Freedom of Information

Tricia Taborn, a great San Francisco spirit, died today

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Tricia Taborn, a great San Francisco spirit, died today

I was saddened to hear that my former associate of many years, Tricia Taborn, died today (April 7) of cancer at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland.

She was four days shy of her 62nd birthday.

She entered the hospital on Saturday (April 3).  Her mother Neomi flew out from Dallas,  Texas,  to be with her the last few days. Her sister Ginny, her  two brothers Kenneth and Michael  and her husband Gerald Baron  were with her when she died. 

Tricia worked for me as assistant to the publisher from July of 1993 to April of 2000.

I always marveled  at how she  could jump into things and make them work.  Her friends and family say that she has been doing that throughout her life.  When she came to the Guardian, she had no newspaper or journalism experience, yet she quickly  fit in and

became a valuable employee able to handle most any administrative job that came along.  She kept me organized and she organized an endless series of events at the Guardian that included five annual awards contests and ceremonies (poetry, photography, cartoons, short stories, film treatments) that she structured to reflect the rich cultural diversity and artistic talent in San Francisco.

She also put on major events and dinners for the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the California Freedom of Information Coalition during its early days.  She loved being a hostess and she did so with flair, a rollicking laugh, flamboyant hats and an ability to make the event important and distinctive and  to see that everyone was welcome and having fun. She served for several years as a director and treasurer of SPJ.

Victoria McDonnell, a friend that Tricia talked with almost every day on the phone, agreed that Tricia liked to jump into things.

“I know she joined her high school year book committee in Florida soon after arriving at the school.  In San Francisco, she did this at Major Ponds (a jazz club where she worked as a bartender in the late 1970s and early 1980s), the Bay Guardian, the Industry Standard (the late dot.com magazine),  OneWorld Health, and lastly selling real estate.

“Tricia was the first employee for One World Health,  It started out at (founder) Victoria Hale’s house and grew to be a world-wide multimillion dollar non profit pharmaceutical company.  The first ever non-profit pharmaceutical company in fact. Tricia thrived on ‘start ups.'”

Victoria Hale said that Tricia was “an amazing woman  who accomplished much, despite the obstacles, with humor and passion, while caring for others.  She had an especially good relationship with the Indian physicians who worked on leishmaniasis.  She demonstrated much courage and trust by becoming the first employee of OneWorld Health, while still on the first floor of our house.”

Tricia lived in Florida, Utah, Atlanta, Dallas, and other places because her father Raymond Taborn was an aeronautical engineer and moved about because of his work. She bought a house in Berkeley in 2004 with her husband Gerald Baron. 

For the last two years of her life, Tricia lived her dream: getting her independence by selling real estate and having fun doing it. She worked in the Berkeley office of Coldwell Banker, specializing in low price housing that many real estate people avoided. She was recently recognized as the top sales person in her office.  Her main hobby, according to her friends, was shopping and she was well known at Nordstroms, Macys and Ross department stores, as well as thrift shops and farmer’s markets.

Tricia was diagnosed in November with metastatic colon cancer. Over the last two months she rallied and was able to spend time and phone calls talking to her friends and “wrapping up her relationships in a positive and meaningful way,” as Victoria Hale put it.

Invariably, her friends reported that Tricia remained upbeat until she went into the hospital for the last time.

She leaves her mother Neomi Taborn of Dallas, a sister Ginny of Dallas, two brothers, Kenneth of Arlington, Texas, and Michael of Phoenix, Arizona, her husband Gerald Baron,  and Tommy, her beloved cat.  Services are pending and will be reported on this blog when they are set.

 

 

Editorial: Needed — some teeth for the San Francisco sunshine law

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance is a national model for open government, the first and strongest local sunshine law in the country. It was written to improve public access to government records and meetings, and to clear up some of the problems and loopholes in state law. On paper, it makes San Francisco a shining example of how concerned residents can come together and eliminate secrecy at City Hall.

But 17 years after its passage, it’s still not working. That’s because city officials routinely ignore the law — and the city attorney, the district attorney, and the Ethics Commission have utterly failed to enforce it.

Here’s how it works, in theory: A San Franciscan makes a request for records in the office of a public official. The official is supposed to make the documents available promptly — within 48 hours for immediate disclosure requests and within 10 working days for routine requests. If the records aren’t forthcoming, the resident can complain to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, which brings both sides in, holds a hearing, gets legal advice, and determines whether the complain is valid. If the task force finds that the official should have made the records available, the matter gets referred to the Ethics Commission, which can file charges of official misconduct.

Here’s how it happens in practice: Some officials, like Mayor Gavin Newsom, simply ignore sunshine requests, or delay responding well beyond the statutory limit, or refuse to release records on grounds that clearly violate the law. The task force holds a hearing, and nobody from the Mayor’s Office shows up. Then the task force finds in favor of the person seeking the records, sends the file to the Ethics Commission — and the whole thing dies.

