ValleyWag
Commentary
August 31, 2010

Secret-sharing website Wikileaks.org’s tagline is “We open governments.” But the organization itself is about as open as North Korea. That’s why we’ve launched Wikileakileaks.org: your source for Wikileaks-related secrets, documents and rumors!

Wikileaks has many secrets, and it works hard to keep them: its funding, structure and sources are almost completely unknown. (Wikileaks’ official spokesman is known only by a pseudonym: “Daniel Schmitt”.) This is in part because Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ enigmatic ex-hacker founder, is notoriously sensitive to media coverage of his organization, sometimes cutting off reporters completely after a single unfavorable article. (This happened to us.) But as details emerge about Assange’s bizarre Swedish sexual molestation case, its becoming clear that there’s more to him than his cool demeanor and lofty proclamations suggest.

This doesn’t exactly fit with the site’s ethos of radical transparency. In many ways Wikileaks really has opened things up, breaking big stories and providing a much-needed check on excessive government secrecy. But championing transparency at all costs has lead to some controversial moves, too: For example, its leak of nearly 100,000 classified Afghanistan war documents may have put America’s Afghan informants’ lives at risk. And the organization has recently come under fire for releasing uncensored court documents from a lurid Belgian pedophile-serial killer case, one which contains dubious allegations against a notable politician and details about underage victims.

It’s time to give Wikileaks the Wikileaks treatment—expose it to the same sort of radical transparency it advocates and see what turns up. We’ve launched Wikileakileaks.org as a place for tipsters to share documents, secrets and rumors relating to any aspect of the organization. Your anonymity will be totally protected if you send in info. And we’ll vet whatever we get and post it with commentary. So head on over to Wikileakileaks.org, or email leaks@wikileakileaks.org, and let’s open up Wikileaks.

Copyright 2010 Gawker     FAC Content Use Policy

The New York Times
August 27, 2010
By Scott Shane

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal grand jury in Washington has indicted a State Department analyst suspected of disclosing top-secret information about North Korea to Fox News, the third time the Obama administration has filed criminal charges accusing people of leaks to the news media.

The indictment, dated Aug. 19 and unsealed on Friday, named Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, 43, of McLean, Va., a specialist in nuclear proliferation who worked as a contractor for the State Department. Mr. Kim, who has worked as a high-level foreign affairs analyst for a decade for various federal agencies, is accused of disclosing the information in June 2009 and of lying to the F.B.I. in September 2009.

Mr. Kim, an American citizen, pleaded not guilty on Friday in Federal District Court before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly and was released on $100,000 bond.

A person familiar with the investigation said it involved a Fox News report on North Korea’s likely reaction to a United Nations Security Council resolution, which was then pending, that condemned its nuclear and ballistic missile tests.

Fox News said at the time that it was “withholding some details about the sources and methods by which American intelligence agencies learned of the North’s plans.”

The charges are part of a crackdown on disclosures of classified information to the news media under President Obama. A former contract linguist for the F.B.I. was sentenced in May to 20 months in prison for disclosing secret documents to a blogger, and a veteran National Security Agency official is awaiting trial on charges of sharing classified information with a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.

In addition, the Justice Department is seeking to question a reporter for The New York Times, James Risen, about his sources for a book about the C.I.A. that describes a program devised to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

News media and civil liberties advocates have criticized the prosecutions, noting that Mr. Obama came into office pledging to insist on openness about government operations.

Administration officials have said there is no contradiction between the transparency policy and aggressively punishing those who leak secrets.

David S. Kris, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s national security division, said in a statement that “the willful disclosure of classified information to those not entitled to it is a serious crime.”

But Abbe D. Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Kim, denounced the charges as an attempt to criminalize “the type of government-media exchanges that happen hundreds of times a day in Washington.” He said the charges would “destroy the career” of Mr. Kim, whom he called “a loyal civil servant and brilliant foreign policy analyst.”

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company   FAC Content Use Policy

Bloomberg News
August 23, 2010

Aug. 23 (Bloomberg) — An appeals court refused to reconsider a decision compelling the Federal Reserve Board to release documents identifying banks that might have failed without the U.S. government bailout.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, in a docket entry dated Aug. 20, denied a May 4 request by the Fed to review a three-judge panel’s unanimous March 19 decision requiring the agency to release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion U.S. loan program begun primarily after the 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns Cos.

