come down on that side of the debate, however, hopefully you can recognize that since (in most places) the information is officially a public record, no publication or news organization should ever have to apologize for merely requesting the information. And yet, as pointed out by Jim Romenesko, The Cherokee Scout in Murphy N.C., posted an astoundingly groveling apology to its readers last week for the sin of daring to request public records:
NOTE TO READERS
The Cherokee Scout made a tremendous error in judgment this week, and thanks to our readers we learned a tough lesson.
As publisher of your local newspaper, I want to apologize to everyone we unintentionally upset with our public records request for a list of those who have or have applied for a concealed carry permit. We had no idea the the reaction it would cause.
Sheriff Keith Lovin had the best interests of the people of Cherokee County at heart when he denied our request. The Scout would like to offer an apology to him as well.
To that end, Editor Robert Horne spoke with Lovin on Friday morning to tell him we were withdrawing our public records request. He asked for a written copy of request, and Horne dropped it off at his office that morning.
While Horne was on the phone with the sheriff, he also thanked him and his staff for their quick response when some people who saw Facebook posts started making personal threats against him. Horne also requested a sit-down meeting in the near future to iron out any issues between the Scout and the sheriff's office, which Lovin graciously accepted.
I realize many people are upset with Horne, myself and the Scout and we can understand that. We never meant to offend the wonderful people of this fine community nor hurt the reputation of this newspaper. We do a lot of positive work that helps make Cherokee County an even better place to live, and I hope more good work will repair our reputation with readers.
Many of you have asked where Horne is from. He is from a small town in south Georgia — Cairo, Ga., to be exact. It is a rural area much like Murphy, and his roots are helping him better understand this community. [He has been editor of the paper since 2005.]
As for myself, I attended Murphy High School. I was married and baptized here, and three of my children are proud Bulldogs. This county has been important to me for a long time.
I know where this community is coming from, and I hope we can regain your trust. I know it may take a while, but we're going to try. Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Publisher David Brown
Newspaper publishers are supposed to stand up for their right to ask for public information, not grovel about how it was a mistake to ask for it in the first place. People might not like it, but newspapers aren't supposed to only report on the stories that people like. If that's the case, they're no longer a newspaper, they're a marketing brochure.
With the rise of new forms of electronic communication, there have been growing problems in figuring out what sort of government communications need to be recorded and preserved. You may remember that there were concerns early on that President Obama wouldn't be allowed to use his Blackberry. Some of those concerns were over security issues, but also there were fears about how every message would need to be recorded and available to the public at some point. This was the same reason that former presidents Bush (the younger) and Clinton did not use email while in office. Down in Florida, apparently, they're going through a debate concerning the use of Blackberry devices, since Blackberries have a special "PIN to PIN" messaging system that works among Blackberries, where those messages aren't recorded -- and certainly, many politicians (and lobbyists) are making use of the system to communicate outside of the "official channels" to avoid having it recorded.
While some are saying this is a reason why Blackberries shouldn't be used at all by these politicians, that seems to miss the point. Yes, it may seem troubling that lobbyists and politicians can and do communicate without any record, but is getting rid of Blackberries really going to solve the issue? For the entire history of the country politicians and lobbyists (from before they were called that) were able to communicate without recording the details through the high tech method of speaking to each other face to face. Saying that all communication needs to be recorded and archived in some manner ignores that plenty of conversations take place by voice all the time that have no such recordings and no way to trace them back. So, yes, worry about corruption between lobbyists and politicians, but focus on the actual issue, not on trying to cut off one of many different ways they might communicate.
An interesting ruling in the Arizona Supreme Court found that the metadata on a public record should be public as well -- so people could, conceivably, look at who created certain documents and when they were created. While that might not seem like a big deal, as the article link above describes, plenty of interesting data often can be found in the metadata -- such as what lobbyist wrote up what documents for other organizations to send. While this only applies in Arizona right now, you have to imagine that lobbyists are quickly learning how to better scrub metadata off their astroturfing letters.