Not once in the history of the ordinance has the Ethics Commission actually filed misconduct charges. Not once. Violating the Sunshine Ordinance is a crime, but D.A. Kamala Harris has never once prosecuted a miscreant. And public officials who disobey the law hide under the protection of advice from the city attorney — although that advice itself is secret.

The message to City Hall is clear: you can defy the sunshine law with impunity; nothing will ever happen.

The task force is offering a series of amendments to the law that would improve enforcement and give the measure some teeth. The supervisors ought to support those proposals — but the board ought to go even further.

The proposals would turn the task force into a commission, which is a fine idea. But more important, the new commission would have something extraordinary: a $50,000 litigation fund to pay for an outside lawyer — not the city attorney — to sue officials who flout the law. If those lawsuits succeed, the city would have to pay attorneys’ fees, which would replenish the fund. And the very threat of that could have a huge impact on the way City Hall responds to sunshine requests.

We support the plan — and since nobody else will enforce the law, we think the task force (or commission) needs the authority to do it. The body overseeing sunshine complaints should be able to force public officials to release records or open meetings; rulings from that body should have the force of law. That works well in Connecticut, where a state Freedom of Information Commission has the authority to order anyone, from the governor to a city council, to open up files. Government in that state hasn’t become unwieldy; officials secrets haven’t fallen into the hands of terrorists. But ordinary citizens who can’t afford a lawsuit have a forum to force reluctant public officials to do their business in public.

San Francisco should adopt that model, and the sooner the better.

Informing the public

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Informing the public

news@sfbg.com

Information is power. But too often, those with political power guard public documents and information from the journalists, activists, lawyers, and others who seek it on the people’s behalf. So every year, we at the Guardian honor those who fight for a freer and more open society by highlighting the annual winners of the James Madison Freedom of Information Awards, which are given by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

This year’s winners are:

Beverly Kees Educator Award

Rachele Kanigel

Rachele Kanigel, an associate professor of journalism and advisor to Golden Gate Xpress publications at San Francisco State University, has been highly involved in student press rights work on a national level. She wrote The Student Newspaper Survival Guide (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), a book designed to empower budding campus reporters. A champion of the free speech rights of her students, Kanigel has gone to bat on several occasions on behalf of student journalists whose work was challenged by interests that didn’t believe students should be afforded the same protections as professional reporters. Kanigel sees part of her job as educating the world about the importance of student journalists and standing up for their rights. “A lot of people won’t talk to student journalists, but they’re doing some really important work,” she said. “A lot of what we have to do is to assure the student journalists and tell the world outside that these are journalists.” The educator award is named in honor of Beverly Kees, who was the SPJ NorCal chapter president at the time of her death in 2004.

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

Mark Fricker

Mary Fricker is the kind of investigative reporter many of us would like to be.

She started out in the 1980s investigating complaints of irregularities at her local savings and loan when she was reporting for the old Russian River News community paper. Her dogged research and hard-hitting stories produced the first major investigation into the toxic problems of financial deregulation in S&Ls. Her work won numerous awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award given out by UCLA and the prestigious George Polk Award, and ultimately led to the book, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loan. The book won Best Book of the Year award from the Investigative Reporters and Editors association.

Fricker did business reporting and major investigative work for 20 years with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. She retired and joined the Chauncey Bailey Project as a volunteer investigative reporter, researcher, Web site maestro, and general good spirit. Her work included several key investigations that determined that the Oakland Police Department was virtually alone in not taping interviews with suspects in investigations. Her stories changed that practice. She is a most worthy recipient of the Norwin S.<0x2009>Yoffie award, which honors the memory of the former publisher of the Marin Independent Journal, a founder of the SPJ/FOI committee, and a splendid warrior in the cause of Freedom of Information.

Professional Journalist

G.W. Schulz

G.W. Schulz was busy when we got him on the phone. “I’m sending out about eight or nine new freedom of information requests a day,” he said. “I fired off a few to the governor of Texas this morning.”

The relentless reporter is working on the Center for Investigative Reporting’s program exposing homeland security spending. It hasn’t been easy. Since the federal government began making big grants to local agencies for supposed antiterrorism and civil emergency equipment and programs, following the money has required unusual persistence. Homeland Security officials don’t even know where their grants are going, so Schulz has been forced to dig deeper.

“I think this is the biggest open government campaign I’ll ever do in my career,” he said. “We’re juggling dozens of requests, state by state. And it’s breathtaking what some people will ignore in their own public records laws.”

He’s found widespread abuse. “These agencies are getting all this expensive equipment and they don’t even maintain it or train their staff how to use it,” he said. CIR is not only doing its own stories, it’s working with local papers that don’t have the resources to do this kind of work. “Lots of great stories in the pipeline,” he said before signing off to get back to the battle. “I’m really excited.”

