In recent months, Utah officials have taken aim at websites such as bustedmugshots.com and mugshots.com, but transparency is taking the hit.

Utah officials accuse the sites of extortion, on the grounds that the sites publish jail booking photos and either charge or direct visitors to a vendor who will remove them — for a fee going as high as hundreds of dollars.

I’ll leave the debate over the ethics of such publications to my colleagues on the Ethics Committee. Instead, let’s look at how Utah’s attempts to deal with it has affected access to public records.

Previously, Utah residents could go on a jail website and see who had been booked and for what crime.

Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder simply took down the photos from the sheriff’s website. Those wanting pictures have to file public records requests under Utah’s Government Access and Management Act.

The Weber and Utah county sheriffs didn’t take the draconian steps Winder did, but they made it harder for the mug-shot sites to scrape photos, and the general public to see who had been booked into the jail.

In Weber County, you have to know the name of the person who has been arrested in order to see the photo. Utah County’s jail website merely posts the pictures in thumbnail size, making the photo barely discernible to people looking at it on a screen, and turning it into a Technicolor blur if it is enlarged to any degree.

But that was not enough for Winder and others.

The Utah State Legislature passed HB408, sponsored by Rep. Paul Ray, R-Clearfield, at Winder’s insistence. The bill requires people seeking mug shots to sign a sworn statement promising not to post the photos on a site that charges people to remove them. Violators would be prosecuted for lying to police, a crime punishable by up to six months in jail.

The bill sailed through the Legislature with no debate or amendments, spurred on by Ray’s pleas to consider the poor soul who got arrested and is trying to get his or her life back in order only to be haunted by their mug shot popping up on web searches.

But this law sets a dangerous precedent. It grants agencies holding public records to weigh what a requester will use a record in whether to grant it to them. The law specifically deals with mug shots, but its principles could easily be extended to other records, which runs counter to the premise that the public doesn’t have to explain why it wants records.

If this were the last shot in this war, that would be bad enough. But wait, there’s more!

This past week, the Salt Lake County Council sustained Winder’s rejection of Kyle Prall’s request for almost 1,400 records to post on his bustedmugshots.com website. Winder stated, and the council affirmed, that the mug shots were copyrighted images and could not be released.

I’ll wait while you clean the beverage you just spit out off your computer screen.

That’s right. A public record, created by a government entity, is being held back because of a copyright claim.

First, U.S. copyright law is clear: Government can’t copyright materials it creates or commissions. That’s why you’re free to copy Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” photo as much as you want.

Second, if we follow the copyright argument to its illogical conclusion, all public records could be closed off because releasing them would violate copyright. Is that what we really want?

Winder and others do the accused no favors by blocking access to mug shots. Sure, it could be embarrassing to see your jail photo plastered on websites, but making them public provides a great protection, as my colleague David Cuillier points out.

The mug shot, Cuillier argues, provides proof that someone has been arrested and how they were treated at the time of their arrest. Contrast that with Argentina’s “Dirty War,” where countless people viewed as opponents to the military junta essentially “disappeared” when they were taken secretly by the government and tortured and murdered.

“If Utah officials want a Stalinist society, they’re off to a good start,” Cullier said.

Oklahoma State University made history by becoming the first university to win SPJ’s not-so-coveted Black Hole Award.

The Cowboys were nominated by Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, for several offenses against open government, such as classifying parking tickets as information protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and identifying a sexual assault as a burglary on a Clery Act report.

But what put Oklahoma State over the top (or into the gutter, depending on your perspective), was its decision to hide behind FERPA to protect the “privacy” of a suspected serial sexual predator. OSU had four verified complaints from students at a fraternity that they were sexually assaulted by another student, yet the university did not notify police or alert students to the potential predator in their midst.

Instead, OSU handled the matter through a closed-door administrative hearing. University officials defended the action on the grounds that FERPA barred them from revealing the suspect’s name, even to the police.

FERPA was meant to protect academic records — college applications, test scores and transcripts — from prying eyes. It was not meant to be a “Harry Potter”-like cloak that hides any scrap of paper that contains a student’s name.

Oklahoma State now joins a rouge’s gallery that includes the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Human Services, and the Georgia, Wisconsin and Utah legislatures. The Utah Legislature had the distinction of winning the first national Black Hole award for railroading through the infamous HB477 in 2011, which would have gutted the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act.

