The governing body for federal courts in the nine western states (Ninth Circuit) decided today to allow the limited use of cameras in federal courts. Fifteen courts will allow cameras on an experimental basis (see Court Press Release).

This is a great gift for access to the federal courts. While state and county courts often allow cameras and video, the federal courts have been slow to allow visual coverage (including the U.S. Supreme Court).

Yesterday afternoon, SPJ Freedom of Information Committee Chairman David Cuillier was a guest on Southern California Public Radio’s “Air Talk.” Cuillier, who is also a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, commented on the Open Government Directive that was released last week by the Obama Administration (read the SPJ press release about the directive).

If you couldn’t tune in yesterday, you’re in luck: listen to the segment, the “open government plan,” here. Great job, Dave!

The U.S. Supreme Court today agreed to determine whether a police officer is entitled to keep secret his or her sexual text messages sent on a work device. The main issue is how far a government employer may go to monitor private communications of workers on public equipment (see CNN story).

The test case involves a California police officer who sent and received 456 personal messages in one month while on duty, an average of 28 per shift. Only three were work-related, and many were sexually explicit to his wife, girlfriend and a fellow police officer.

While the issue focuses on whether a government employer has the right to see private messages sent by employees, this also has FOI implications. If those text messages are deemed public records, which they should be, then they should be disclosable under public records laws, unless the courts deem them an invasion of privacy.

It would seem that they should be public in some circumstances and private in another. For example, if a police officer gets a text message from her husband saying he just got back from the doctor and has prostrate cancer or a venereal disease, that message probably would be deemed an invasion of privacy if divulged and have little public interest. Keep that closed. But if an officer is spending his or her time running a business while on shift, or talking non-stop about personal issues, then taxpayers are getting ripped off: the public interest outweights the officer’s privacy, and the records should be public.

Let’s wait to see what the court decides.

A question came up on the FOI listserv this week asking how people track their public records requests. Here are some of the responses:

• One requester said he uses an Excel spreadsheet with each request and the fields: request number (he assigns his own ID number for each request), agency, subject, the agency’s request number, date sent, date received, date of first office action, status, and notes. Paper letters and correspondance are clipped together with a Post-It note on top with the request number to find it easily.
• Try the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press FOIA Project Tracker. It doesn’t update requests for you, but it will provide a central place to store information about requests. You create a login and password and then can store letters (with links to their online letter generators), add journal entries with date/time to track communications, reminders and contacts.
• I’ve heard of some people using Google Documents to track project information, since you can log in from anywhere and you can share it with a co-worker if you are on a team project.
• Google Calendar is another application that lets you enter reminder dates that will alert you to check back on a request. It might be a good option for people who don’t use calendar alerts on their cell phones, Outlook, or similar software.

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the federal shield law 14-5. Now the full Senate will consider the bill, called the Free Flow of Information Act. The House already has passed a similar version.

This is the furthest any shield law bill has gotten. While it’s not perfect, if passed it should slow the flow of willy-nilly federal subpoenas. Congratulations to the bill proponents for persevering through formidable opposition by key senators and negotiations with the White House.

The committee discussed an amendment proposed by Sens Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that would have defined journalists as those who work for a media outlet, excluding some online journalists. The committee instead stuck with the original definition that covers anyone with the intent to disseminate information to the public.

For more information, see SPJ’s statement today, a summary by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press or watch the full three-hour meeting Webcast (which includes other topics). This thing might actually get passed into law.

The nonprofit conservative group Judicial Watch filed suit this week to get access to White House visitor logs from earlier this year.

The Secret Service has denied requests from the group and msnbc.com, which want to see who might be influencing public policy issues such as health care and the economy (see story by msnbc.com and a summary by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press).

While the White House now publishes select visitor logs online, Judicial Watch and journalists want access to logs from January through August. The Obama Administration has said it will release the logs voluntarily and that release is discretionary, even though several courts have ruled that they shall be made public.

If the Obama Administration truly values transparency, as promised on the president’s first day of office and through the Open Government Directive issued this week, then perhaps it might choose to follow those words with action and make the records public (as courts have ruled; It would be nice if the president followed the rule of law, too). Or is there something to hide? The public won’t know unless the records are released. Transparency dispels rumors and mistrust. Truth undercuts critics and builds public confidence.

Today the Office of Management and Budget released an 11-page “Open Government Directive,” laying out how the federal government shall work more openly.

President Obama in January instructed OMB to come up with the plan. The plan took a while, but it looks pretty good. Some highlights (note the “shalls” and “shoulds” – those are important):

• Agencies shall put information online in a timely manner and should make it in a format that is easily searched and retrieved.
• Within 45 days, each agency shall publish online at least three “high-value” data sets that haven’t been online previously.
• Within 60 days, each agency shall create an “Open Government Webpage” to allow input from the public and post its FOIA report and backlog numbers annually. Agencies are to come up with plans to increase transparency.
• Within 45 days, OMB will create a working group to focus on transparency issues.

So essentially, it’s a plan to start planning for transparency. That’s a good start, and the talk is great. It’s difficult to tell, however, if anything will become of it (See blog posts by The National Security Archive, Secrecy News, and OMB Watch). Agencies can create all the plans they want, but if they don’t deal with backlogs and make (useful) documents and data more accessible then it is all fluff and PR. Perhaps, I hope, it will start developing a culture of transparency, which would be nice. Let’s see what happens!

