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TOP NEWS: In a letter to the Senate, the Archivist of the United States declined to formally designate the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation practices as a “federal record.” The Sunlight Foundation is part of a coalition of non-governmental groups that sent the Archivist a letter asking him to make the designation in the other direction. [FAS]
WHAT STINGRAYS? If David Simon had kept writing seasons of “The Wire,” the federal government instructing local cops to use parallel construction of evidence to hide secret surveillance gear would have been a plot line. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is telling local police departments to use evidence obtained through using its cellphone tracking equipment — the cell site simulators known as “Stingrays — only as a lead in investigations. The nondisclosure agreement was obtained by Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet, and contradicts what the Department of Justice has said in the past. [The Intercept]
This is the first time I have seen language this explicit in an FBI nondisclosure agreement,” Nate Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote in an email to The Intercept. “The typical NDAs order local police to hide information from courts and defense attorneys, which is bad enough, but this goes the outrageous extra step of ordering police to actually engage in evidence laundering. Instead of just hiding the surveillance, the FBI is mandating manufacture of a whole new chain of evidence to throw defense attorneys and judges off the scent. As a result, defendants are denied their right to challenge potentially unconstitutional surveillance and courts are deprived of an opportunity to curb law enforcement abuses.
PROGRESS: The White House is touting the Obama administration’s efforts on financial transparency and anti-corruption, putting them in the context of the Panama Papers. The White House blog post linked to the U.S. Treasury’s announcement that it was sending Congress a draft of legislation on beneficial ownership and issuing a final rule on customer due diligence for financial institutions. (Neither the final rule nor draft bill were available today.) Treasury Secretary Jack Lew sent Speaker of the House Paul Ryan a letter regarding the former. Separately, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it will send Congress proposed amendments on transnational corruption offenses.
National
Similar to our results from Part 1, we found that despite the fact that we targeted FOIA programs whose use of still interested letters might have the greatest effect on requesters and that we included requests that were likely not closed using still interested letters in our data, the FOIA programs we reviewed closed relatively few requests possibly using these letters. Of the 46,019 requests the FOIA programs we reviewed processed in FY 2014, about 5.5 percent (2,535 requests) were closed using a method that might be related to a still interested letter.
Further: “All of the FOIA programs we interviewed informed us that their current use of the letters is in line with guidance issued by the Office of Information Policy (OIP) at the Department of Justice (DOJ).” [OGIS]
If your experience with the use of these letters differs, please tell us — and contact OGIS to make sure they know.
Auditing /open under @OpenGov. @DeptofDefense‘s #opengov contact page is blank https://t.co/WMKAsuyPFK pic.twitter.com/mdLlKBaKkq
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) May 5, 2016
State and Local
This February, Nextdoor hosted Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole for the first-ever online “town hall” on the platform: Residents asked the police chief questions and had a chance to hear directly from her. But when local journalist Erica Barnett reported on the event, Nextdoor booted her from the site for violating its terms of service for publicly posting users’ questions. It wasn’t until after she wrote about the incident on her website that her account was reinstated.
Barnett’s reporting was fiercely critical of the echo-chamber effect of the local, private community pages, many of which have hyperactive “crime and safety” sections. Indeed, in a recent interview with Barnett, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray derided an atmosphere of “paranoid hysteria” he’d witnessed on the message boards of some of Seattle’s more upscale neighborhoods.
That hysteria, Barnett reports, tends to focus on complaints about property crimes and homelessness. That’s because some of the most active communities on Nextdoor are in Seattle’s wealthier areas. “The neighborhoods where most of the social-media complaints are coming out of are not even the neighborhoods that have significant crime problems, which tend to be our communities of color in the south part of the city,” Murray told KUOW, the local NPR affiliate, in February. “If it’s simply about creating a sense of paranoia or if it’s about stigmatizing folks in our city that are struggling, then I have to think about why we’re in that kind of partnership.” International
One reason Facebook might want to keep the trending news operation faceless is that it wants to foster the illusion of a bias-free news ranking process—a network that sorts and selects news stories like an entirely apolitical machine. After all, the company’s entire media division, which is run by Facebook’s managing editor Benjamin Wagner, depends on people’s trust in the platform as a conduit for information. If an editorial team is deliberating over trending topics—just like a newspaper staff would talk about front-page news—Facebook risks losing its image as a non-partisan player in the media industry, a neutral pipeline for distributing content, rather than a selective and inherently flawed curator.
Events
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The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, and provides new tools and resources for media and citizens, alike.