passopenrecords.org

During the debate, legislators spent several hours hand-wringing over the potential impact of opening up e-mail to public scrutiny. Some questioned how long e-mail documents needed to be kept, how they should be stored, and whether such storage capacity even existed.

Still others worried whether they would suddenly be subject to stiff fines, and possibly prosecution, if they accidentally deleted an e-mail.

To all of which, [Rep. Babette] Josephs (D-Philadelphia) sanely responded. “I think it was all bordering on paranoia. It demonstrated a basic lack of knowledge about how computers work.”

Moreover, as Liz Hill, the assistant ombudsman for public access with the Arizona Ombudsman’s Office, noted “the whole point is transparency.”

Other observers are noting a lot more:

• The Email Connection
As reported by news outlets everywhere, the failure of House Bill 443 to include email is unprecedented in the U.S. So there has been a great deal of speculation about why House members are so eager to keep emails secret. Under the current version of HB 443, only those parts of emails that “contain a detailed discussion of the spending of public money” are public records.

One theory for lawmakers’ insistence on secrecy is that email gives lobbyists access to lawmakers at the instant they are voting on legislation. In previous eras of corruption, PA was notorious for the influence lobbyists had over lawmakers. The leading industries of the Gilded Age were given seats on the floor of the House so that they could conveniently tell lawmakers how to vote. Eventually, lobbyists were banned from the floor of the General Assembly and relegated to the lobby outside the ornate House and Senate chambers.

Until email. Now, email puts lobbyists back on the floor of the House and Senate, but in a way that neither citizens nor reporters can see.

Questions:
o How “detailed” does a discussion of public spending have to be before it becomes public information?
o How is anyone to know that an email contains a “detailed discussion of the spending of public money” in order to ask for it?
o How many lawyers and how many years will it take to answer these two simple questions that citizens in other states don’t even have to ask when checking in on their government?
o Or is the real problem with email garden-variety venality the desire to protect against disclosure of who’s doing what with whom at whose un-detailed expense? Remember former Congressman Mark Foley, R-FL? Who thinks it can’t happen here?

It’s easy to conclude that keeping email secret is not designed to protect the innocent; it’s designed to protect the guilty. Other states have figured out how to protect the innocent without protecting the guilty. PA lawmakers should follow their lead and do them one better.

• You’ve got mail!

But odds are it will not be from your state legislator.

The state House has voted preliminarily to keep members’ e-mail secret. A final vote on the House bill – ironically called “open-records reform” – is expected this week.

Pennsylvania legislators say they oppose release of their e-mail because confidential communications from constituents might be revealed to the public. They talk about this almost as if they are lawyers protecting the rights of their clients to privacy or priests upholding the sanctity of confession.

Please. Did they ever hear of redaction? They could provide in the law for deletion of a constituent’s name in a personal matter. By and large, citizens are writing about issues and legislation or problems in the legislator’s district.

It takes a lot of gall to say “No, you can’t see my e-mail.” Mainly it’s about fearing change and not taking risks.

• Even as lawmakers boast that open-records legislation pending in the Capitol would greatly expand access to government documents, legislators are moving to make Pennsylvania the only state in the nation to keep all e-mail confidential.

Lawmakers contend this is necessary to allow unfettered policy-making and constituent service.

“To have a blanket exemption based on the form of a document, like e-mail, that’s just outright lunacy,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “That kind of all-or-nothing exemption just opens the door to abuse,” she said.

States that make e-mail public say problems have not materialized.

In Arizona, all e-mail to or from public agencies or officials is considered a public record, and e-mail sent from an official’s private account is also open for inspection if it pertains to public business.

Officials in Florida said they had similar laws for e-mail.

[Assistant ombudsman Liz] Hill said she occasionally received a call from a private citizen complaining that e-mail to a public agency or official could become public. But, she said, “the whole point is transparency.”

And there are protections for personal information, such as when a person is writing for assistance with a child-support problem, Hill said.

“People have said that it could have a chilling impact on communications,” Hill said, “but that hasn’t come up in my experience.”

• Just to be clear

This much-amended bill [HB 443] doesn’t, as some have reported, close all records with birth dates and addresses. Section 307, which lists records “deemed inaccessible,” makes an exception for personal information of deceased individuals:

“The exemption under this paragraph relating to the disclosure of an individual’s home address shall not apply to … any former address of a deceased person. The exemption under this paragraph relating to the disclosure of an individual’s birth date shall not apply to the birth date of a deceased person.”