Legal Counsel

Ann Brick/ACLU

On the heels of a now-infamous Supreme Court ruling on so-called First Amendment rights for corporate political speech, SPJ is honoring an individual who has made a career devoted to protecting real, individual free speech rights for almost 20 years. Ann Brick, staff attorney for the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, has litigated in defense of privacy rights, free speech, government accountability, and student rights in cases ranging from book burning to Internet speech to illegal government wiretapping. “I can’t tell you how much of an honor it is to have worked with the ACLU,” she says, adding, “I can’t think of another award I’d rather get than this one — an award from journalists.” But the public’s gratitude goes to Brick, whose years of service are a shining example of speaking truth to power.

Computer Assisted Reporting

Phillip Reese

Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee is being honored for his unrelenting pursuit of public records and for producing interactive databases. Reese was the architect of the Bee‘s data center, providing readers readily accessible information about legislative voting records, neighborhood election results, state employee salaries, and other important information. At one point, the city of Sacramento demanded several thousand dollars in exchange for employee salary data. Reese gathered the city’s IT workers and a city attorney for a meeting, where he argued that organizing records in an analyzable format would insure the system wasn’t being abused, so they chose to provide the records for free. The online databases provide public access to records that are often disorganized and cryptic. “Sometimes these databases go well with a story, and sometimes they can stand on the Internet alone. People can view them in a way that is important to themselves,” Reese said.

Public Official

Leland Yee

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) has been an open government advocate since his days on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and one of his favorite targets is the administration of the University of California. He has fought to protect UC students from administrators who want to curtail their free-speech right and to get documents from university officials.

In 2008, he authored and passed SB 1696, which blocked the university from hiding audit information behind a private contractor. UCSF was refusing to release the information in an audit the school paid a private contractor to conduct. “I read about this in the newspaper and I was just scratching my head. How can public officials do this stuff?” Yee said. He had to overcome resistance from university officials and public agencies arguing that the state shouldn’t be sticking its nose into their business. “But it’s public money, and they’re public entities, and the people have a right to know where that money is going.”

Computer Assisted Reporting

Thomas Peele and Daniel Willis

This duo with the Bay Area News Group, which includes 15 daily and 14 community newspapers around the Bay Area, performed monumental multitasking when they decided to crunch the salaries of more than 194,000 public employees from 97 government agencies into a database. Honored with the Computer Assisted Reporting Award, the duo provided the public with a database that translated a gargantuan amount of records into understandable information. They had to submit dozens of California Public Records Act requests to access the records of salaries that account for more than $1.8 billion in taxpayer money. “It is important that the public know how its money is spent. This data base, built rather painstakingly one public records act request at a time by Danny Willis and myself as a public service, goes a long way in helping people follow the money,” Peele said.

Nonprofit

Californians Aware: The Center for Public Forum Rights

California’s sunshine laws, including the Brown Act open meeting law and California Public Records Act, aren’t bad. Unfortunately, they are routinely flouted by public officials, often making it necessary to go to court to enforce them. That’s why we need groups like CalAware, and individuals like its president, Rick McKee, and its counsel, longtime media attorney Terry Francke. Last year, while defending an Orange County school board member’s free speech rights and trying to restore a censored public meeting transcript, CalAware not only found itself losing the case on an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion, but being ordered to pay more than $80,000 in school district legal fees. “It’s never been easy, but that was going to be the end of private enforcement of the Brown Act,” Francke said. Luckily, Sen. Leland Yee intervened with legislation that prevents awarding attorney fees in such sunshine cases, leaving CalAware bruised but unbowed. “We’ve become active in court like never before.”

News Media

SF Public Press/McSweeney’s

Last year, when author Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s magazine staff decided to put out a single newspaper issue (because “it’s a form we love,” Eggers told us), they filled San Francisco Panorama with the unusual mix of writers, topics, and graphics one might expect from a literary enterprise. But they wanted a hard-hitting investigation on the cover, so they turned to the nonprofit SF Public Press and reporters Robert Porterfield and Patricia Decker. Together, they worked full-time for four months to gather information on cost overruns on the Bay Bridge rebuild, fighting for public records and information from obscure agencies and an intransigent CalTrans. “We’re still dealing with this. I’ve been trying to secure documents for a follow-up and I keep getting the runaround,” said Decker, a new journalist with a master’s degree in engineering, a nice complement to Porterfield, an award-winning old pro. “He’s a great mentor, just such a fount of knowledge.”

Professional Journalist

Sean Webby

San Jose Mercury News reporter Sean Webby won for a series spotlighting the San Jose Police Department’s use of force and how difficult it is for the public or the press to track.

