It’s Sunshine Week
From AustinDailyHerald.com:
You have a right to know. This is Sunshine Week, a time to celebrate access to government and to remind officials that their records and meetings are your records and meetings.
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Author: NFOIC
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- https://nfoic.org
Posts by NFOIC
Federal judge finds national security letters unconstitutional, bans them
From Wired.com:
Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge ruled Friday.
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Open government?
From Columbia Journalism Review:
Since President Obama came to the White House in 2009, federal regulatory and science agencies have taken measurable steps—on paper, at least—toward improving their relationships with the press, according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
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Open government needs enforcement
North Carolina’s open government laws are good. But enforcement is weak.
A Republican state senator from Wilmington is trying to add muscle, proposing a bill to make it a misdemeanor for public officials to unlawfully close meetings or deny access to records.
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FOIA may face changes: Proposed bill would give exemption to concealed weapons carriers
From Journal-News.net:
CHARLESTON – Currently in West Virginia, the names and addresses of concealed weapons licensees is public information. But a bill introduced to the House of Delegates on Tuesday could change that.
HB2911 proposes to exempt from the Freedom of Information Act records pertaining to the issuance, renewal, expiration, suspension or revocation of a license to carry a concealed weapon, according to the legislation.
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The concept of open government is no fad
From Fredericksburg.com:
This is Sunshine Week, the one week in the year when open-government advocates celebrate the concept that government should operate in the open and that secrecy in government is bad government.
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The innards of state government, courtesy of public record and sunshine laws
From The Progressive Pulse:
Public records in the North Carolina offer a chance to peer into the depths of state government, and see what is and what isn’t working.
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Lawmakers now reporting financial transactions
From myCentralJersey.com:
WASHINGTON — Members of Congress are now posting their stock transactions online on a regular basis to comply with a law enacted 11 months ago to curtail illegal insider trading by lawmakers and their staffs.
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Watchdog group grades agencies’ FOIA performance
From FCW:
The Center for Effective Government on March 13 released a report on the government’s Freedom of Information Act response efforts, finding that agencies processed more FOIA in 2012 than in previous years, and that backlogs have declined even as the number of requests has grown. But more requests are being redacted, the report found, and the cost of FOIA processing varied widely from agency to agency.
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Sunshine Week: Persistence and public records pay off in tracking double-dipping school chiefs
From Watchdog.org:
A recent New Jersey Watchdog investigation revealed 45 “retired” school chiefs had returned to the public payroll, double-dipping millions of dollars a year from pension funds and local education budgets.
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