Mackinac Center, ACLU officials push for greater government transparency

From MLive.com:  Improving local and state government transparency was the driving focus of a Wednesday discussion sponsored by a well-known conservative think tank.

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NSA says it can’t search its own emails

From ProPublica:  The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

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Justice Department told not to delay Aaron Swartz FOIA

From The Blog of Legal Times:  A federal trial judge in Washington [July 23] urged the government to continue reviewing thousands of pages of documents that could be released in a public records lawsuit seeking information from the Secret Service about the Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

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Burlington Free Press reporter wins national award from SPJ

From Burlington Free Press:  Mike Donoghue, a reporter with the Burlington Free Press, has won a Sunshine Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

“The Society’s Sunshine Award recognizes those making important contributions in the area of open government,” a news release said. “This award was the most competitive of our national honor awards.”

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Government Public Affairs Offices: More Hindrance Than Help?

From The National Press Club:  A National Press Club panel will convene on Aug. 12 to debate federal public-affairs practices that some say can cut the public off from its affairs.

Although executive branch communications offices can be useful, at times indispensable, in helping the press cover the government, reporters need to always be free to seek information in other ways. Yet doing so has become difficult to a degree that some say jeopardizes open government.

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Kansas officials learn about open meetings and open records in seminar

From Garden City Telegram:  About two dozen people, mostly local government officials, attended the first of five regional training sessions designed as a primer on the Kansas Open Meetings Act and the Kansas Open Records Act. The seminar was held on Monday in the Endowment Room of the Beth Tedrow Student Center at Garden City Community College.

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Judge dismisses public records suit filed against Carolinas Healthcare System

From CharlotteObserver.com:  A judge has dismissed a lawsuit contending that one of the nation’s largest public hospital chains, Carolinas HealthCare System, violated the state public records law.

In an order signed Monday, Superior Court Judge Robert Sumner agreed that the Charlotte-based hospital system has a right to keep confidential a legal settlement that it obtained against the former Wachovia Bank.

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OGIS helps to resolve three-year old FOIA request

From Matt Ehling, Public Record Media, via Twin Cities Daily Planet:  In keeping with our mission, PRM aspires to be a comprehensive requester of public records. We not only submit a wide variety of data requests to government agencies, but we also pursue each through to its resolution, in order to ensure the integrity of Freedom of Information (FOI) processes at both the state and federal level.

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