The department and the San Jose City Council refused to release use-of-force reports, so Webby obtained them through public court files. He zeroed in on incidents that involved “resisting arrest” charges, and even uncovered a cell phone video in which officers Tasered and battered suspects who did not appear to be resisting.

Webby has won numerous awards in the past, but says he is particularly proud of this one. “Freedom of information is basically our mission statement, our bible, our motto,” he said. “We feel like the less resistance the average person has to getting information, the better the system works.”

Webby said that despite causing some tension between his paper and the San Jose Police Department, the project was well worth it. “We are never going to back off the hard questions. It’s our job as a watchdog organization.”

Public Service

Rita Williams

KTVU’s Rita Williams is being honored for her tireless efforts to establish a media room in the San Francisco Federal Building that provides broadcasters the same access to interviews as print reporters.

Television and radio equipment was banned from the federal pressroom following 9/11, but Williams solicited support from television stations, security agencies, the courts, and the National Bar Association. After a six-year push, they were able to restore access.

Williams and her supporters converted a storage unit in the federal building into a full-blown media center, which was well-used during the Proposition 8 trial. “I only did two days of the trials, but every time I walked into the room, I would just be swarmed with camera folks saying thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said. “I’m getting close to retirement and I was in the first wave of women in broadcasting, and I’m proud that almost 40 years later, I can leave this legacy.”

Citizen

Melissa Nix

With her Betty Page looks, dogged sense of justice, and journalistic training, Melissa Nix became a charismatic and relentless force in the quest to find out how her ex-boyfriend Hugues de la Plaza really died in 2007. Nix began her efforts after the San Francisco medical examiner declared it was unable to determine how de la Plaza died and the San Francisco Police Department seemed to be leaning toward categorizing the case as a suicide. Using personal knowledge of de la Plaza and experience as a reporter with The Sacramento Bee, Nix got the French police involved, who ruled the death a homicide, and unearthed the existence of an independent medical examiner report that concluded that de la Plaza was murdered.

Editorial/Commentary

Daniel Borenstein

Contra Costa Times reporter Daniel Borenstein wasn’t out to deprive public worker retirees of yachting, country club golf, and rum-y cocktails at tropical resorts. The columnist was only trying to figure out how, for example, the chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District turned a $185,000 salary into a $241,000 annual pension. Borenstein’s effort to unearth and make public, in easily readable spreadsheets, the records of all Contra Costa County public employee pensioners led the Contra Costa Times to a court victory stipulating just that: all records would be released promptly on request without allowing retirees time to go to court to block access. The effects have been noticeable: “I get scores of e-mails most weeks in reaction to the columns I’m writing on pensions, [and] public officials are much more sensitive to the issue,” Borenstein says. It is a precedent that has carried into the Modesto Bee‘s similar pension-disclosure efforts in Stanislaus County.

Student Name Withheld After a photojournalism student at San Francisco State University snapped photographs at the scene of a fatal shooting in Bayview-Hunters Point, police skipped the usual process of using a subpoena to seek evidence, and went straight into his home with a search warrant to seize this student’s work. But with the help of his attorney, the student quashed the warrant, arguing California’s shield law prevents law enforcement from compelling journalists to disclose unpublished information. He won, and the case served to demonstrate that the shield law should apply to nontraditional journalists.

The student is being recognized because he resisted the warrant rather than caving into the demands of law enforcement. Invoking the shield law in such cases prevents reporters from being perceived as extensions of law enforcement by the communities they report on, enabling a free exchange of information. The student remained anonymous in the aftermath of the shooting because he feared for his life. Based on his ongoing concerns, NorCal SPJ and the Guardian have agreed to honor his wish to have his name withheld.

Some teeth for the sunshine law

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Some teeth for the sunshine law

EDITORIAL The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance is a national model for open government, the first and strongest local sunshine law in the country. It was written to improve public access to government records and meetings, and to clear up some of the problems and loopholes in state law. On paper, it makes San Francisco a shining example of how concerned residents can come together and eliminate secrecy at City Hall.

But 17 years after its passage, it’s still not working. That’s because city officials routinely ignore the law — and the city attorney, the district attorney, and the Ethics Commission have utterly failed to enforce it.

Here’s how it works, in theory: A San Franciscan makes a request for records in the office of a public official. The official is supposed to make the documents available promptly — within 48 hours for immediate disclosure requests and within 10 working days for routine requests. If the records aren’t forthcoming, the resident can complain to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, which brings both sides in, holds a hearing, gets legal advice, and determines whether the complain is valid. If the task force finds that the official should have made the records available, the matter gets referred to the Ethics Commission, which can file charges of official misconduct.

Here’s how it happens in practice: Some officials, like Mayor Gavin Newsom, simply ignore sunshine requests, or delay responding well beyond the statutory limit, or refuse to release records on grounds that clearly violate the law. The task force holds a hearing, and nobody from the Mayor’s Office shows up. Then the task force finds in favor of the person seeking the records, sends the file to the Ethics Commission — and the whole thing dies.