Unless the court stays its decision, the Fed will have seven days to disclose the documents. In the event of a stay, the central bank and the Clearing House Association LLC, an organization of 20 commercial banks that joined the Fed in defense of the lawsuit, will have 90 days to petition the Supreme Court to consider their appeal. The Clearing House has already said it will ask the high court to rule on the case.

“We are reviewing the decision and considering our options for appeal,” David Skidmore, a Fed spokesman, said.

The March appeals court ruling upheld a decision of a lower-court judge in Manhattan who in August 2009 ordered that the information be released.

‘Competitive Injury’

“The decision is of exceptional importance,” the Fed’s lawyers wrote in a legal brief on May 4 in which they asked the circuit court to reconsider the decision. “The real-world consequence of the panel’s decision will be serious, perhaps irreparable harm to the institutional borrowers whose information will be revealed.”

The 157-year-old New York-based Clearing House Payments Co., which processes transactions among banks, is owned by its 20 members. They include JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings Plc, PNC Financial Services Group Inc., UBS AG, U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo & Co.

Clearing House Action

The Clearing House Association, a lobbying group with the same members, joined the lawsuit in September 2009, after the initial ruling against the central bank in federal court in Manhattan.

Iya Davidson, a spokeswoman for the Clearing House, didn’t return calls seeking comment.

The amount the Fed and the U.S. government lent, spent and guaranteed to stem the recession and rescue the banking system peaked in March 2009 at $12.8 trillion, most of it following the September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Fox News, a unit of New York-based News Corp., also sued the Fed to force the release of loan documents for transactions in 2008 and 2009.

The New York Times Co., the Associated Press and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, are among media companies that have signed up as friends of the court in support of Bloomberg.

Argument for Disclosure

“The public interest in disclosure in this case could hardly be greater,” the friends of the court said in their letter. Despite the Fed’s “massive outlay, the public knows little about who has received these funds or the terms of their loans. Without this information, it is impossible to monitor the Board’s actions, and FOIA’s core purpose is defeated.”

The case is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 09-04083, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York).

–With assistance from David Glovin, David McLaughlin and Bob Van Voris in New York. Editors: Peter Blumberg, Andrew Dunn

Copyright 2010 BLOOMBERG L.P. FAC Content Use Policy

Visalia Times-Delta
August 21, 2010
By Valerie Gibbons

A Tulare County Superior Court judge will likely dismiss an open meetings lawsuit against the Tulare County Board of Supervisors next week.

Late Friday afternoon Judge Melinda Reed issued a tentative ruling in advance of a hearing scheduled Monday. In it, she upheld her ruling on July 1 that there wasn’t evidence to proceed with a trial, writing the lawsuit was based on “speculation and unreasonable inferences.”

Reed ruled there was no substantive proof that county business was discussed at the lunches.

“Thus petitioner fails to allege facts showing that any type of policy making discussions affecting the general public or having to do with the county’s governmental interest have taken place,” she wrote.

The two sides have been warring since February over whether Tulare County supervisors admitted violating state open-meeting laws when they certified that dozens of lunch meetings held in 2009 represented a business expense.

Southern California open-meetings watchdog Richard McKee filed a lawsuit in March alleging that the Board of Supervisors violated state open-meeting laws — known collectively as the Brown Act — when it met with a voting majority 46 times for meals in 2009. He filed the suit to end such lunch meetings.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association and the company that owns the Visalia Times-Delta and Tulare Advance-Register, Visalia Newspapers Inc., joined the suit in April.

McKee and the media groups contend the county’s characterization of the lunch meetings as “team building” and “building collegiality” represent an admission that the county violated the Brown Act.

In the response, County Counsel Kathleen Bales-Lange argued the lawsuit was filed frivolously.

“They have failed to allege any new material facts showing any conduct of the board that is in violation of the Brown Act,” Bales-Lange said.

The board has since suspended the practice of meeting for lunch when a voting majority is present.

The hearing will be held in Tulare County Superior Court Monday, August 23 at 8:30 a.m.

Copyright 2010 Gannett  FAC Content Use Policy

The Porterville Recorder
August 19, 2010
By Jenna Chandler

After quarreling, City Councilmen decided Tuesday night not to restrict when, and what topics the public may speak about during meetings.

When Pete McCracken requested they limit the first round of scheduled oral communications to matters which are only on the agenda, Greg Shelton and Brian Ward vehemently protested, saying it would silence citizens who attend meetings to air concerns about gang problems, announce community events and present other miscellaneous information which the Council was not slated to discuss.

“It’s small potatoes to let someone be able to get up there and talk about anything they want, especially when you’re already limiting them to three minutes,” Ward said.