That bill was repealed amid public fury, a petition drive to put legislation repealing the bill on the next ballot, front-page editorials in the state’s largest newspaper denouncing the bill and the national publicity generated by the Black Hole award.

The Cherokee Scout in Murphy, N.C., did not do the open-government movement any favors this week.

As Jim Romenesko reported, the paper issued an apology for filing a records request with Cherokee County Sheriff Keith Lovin for a list of concealed-carry permit holders in the county, as well as the application. The paper indicated in a letter to readers that it was looking into allegations that Lovin was only issuing permits to people he favored. There was no indication that the paper was going to publish all the names it got.

But Lovin refused to grant the request, and posted the paper’s request, as well as his response and his vow to “support the constitution [sic] and all amendments including the Second Amendment on the department’s Facebook page. I will continue to uphold my Oath of Office [sic] and serve the Citizens of Cherokee County.” He obviously forgot that his oath was also uphold the laws of North Carolina, including the open-records law that said the concealed-permit information is a matter of public records.

The sheriff’s posting the information on the department’s Facebook page naturally got the gun-rights crowd fired up (no pun intended), who promptly denounced the paper’s efforts.

Which brings us to the withdrawal of the open-records request, as well as the apology from publisher David Brown and editor Robert Horne, who called the request “a lapse of judgment.”

“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.”

Brown also brought out his and Horne’s bona fides as local folks, with Brown even noting he had been baptized there.

The only lapse of judgment was backing down on the request and kissing Lovin’s boots.

This does not help the Scout, or its readers. Rather, Lovin has learned that he can make the local paper back off and print only the news he wants. He’s also learned he can break open-records laws, which he is sworn to uphold, without any fear of repercussion.

And it will embolden others to follow Lovin’s example and bully journalists into sticking with the press releases they are being spoon fed.

Would the paper had faced a backlash if it pursued the case? Probably. But nobody ever said that journalism was a risk-free enterprise, especially when it comes to speaking truth to power.

Elijah Lovejoy could have probably lived a longer, more prosperous life if he had not challenged the institution of slavery. While the abolitionist publisher paid with his life, he also sent a message that killing the messenger doesn’t kill the message.

Likewise, thugs in Arizona thought they could keep their misdeeds secret by killing Don Bolles, but instead their crimes got even greater media scrutiny.

In the spirit of Bolles and the Arizona Project his death inspired, maybe we should all file a records request with Lovin for the concealed-carry permit list, and let him know that he may have silenced one news outlet but true journalists never give up.

Lovin’s contact information can be found here.

When a city government settles a lawsuit claiming one of its police officers killed someone with a supposedly non-lethal weapon, you’d want to know the details, right?

Well, in the case of the suit against Hurricane, Utah, and its police chief and a police officer, the public is in the dark.

As reported in The Salt Lake Tribune, Peter Stirba, the attorney representing the southern Utah city, said the details of the city’s settlement with the family of Brian Cardall is confidential. The only details we know is that Police Chief Lynn Excell and Officer Kenneth Thompson were dropped as defendants.

Cardall, his wife and daughter were driving back to their home in Flagstaff, Ariz., on June 9, 2009, when he began having a bipolar episode. His wife gave him his medication, and they pulled over to wait for it to take effect. But he became agitated, began removing his clothes and darting into the roadway.

Cardall’s wife called 911 for help, but when Excell and Thompson arrived on the scene, Thompson reportedly took out his Taser pistol and delivered an electrical shock into Cardall’s chest. Thompson delivered a second shock to Cardall when he was on the ground. After that, court records stated, Cardall had trouble breathing and, when paramedics arrived, he had no pulse. The family alleged that Excell and Thompson did not render any aid, and left him face-down, handcuffed on the shoulder of the road while ordering Cardall’s wife back into her car.

Cardall’s death led to the Utah State Legislature passing a resolution encouraging police officers to get training in dealing with people with mental illness.

But keeping the details of the settlement confidential not only fly in the face of the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act, it also flouts the basic concept of government accountability. The public has a right to know why Excell and Thompson were dropped from the suit, how much money was paid out over this and what steps are being taken to prevent a recurrence.

Utah’s open-government advocates got something After a year-long fight, the Utah State Legislature has finally released 16,000 pages of documents related to the state’s redistricting efforts.

The decision to release the documents came after the Utah Democratic Party threatened to sue the state for access to the record. Lawmakers refused to turn over the records until a $9,250 bill for compiling the data was paid.

Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act allows fees to be waived if the records request benefits the public. Legislators argued that the Democratic Party’s request failed that test, because they believed it was for a political purposes. But isn’t calling out a Republican-dominated Legislature that drew congressional and legsilative district lines behind closed doors a public benefit?

Lawmakers also said they decided to dump the data online after media outlets filed records requests, which convinced them that there was a public demand for the records.

Click here to see the documents.

Only in Utah, where legislators earned a Black Hole award for attempting to gut the state’s open records law, would a bureaucrat attempt to criminalize talking about a records denial.

The Salt Lake Tribune is challenging the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which operates a bus and train system serving Salt Lake and Utah counties, for holding back crime statistics. The Tribune is seeking data about crimes that have occurred on the transit system as part of an ongoing series about crime trends in Salt Lake County. Fifteen other agencies have complied.

The Tribune reports that the transit authority, in its response to the paper’s appeal to the State Records Committee, not only wants its denial of the request upheld, but it also wants the paper and its reporters sanctioned for allegedly violating Utah Code 76-8-104, which says a person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor “if he threatens any harm to a public servant, party official, or voter with a purpose of influencing his action, decision, opinion, recommendation, nomination, vote or other exercise of discretion.”

The authority claimed that a Tribune reporter threatened to write a negative story if the records were not turned over.

When Tribune columnist Paul Rolly contacted the authority, he was told that it was a misunderstanding, that the attorney who drafted the response to the appeal was reacting emotionally. Rolly was told by transit authority officials that the authority was not alleging criminal conduct by the paper or its journalists.

Rolly said that Tribune reporter Lee Davidson said he never threatened a UTA spokesman with bad press for not providing the records. He told the spokesman that he would have to write that the UTA was not providing the records, Rolly reported.

The records committee, which cannot issue criminal sanctions anyway, will hear the Tribune’s case Thursday.

Remember how everyone was mad as hell and not going to take the Utah State Legislature’s attempt to gut the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act?

After all, these were the people who won SPJ’s first national Black Hole Award.

A blog on The Salt Lake Tribune website reports that the rage pretty much faded away by the 2012 election, when the Entire House of Representatives and part of the Senate were up for re-election.

Out of the 61 representatives who voted for it, 42 were returned to office, and the bill’s sponsor, Rep. John Dougall, won election as the state’s auditor. Dougall ran on a platform of — wait for it — increased government transparency.

In a case that spanned decades, a federal judge has ordered the FBI to pay nearly a half-million in legal fees for holding back documents a journalist requested.

According to the First Amendment Center, Seth Rosenfeld had to file two lawsuits to obtain documents detailing the FBI’s investigation of campus protests at the University of California Berkley in the 1960s. U.S. Judge Edward Chen ruled that the documents should have been released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Rosenfeld has used FBI documents to write articles on the investigations of protestors, and recently published the book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.

The $470,000 will be paid to the First Amendment Project of Oakland, which represented Rosenfeld.

Without a proper criminal penalty for violating open-government laws, attorney’s fees are the only way to punish agencies that refuse to release information.

The First Amendment Center will consider a challenge to Virginia’s law barring out-of-state residents from requesting public documents.

The federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, calling it a reasonable restriction.  That contradicted a 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision striking down a similar law in Delaware. The conflicting appellate decision most likely made it easier for the justices to decide they wanted to hear the case.

The case has the potential for striking down such restrictions. Most states recognize that public means everyone, not just the people who call that particular state home.

But, there is also the risk that the high court could uphold Virginia’s law and embolden other states to impose restrictions on who can make records requests.

Linda Petersen, SPJ’s national FOI chairwoman, and Kathryn Foxhall, of the PR Office Censorship blog, co-authored an article in this month’s Quill magazine about the insidious ways public information officers try to steer coverage.

While Kathryn has written extensively on the problem of government PIOs acting more like minders in third-world countries, either monitoring interviews or serving as the choke point through which all information must pass, the article shows it’s not just a Washington beltway phenomena.

Linda tells of the time a public-information officer in a small Utah city told her that, as a “professional courtesy,” one of Linda’s reporters should tell her what stories she was working on.

The article also gives tips for how to get around these roadblocks to information. You may want to share it with your newsrooms.

Have you had any problems with public information officers who see themselves as censors? Leave a comment below.