Not once in the history of the ordinance has the Ethics Commission actually filed misconduct charges. Not once. Violating the Sunshine Ordinance is a crime, but D.A. Kamala Harris has never once prosecuted a miscreant. And public officials who disobey the law hide under the protection of advice from the city attorney — although that advice itself is secret.

The message to City Hall is clear: you can defy the sunshine law with impunity; nothing will ever happen.

The task force is offering a series of amendments to the law that would improve enforcement and give the measure some teeth. The supervisors ought to support those proposals — but the board ought to go even further.

The proposals would turn the task force into a commission, which is a fine idea. But more important, the new commission would have something extraordinary: a $50,000 litigation fund to pay for an outside lawyer — not the city attorney — to sue officials who flout the law. If those lawsuits succeed, the city would have to pay attorneys’ fees, which would replenish the fund. And the very threat of that could have a huge impact on the way City Hall responds to sunshine requests.

We support the plan — and since nobody else will enforce the law, we think the task force (or commission) needs the authority to do it. The body overseeing sunshine complaints should be able to force public officials to release records or open meetings; rulings from that body should have the force of law. That works well in Connecticut, where a state Freedom of Information Commission has the authority to order anyone, from the governor to a city council, to open up files. Government in that state hasn’t become unwieldy; officials secrets haven’t fallen into the hands of terrorists. But ordinary citizens who can’t afford a lawsuit have a forum to force reluctant public officials to do their business in public.

San Francisco should adopt that model, and the sooner the better.

Sunshine heroes: Call for nominations!

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By Rebecca Bowe

sunshine.jpg

Not every bright star who snags a James Madison Freedom of Information Award is a superstar investigative journalist. The annual contest, administered by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, honors citizens and journalists alike who’ve exercised their right to obtain public documents and used the information to produce stellar work. The awards also recognize those who’ve poured time and energy into promoting greater government transparency.

Right now, the SPJ NorCal Chapter’s Freedom of Information Committee is accepting nominations for The 25th Annual James Madison Awards. The awards recognize Northern California organizations and individuals who have made significant contributions to the advancement of freedom of information and expression in the spirit of James Madison, the creative force behind the First Amendment.

Click here to go to an online nomination form. The last day to send a nomination is January 9, 2010.

The awards are presented at a ceremony in March during National Freedom of Information Week, near the anniversary of Madison’s birth. Eligible for nomination are Northern California journalists, citizens, media organizations, or community groups who, during 2009, have defended public access to meetings, public records, or court proceedings or otherwise promoted the public’s right to know, publish and speak freely about issues of public concern.

Dick Fogel, journalist and FOI legend, 1923-2009

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DickFogel.jpg
Scroll down for B3 comments on Dick Fogel.

San Francisco’s Bay City News Service reported today that Dick Fogel, co-founder with his wife of the service, died Wednesday in Thousand Oaks.

Wayne Futak, a key member of the original founding group and now the general manager who has taken the helm,
told me that Dick “was passionate about the importance of journalism in society and he passed that on to the hundreds of young journalists who have come through Bay City News, including me.
In describing Dick’s newsroom philosophy, perhaps the best tribute is the Bay City News Service Credo he established, which was given to all new employees.” Futak sent along the Credo:

“It shall be the constant intention of Bay City News Service reporters and editors:
–to pursue and write the news with fairness, accuracy and a sense of professional detachment;
–to be purposeful and searching in the quest for information; and yet,
–to avoid arrogance and instead maintain a reasonable concern for the personal dignity of sources and contacts.”

I asked Wayne if the BCN obit ought to have a byline. No, he said, it was a collective effort and should just say from the Bay City News Service. Here it is:

Richard Henry Fogel, 86, longtime newspaper editor and co-founder of San Francisco’s Bay City News Service, died on Sept. 9, 2009, in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

A passionate advocate on issues relating to the public’s right to access government information, Fogel worked tirelessly with other prominent journalists and news organizations across the country to craft the basic principles of what would later become the landmark Freedom of Information Act (Public Law 89-554, 80 Stat. 383).

Regarded as a legend among San Francisco Bay Area journalists, Fogel received the prestigious Northern California Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

Born April 29, 1923, in Santa Monica, California, Richard Fogel, known to friends and colleagues as “Dick,” was the younger of two sons of Moe Miller Fogel and Syndie Aileen Gardner Fogel.