California’s open meeting law, the Brown Act, affords the public the right to comment on issues before a governing body makes a decision. At all regular meetings, time is provided under oral communications for the public to comment on items not on the agenda.

McCracken said he wanted to limit oral communications to councilmen’s reports and non-public hearing agenda items, because those who attend meetings for scheduled items have waited as long as an hour or more to have their items discussed while community members take to the lectern. He said his proposal would not violate the Brown Act, because he would allow for comments on any items not on the agenda after the Council finished its business.

“One of the problems we’ve had in the past with oral communications at the beginning is that we have forced people who have something on the agenda to sit and wait while somebody else talks about something that’s not on the agenda, and my intent on the oral communications was nothing more than we do the agenda, and then we sit here and listen to people as long as we have to,” he said.

But his opponents feared there would be a perception that the Council was trying to limit free speech, and didn’t want to inconvenience citizens wanting to partake in civic affairs.

“I’ve been out there and it takes a lot of guts to get up here in front of the Council to say anything regardless of whether it’s on the agenda or not … so now we’re going to say you know what, you can wait two and a half hours because someone on the agenda matters because someone on the scheduled matters doesn’t want to wait five minutes?” Ward asked.

“It’s free speech. I’ve listened to you guys blather on up here from back down there for hours at a time, and you can’t endure three minutes of the haranguing?” Shelton said.

McCracken ultimately conceded upon objections from most of the councilmen, Vice Mayor Cameron Hamilton included.

The Council did change slightly the agenda’s line up by moving reports from the Council to the beginning of the agenda, rather than the end.

At the start of the meeting, Mayor Ron Irish restricted oral communications for the night to only those items on the agenda. Although Shelton objected, the rest of the Council joined Irish.

While they ultimately agreed that restricting the comments to agenda items is a bad idea, the decision comes on the heels of other changes made to the format of meetings since Irish took the gavel.

Open session now starts 30 minutes earlier at 6:30 p.m. and will wrap up by 9:45 p.m. In the past, meetings have gone as late as 1:30 a.m., which some believed discouraged attendance and community participation.

And a few weeks ago, Irish said anyone who spoke out during the pledge of allegiance would be escorted out of chambers by the Police of Chief. He directed his comments to a woman who regularly attends meetings and says “one day” after “justice for all.”

Copyright 2010 Freedom Communications, Inc. FAC Content Use Policy

NextGov
August 16, 2010
By Aliya Sternstein

As the Obama administration gently pushes agencies to follow their transparency plans, recent changes in key management positions at the White House have watchdog groups concerned the open government initiative could lose steam.

The administration on Thursday scored agencies according to an online dashboard that featured color-coded dots to depict how well they have complied with certain stipulations in a December 2009 directive on open government. The document called for institutionalizing data transparency, public participation in government, and collaboration with industry and other agencies.

The White House review found 18 of 30 agencies it tracked had met all criteria, including developing a plan for embedding open government principles into daily operations. Eight agencies were given awards for exceptional performance in categories such as culture change.

But a coalition of nonprofit researchers found in an analysis conducted in July that of 39 agencies studied, some of which are exempt from the directive, only 11 mostly met or exceeded requirements.

Both reports were released in the wake of a reorganization within the White House offices responsible for open government, causing some transparency activists to question who, if anyone, will continue the administration’s commitment to transform government. Norm Eisen, presently President Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, is expected to become the next U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, and Peter R. Orszag, who issued the directive, has left his position as Office of Management and Budget director. White House counsel Bob Bauer reportedly is taking on the added responsibility of government reform oversight, when Eisen exits.

On Thursday, an entry on the White House blog announced federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, had signed off on the latest open government ratings.

“The newness of all this is wearing off, but we are at a critical juncture and we need to re-energize and reemphasize implementation at this point,” said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, which was part of the coalition that independently analyzed agencies’ open government plans. “I hope that Aneesh’s and Cass’ next blog is about next steps. And I hope another signatory on it is Bob Bauer.”

Parts of the plans might require tweaks if not rewrites of policies that fall under the jurisdiction of OIRA. For example, rules surrounding the Freedom of Information Act and records management might be barriers to open government, activists have said. But to date, OMB and the Office of Science and Technology Policy have lead most White House efforts to make government data more accessible.