Here’s another strike against the Obama administration’s pledge for openness. A workshop Monday for federal FOIA officers and other employees by the new Office of Government Information Services (the federal ombudsman’s office) was conducted in secret, according to an Associated Press story.

The Department of Justice’s director of information policy reportedly said the FOIA workshop was private because they wanted to allow people to talk candidly. New ombudsman Miriam Nisbet said it was closed to make sure there was room for government employees. Bad move.

Granted, the workshop’s PowerPoint slides (posted online by Patrice McDermott from openthegovernment.org) focus on problems requesters have in getting documents and how FOIA officers can help smooth the way. The program looks good. I didn’t see anything in there on how to keep things secret, stall or increase agency revenues through copy fees.

The problem, however, with keeping the workshop secret is that it gives the appearance of hiding. The public is left wondering what is being said behind closed doors – what advice is being given to employees. Say a government employee complains about ignorant or bothersome requesters. That’s to be expected. Say a government employee asks how he or she can increase revenues through increased copy fees. I wouldn’t be surprised. Say an employee says there is too much openness and not enough secrecy. I’ve heard it at these kinds of workshops. No big whoop. That’s part of the dialogue – a dialogue that should be conducted openly.

This action caused much more stir than they would have received from a few comments at an open workshop. It caused mistrust in the new ombudsman’s office, and chuckles in the access community. C’mon, folks!

Since the Association of Health Care Journalists, SPJ and nine other journalism organizations issued a letter Dec. 1 urging the FDA to stop requiring media interviews to be OK’d and attended by public information officers, I’ve been waiting to see if there is much reaction from the government community. So far not a lot.

The letter has been mentioned on Poynter, Reporters Committee, NFOIC, and a variety of other journalism Web sites. I’m more interested, however, in the reaction on the non-journalism Web sites. It’s easy preaching to the choir, but what do other folks think?

I didn’t see any comments on the PR Week posting, but one comment posted on the Health Care blog said that having professional PIOs assist in interviews helps the facts get out more accurately – that journalists often get it wrong, disgruntled employees say bad things about their employers, and government employees sometimes say the wrong thing. Granted, I haven’t been that impressed with some journalists who have interviewed me (and I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my time as a reporter), and as an academic speaking to reporters sometimes I say things that aren’t very smooth (which, of course, end up in print).

But I think what frustrates journalists is that the purpose of PIO-assisted interviews is really about managing the message and trying to avoid negative or critical coverage. It isn’t  about making sure facts are accurate. That is part of it, and there are a lot of good PR professionals who genuinely care about making sure the public gets accurate information. But avoiding bad PR and making sure the “right” accurate facts get printed are the main purposes of such media manipulation. At least that’s the perception of a lot of journalists who have seen first-hand the transitions in agencies from open to manipulative. All it takes is one negative story, a thin-skinned paranoid agency director, and a control-freak communications director, and all of a sudden new policies are issued to make sure all future media coverage are accurate and positive – from the agency’s perspective.

Now that journalism organizations have stood up and say “no more” to this practice, what will happen? Will the FDA and state and local agencies end policies prohibiting government employees from talking to the press without  a PIO? I hope so, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t. If that’s the case, what are the options?  Should reporters be polite to PIOs but make it clear they will talk to government employees regardless of agency policies? I think so. Should reporters counter manipulative policies with more aggressive reporting, get at the truth through solid sourcing and records reporting? Yep. Are stretched-thin newsrooms making thorough reporting more difficult and making journalists more reliant on PIO-assisted interviews. Probably.

So what’s the next step? What should journalists do, in your opinion?

The Senate Judiciary Committee at its executive business meeting this morning attempted to discuss the federal shield law but bogged down in discussing amendments. But the bill still lives. Check out the webcast (the discussion is toward the end, at 90 minutes into the two-hour meeting).

A few senators have raised 26 amendments, led by Jon Kyl, R-Ariz. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., proposed an amendment limiting the definition of a journalist to someone who is paid or contracted by a news organization (excluding unpaid news bloggers, student journalists, etc.).

The committee debated for some time on how to handle the process given the huge number of discussion items, implying that Kyl was trying to filibuster through amendment. Kyl, who has objected to the shield law for several years, argued that the committee should discuss all the amendments: “It’s obvious this bill is not going to be heard on the Senate floor for a long time… The reality is the time we take here in the committee will not be wasted.”

Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., proposed applying Rule 14, sending the bill directly to the Senate floor, bypassing the amendments and committee mire. However, the committee decided to go ahead and limit discussion time to five minutes per amendment.

The committee dealt with a few minor amendments and didn’t tackle the Feinstein journalist-definition amendment. They decided to handle the rest of them later, perhaps this weekend.

An interesting anecdote:  Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he objected to the title, “Free Flow of Information Act,” saying it suggests that everything should be open, including information that could threaten national security.  Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, responded, saying, “In a democracy I kind of like the free flow of information… especially when it protects law enforcement and national security issues.”

Well said, Mr. Leahy.