Blocking California’s sunshine: Proposed legislation would limit access to public information

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By Rebecca Bowe

cloudy sky.jpg

The California Public Records Act guarantees the right to be able to request government documents that are part of the public record. But proposed legislation heard today by the Assembly Judiciary Committee would restrict access in certain cases. The bill, titled AB 520 and introduced by Assemblywoman Wilmer Amina Carter (D-Rialto), would authorize a superior court to limit the scope of requests a member of the public can make if the court determines that the requestor is seeking information for an “improper purpose.” The text of the bill leaves the definition of “improper” open-ended, specifying only that it is “including, but not limited to, the harassment of a public agency or its employees.”

The bill is still in the early stages, but sunshine advocates are watching closely and weighing in. Californians Aware (CalAware), the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA), and the Freedom of Information Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter have all come out against it. Letters of opposition pointed out that even without this new restriction in place, government agencies are often slow to release public records. “Every audit performed by Californians Aware, the California First Amendment Coalition, or CNPA member newspapers such as the Contra Costa Times or Stockton Record, has shown abysmal compliance with the law,” CNPA noted in a letter to Assemblywoman Carter.

Others characterized the proposed rule as an erosion of the principles of open government that are embodied in the state constitution. “The ultimate principle arguing against AB 520 is that like the right of speech itself … the right to obtain information found in public records is so fundamental to informed democracy that certain expressions of that right, while they may be deplored as an excess of license, must be tolerated as a cost of liberty,” CalAware’s opposition letter reads.

In the context of a new presidential administration that has professed a commitment to government transparency, and even delivered on it, AB 520 looks like a giant step backward.

Holder’s FOIA memo a hit in Sunshine Week

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Just in time for sunshine week, Attorney General Eric Holder declares that government records should henceforth be presumed public.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s much anticipated memo on new Freedom of Information Act general guidelines is a hit with sunshine advocates.

That’s because it rescinds the Bush administration’s information withholding standard, which was set by former Attorney General John Ashcroft on October 12, 2001, just one month after the September 11 attacks, and five days after the US invaded Afghanistan.

By contrast, Holder’s memo orders that government agency records should be presumed public.

In so doing, Holder follows through on statements that President Barack Obama made on his second day in office and sets the tone for how executive agencies interpret and administer FOIA.

FOIA remains one of the most important tools available to the public and the press, in terms of finding out what the federal government is, and has been, up to.

“The Holder memo is a refreshing change from the disastrous standard set by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001,” said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy A. Dalglish. “We hope it empowers federal employers who manage these public records to improve their services to the taxpayers who request them.”

Of course, the proof will be in the pudding, and I’m waiting to see how the feds respond to recent FOIA requests, but in the meantime, you can read the full text of Holder’s memo here.

Opening up

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Shortly after his election in November 2008, President Barack Obama received a letter from Public Citizen and 59 other nonprofit groups noting that the public’s access to information about the government had been shut down under President George W. Bush.

The groups urged Obama to help "by issuing a presidential memorandum on Day One that makes clear that government information belongs to the people and that directs federal agencies to harness technology and personnel skills to ensure maximum accessibility of government records, consistent with law, regulation, and administrative orders."

Obama responded to these concerns on his second day as president by sending a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies that committed his administration to more transparency and unprecedented disclosures of information.

"In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act, which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government," Obama said, noting that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails."

Open government advocates warmly welcomed Obama’s announcement. But 50 days later, as they wait for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to issue new FOIA implementation guidelines, some worry that the new administration may still need more prodding.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the San Rafael–based California First Amendment Coalition (one of the letter’s signatories), told the Guardian that it remains to be seen how Obama’s directive will be implemented.

"The directive is good. The spirit is right. But what really matters is whether more information is turned over to the public on a timely basis," said Scheer, who hopes the Obama administration will explore ways to change the FOIA incentive structure so that agencies have a genuine bias in favor of giving out more information, not less.

"Right now, the incentives are all in favor of withholding information," Scheer explained.

Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told the Guardian that she is looking forward to the U.S. Attorney General’s new FOIA guidelines. "I imagine they will say, ‘If you have discretion to disclose information do so, make a greater effort to meet FOIA deadlines, and put an emphasis on proactively posting stuff online,’" Dalglish predicted.

"The difficulty I see lying ahead is a lack of money to help agencies tackle the backlog of FOIA requests," Dalglish said. "But otherwise, I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape."

Scheer was happy about the Obama administration’s March 2 release of nine highly controversial memoranda and legal opinions that the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared under Bush in the aftermath of 9/11, purporting to authorize warrantless national security wiretaps on U.S. citizens, extrajudicial detention of US citizens suspected of terrorism, and use of the military to conduct counterterrorist operations in the U.S.

In the last days of the Bush administration, DOJ officials claimed that most of these opinions were withdrawn by 2003, but open-government advocates believe their release helps prove the extent to which the Bush regime violated the constitution.

"Let’s just hope Obama is just as amenable to releasing his own legal memoranda, four years from now, as he is to release the prior administration’s more embarrassing documents," added Scheer.