OIRA Associate Administrator Michael Fitzpatrick said on Monday the initiative has always been larger than any one person, adding major architects of the movement are not leaving. He noted that Eisen is not left yet and Beth Noveck, deputy CTO for open government; Chopra; federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra; Sunstein; and himself still are committed to improving transparency.

Thursday’s blog entry serves as a reminder of the White House’s tendency to seek praise for the directive, and the inherent difficulty in ordering compliance publicly, said John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, another member of the coalition. “This post leaves me wondering whether there is a counterpart to this positive effort aimed at forcing agencies that aren’t performing well to shape up,” he said.

So far, Bass is disappointed with the White House’s effort to convince agencies to follow the open government directive. The administration has provided no information to back color-coded ratings or the awards, members of the coalition said.

Links next to the award winners simply take users to the agencies’ open government plans. “It is odd. They don’t indicate why those agencies got the awards in the various categories, nor do they take you to the spot in their plans that earned the agency the award,” said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a transparency group that organized the outside audit.

“I have no idea how the awards were judged,” Bass said. “That’s kind of ironic for a transparency initiative. They’ve got to get more serious.”

Some agency projects are incorporating the ideals of open government, including FDA-TRACK, which displays performance metrics for the Food and Drug Administration’s programs, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s weekly reports on workplace fatalities and accidents.

“They should be proud of that,” Bass added. “Let’s cut the fluff.”

Fitzpatrick said the White House is aware that during the next several months agencies and senior officials must perform and also knows “the open government community will watch us like hawks, and frankly it helps us to keep on our toes.”
On the White House’s report card, a yellow dot next to an agency’s name indicated progress toward a directive goal. No agency had a red dot, which would indicate a failure to meet expectations. The 10 areas reviewed included posting data sets in downloadable formats, open government home pages, overall open government plans, one major project that encapsulates a tenet of open government, and several other assignments laid out the directive.

When the dashboard launched on April 27, White House officials interpreted the marks, which were based on agency self-evaluations, to mean that agencies were off to a good start yet had more work to do.

But an independent analysis conducted at the same time by the coalition found open government strategies to be average.

OpenTheGovernment.org encouraged agencies to enhance their blueprints and resubmit them for grading in July. This summer, 23 of 39 agencies updated their plans, including the Health and Human Services Department, which won a White House award on Thursday for exceptional transparency. The department’s rewrite also ranked at the top of OpenTheGovernment.org’s list and earned bonus points partly by making it easy for people to download hospital comparison information.

HHS manages some expensive and valuable data on Americans’ health, the operations of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and grant-making bodies such as FDA and the National Institutes of Health. “The agency has been aggressive in liberating data sets that might be considered politically sensitive,” such as Medicare expenditure data, said Ted Smith, an independent researcher who audited HHS for the coalition’s assessment.

“The level of disclosure promised — and in many cases already delivered — is truly a model,” added Smith, an executive vice president at HealthCentral.com, an online gateway to clinical resources and patient support.

The HHS team seriously considered Smith’s criticism of its original plan and increased the department’s online disclosures by 50 percent, adding detailed organizational charts, descriptions of how it interacts with Congress and sensitive material about the process of classifying information, he noted.

Thursday’s review alludes to contributions by OpenTheGovernment.org analysts. “Members of the open government community — within and outside the government — have been working together to improve the open government plans,” the White House blog entry noted. “Today, we update our open government dashboard to reflect this progress.”

McDermott pointed out, however, that while the White House said it based the new scores in part on improvements prompted by her group, it did not say why it believed agencies had made strides in their transparency efforts.

“What strikes me as amazing is that the open government dashboard hasn’t changed” four months later, Bass said. “It’s still just green light, yellow light. I thought it was going to evolve to be more sophisticated.”

Fitzpatrick acknowledged the dashboard could be more complex. White House officials are considering ways to assess the administration’s output in more detail, but such activities consume substantial resources, he said. Fitzpatrick added people should not lose sight of the fact that interest groups and agency officials completed two internal and two external assessments within five months.

“Implementation is the crux of all this, I agree,” he said. “We have done something that is unprecedented” in demanding extensive open government plans from almost 40 agencies. “But it isn’t a real achievement until we follow through on our commitments.”

Copyright 2010 NextGov

The Washington Post

August 6, 2010

By Ed O’Keefe

The move essentially returns things to the way they were during previous administrations, when the president’s top lawyer handled such matters. But sources stressed that Bauer’s assumption of the portfolio should give it more prominence thanks to his regular face time with President Obama.