He would also like to see an acceleration of the process for declassifying older national security materials and Federal Bureau of Investigation materials, and hopes that a review of Bush–era DOJ use of the state secrets privilege will "result in a modification or abandonment of that policy, except where absolutely necessary to protect vital national security interests.

"I think everyone became quite reasonably suspicious during the Bush years, when a privilege that was previously rarely invoked was popping up in literally dozens of cases and clearly being overused," Scheer explained.

Yet Dalglish fears that sunshine gains under Obama could be offset by the demise of mainstream newspapers.

"If the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer join Denver’s Rocky Mountain News in closing this year, the United States will be in a world of trouble in the future in terms of fighting for greater openness and transparency in government," Dalglish opined. "For the last 50 years, the mainstream media, not the alternative press, has been waging most of these battles pushing for open government."

Spin vs. substance

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› rebeccab@sfbg.com

Hollywood paparazzi crews are beginning to follow high-profile politicians, such as Mayor Gavin Newsom, the same way they track the likes of Britney Spears, the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently. And when a celebrity gossip photographer surreptitiously aims the lens at a political leader, the picture that emerges isn’t always flattering.

Likewise, the documents that can be extracted through public records laws — including the federal Freedom of Information Act, California Public Records Act, and San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance — don’t always paint political figures in the most favorable light.

Both end products leave the same impression of a glimpse behind the curtain — consumers feel they’re privy to the raw, unpackaged truth. But while photos may show politicians looking silly or meeting with controversial power brokers, documents show how the people’s business is being conducted. So the willingness of officials to promptly comply with requests for documents and information says a great deal about whether their public statements match their private deeds.

Nathan Ballard, Newsom’s press secretary, characterizes (through e-mail, the medium through which he insists on dealing with the Guardian) the mayor’s commitment to open government as being "as strong or stronger than any public official in this country."

But to hear some proponents of open government tell it — and in our experience here at the Guardian — the Newsom administration keeps much of the mayor’s business under wraps, leaving many info-seekers in the dark or reliant on Ballard’s spin. Responses to requests for public records tend to be delayed and incomplete, and queries directed to the mayor’s office of communications are often returned with terse, one-line e-mails that obscure more than illuminate.

Rick Knee, a longtime member of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force — the city body charged with upholding the open-government rule — says Newsom has been in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance on several occasions. "Mayor Newsom’s actual practices regarding Sunshine have been, shall we say, less than what one would desire of him," Knee says. Despite those violations, he adds, the mayor "continues to refuse to provide what remedies the task force calls for on his part."

Under Proposition 59, a state constitutional amendment that won overwhelming voter approval in 2004, the records kept by public officials are considered to be "the people’s business." In practice, however, it doesn’t always pan out that way.

For example, a group of citizens informally known as the Sunshine Posse who have made it a personal quest to improve government transparency by peppering city departments with Sunshine requests, have sounded alarm bells over the mayor’s refusal to release a more detailed daily calendar. One Sunshine Posse member began seeking more fleshed-out mayoral itineraries back in 2006, according to group member Christian Holmer, to gain an understanding of whom the mayor had met with and what had been discussed.

But he quickly ran into a slew of difficulties. "The Mayor’s Office ignored our simple request for 255 days," Holmer told the Guardian. "We sent weekly reminders to most of his staff and key members of the city attorney’s executive and government teams for months and months." After bringing the matter to the attention of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, Holmer says, a new set of problems cropped up. "For the Mayor’s Office, it was an ongoing tale of crashed hard drives, changing office personnel, lost documents, overt/covert confusion, and best intentions."

Nearly three years later, the scrutinizing crew remains frustrated with the results, saying the Mayor’s Office has only come forth with a watered-down schedule, called the Prop. G calendar ("scrubbed" and "virtually useless," in Holmer’s opinion), rather than the more descriptive document known as the working calendar. Many days, Newsom’s Prop. G calendar is blank, and seldom is there more than a few hours worth of activities, each one usually described in just a few words.

The Prop. G calendar seeks to comply with the minimum standards for calendars set forth in the city’s 1999 sunshine law: "The mayor … shall keep or cause to be kept a daily calendar wherein is recorded the time and place of each meeting or event attended by that official…. For meetings not otherwise publicly recorded, the calendar shall include a general statement of issues discussed."

The working calendar is a confidential document, the Mayor’s Office held in a letter responding to the Sunshine Posse’s complaint that the mayor was withholding public information. "The Mayor’s Office prepares a working calendar that is extremely detailed and accounts for his time from departure from home until his return in the evening," the letter states. "The working calendar contains not only the mayor’s meeting schedule, but also confidential information such as the officers assigned to protect him, security contact numbers, the mayor’s private schedule, details of his travel [etc.]. As with past administrations, the mayor’s staff keeps the working calendar and its contents confidential…. The computer system automatically deletes the working calendar after five days."