In addition to Bauer’s new role, Steven P. Croley, who consulted the Obama-Biden transition team on ethics and regulatory reform matters, will join the Domestic Policy Council and work with a team of six lawyers in the counsel’s office, sources said. Croley currently serves as a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. Sources described him as the architect of the team Eisen currently leads.

The new six-member legal team will focus on enforcing and reviewing several legal issues, including lobbying reforms, campaign finance, federal whistleblower issues and transparency programs, sources said. It also will work on new initiatives related to regulatory reform, personnel accountability measures and the disclosure of government performance data, sources said.

Eisen’s unique role as ethics czar earned him the nicknames “Mr. No” or “The Fun Sponge” for his strict adherence to federal ethics rules. He earned the ire of many in the lobbying and legal community for overseeing the controversial ban on lobbyists serving in the Obama government.

The transition will not take effect until the Senate confirms Eisen as America’s top diplomat to Prague. He was not among the dozens of other nominees confirmed this week.

This post has been updated since it was first published.

NextGov
August 4, 2010
By Aliya Sternstein

A bill President Obama recently signed requires the Office of Management and Budget to disclose on a public website contractor integrity information housed in a new vendor performance database, reversing a recent decision by the Defense Department to block public access to the entire database.

The supplemental appropriations bill (H.R. 4899), enacted on July 29, contains a provision mandating OMB to post all information in the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS), except for past performance reviews. The rider amends the 2008 Clean Contracting Act, which established the internal online system.

Open government groups and taxpayer advocates had long sought access to the contents of the system to hold contractors accountable. Industry groups had raised concerns that some of the information in the system is proprietary and vendor reviews could be misinterpreted without additional context.

In a July 26 letter, the Defense Department rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for select data in the system on the grounds that internal decisions on contract awards are sensitive. “Information contained in the FAPIIS is exempt from release in its entirety,” stated the letter to the Project on Government Oversight, a government transparency group that on June 17 filed the FOIA request.

The database is expected to document criminal and civil proceedings against suppliers in connection with federal awards, vendors whose contracts were terminated, contractors banned from doing business with the government and performance reviews.

POGO officials on Wednesday praised the president’s decision to enact the legislation. “Making FAPIIS public was the right thing to do,” said Scott H. Amey, general counsel for the group. “The majority of data was already publicly available and now it will be stored in one place so that government officials, Congress and the public can better track how contractors do business and whether they act responsibly.”

Obama administration officials told a Senate panel on Tuesday that agencies are using analytical software to probe databases such as FAPIIS to detect and prevent fraud, waste and abuse.

Copyright 2010 NextGov

News

August 4, 2010

By The Associated Press

HARTFORD, Conn. —The Republican governor issued her veto on the same the day the measure, S.B. 551, arrived on her desk. The Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed the legislation July 30, attempting to save the underlying law, which includes the state’s public-financing program and other election reforms.

She said she “disagreed profoundly” with the legislature’s decision to increase grants for gubernatorial candidates in order to make the law constitutionally palatable.

“They have taken a program that was intended to remove the taint of special interests and corruption from political campaigns and turned it into a welfare program for politicians,” Rell said in her three-page veto message.

House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, said he was talking with his fellow House Democrats about their availability for a possible override of Rell’s veto.

“We will come back to resolve this,” he said.

Rell had warned legislators prior to the July 30 special legislative session that she would veto the bill if they increased the base grants for gubernatorial candidates who participate in the state’s voluntary public campaign-financing program for statewide and legislative races, known as the Citizens Election Program.

But proponents of the legislation said they hoped that Rell, a supporter of the public-financing system and the various election reforms, would change her mind.

“I am disappointed that in one of her last acts as governor she fails to rise above the negative campaigning she criticizes in her veto message,” Donovan said.

The bill called for increasing the grants for governor candidates from $3 million to $6 million because the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it was unconstitutional to give extra money or matching grants to participating candidates who face well-funded opponents.

Two of the five candidates for governor, Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Fedele and former Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy, the endorsed Democrat, are participating in the public-financing program. Proponents said it wouldn’t be fair to either candidate, should they win the Aug. 10 primary, to not provide them with at least some of the funds they were expecting for the general election to combat a wealthy self-funding opponent.

About $40 million has been budgeted for the Citizens Election Program this year. The money comes from unclaimed monies, such as old bank accounts, that revert to the state.

Among other changes in the bill, the legislation allows lobbyists and their families to contribute to political campaigns but only up to $100. The appeals court ruled that a prior ban on lobbyist contributions was unconstitutional because it violated free-speech rights.