Despite this defense, the task force determined that the working calendar is in fact a public document that should be provided to the citizens. Doug Comstock was task force chair when the issue was heard. "We made it very clear that they have to turn over those documents," he says. "If there’s a document that’s being created using public monies and public funds, that is a more specific calendar, that’s the document that needs to be provided." Comstock also noted that it is possible for the Mayor’s Office to redact sensitive information that could pose a security risk. Nonetheless, he says, three years have passed and "the real calendar remains hidden from view."

When asked about the complaints regarding the calendar, Ballard responded, "Their criticism is baseless. We exceed far [sic] the requirements of the Sunshine Ordinance with the level of disclosure that we provide."

Erica Craven, an attorney who sits on the task force, believes there’s room for improvement on the mayor’s practices regarding sunshine. "My instinct is that there are a lot of people who work in the Mayor’s Office who are committed to open government," she says. "But there are some troubling things we’ve seen as well, such as complaints where the Mayor’s Office hasn’t sent a representative to respond to allegations. I would like to see a little bit more commitment and leadership on open government from the Mayor’s Office — I think it would set a good tone in City Hall."

In recent weeks, interest in the mayor’s schedule has intensified once again in light of the city’s financial predicament. In the face of a looming budget deficit of unprecedented size and with the economy in shambles and jobs at stake, journalists and affected citizens are seeking details about how the conundrum is being dealt with inside City Hall.

Last month, the Guardian filed a request under the Sunshine Ordinance for details on the mayor’s meetings about the budget, asking for "a list of all the labor and business leaders and supervisors that he’s met with about the budget, the dates of those meetings and how long they lasted, all documents associated with those meetings (including any agendas, communications to set up those meetings and follow-up communications after the meetings), and summaries of what was discussed at those meetings, including any outcomes or agreements."

Under the Sunshine Ordinance, such "immediate disclosure" requests are supposed be honored in two days’ time, but it took five days and a Guardian reminder for the Mayor’s Office to respond via e-mail, saying: "As you know, the Sunshine Ordinance does not require us to create documents. If you can point to a specific document that you’re seeking, I’d be happy to try and locate it for you."

Three days later, the Mayor’s Office forwarded the Prop. G calendar, which revealed that the mayor booked 7.5 hours of meetings about the budget crisis over the course of 17 days, none with labor representatives (whom Ballard said Newsom had met with). It included one-line entries disclosing whom he met with and when, but no information concerning the substance of the discussion. When the Guardian pressed for more information, the Mayor’s Office said there were no other documents associated with those meetings or any other information they were willing to provide.

Similarly, just last week, the Guardian tried to find out what the Mayor’s Office was doing about reports that Caltrain and the California High-Speed Rail Authority were balking at using the Transbay Terminal, citing technical concerns. On March 6, we asked who was working on the issue, what communications there had been with these agencies, and other basic information.

Ballard would say only that "The mayor is fully engaged in finding a comprehensive regional solution that ensures that high speed rail will come to the Transbay Terminal," and denied further requests for more substantive information.

Ballard acknowledges that the Mayor’s Office has "occasionally" been found to be in violation of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. However, he noted, "I can’t remember a time when the Ethics Commission did not overturn a task force decision against our office. In other words, most if not all task force decisions against us have, upon review, been found to be without merit."

Actually, the chronically under-funded Ethics Commission isn’t charged with judging whether SOTF findings have merit. The SOTF is the arbiter of whether the Sunshine Ordinance was violated, but it has no enforcement authority and therefore must rely on Ethics to pursue violations — if it has the will and resources to do so.

This touches on a trend that Knee says is a fundamental challenge to upholding the Sunshine Ordinance. "If the [task force] finds that there has been a willful violation … we can refer our findings to any or all of four entities: Ethics, the Board of Supervisors, the District Attorney, and the California Attorney General," Knee explains. "At one time or another we have made referrals to any or all of those organizations. And every single time, those entities have thrown out our findings. Not one complaint we have submitted has been upheld."

To remedy this, he says, a package of proposed reforms is in the works. "We want to give the task force some teeth," he says. "We want enforcement power of our own."

Steven T. Jones contributed to this report.

Freeing the press

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Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

ROBERT PORTERFIELD


Bob Porterfield is a shit-disturber, an old-fashioned investigative reporter who has no favorites, no sacred cows, and no fear of offending anyone. Since his first story — a profile of a YMCA social program published in Eugene, Ore.’s The Register-Guard in 1959, when he was 15 — Porterfield has had ink in his veins. He’s shared two Pulitzer Prizes (first for an Anchorage Daily News report on the Teamsters Union in 1975 and then for a series on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority for The Boston Globe), won more than two dozen other prizes and worked on a long list of major investigative projects.

He has become something of an expert in computer-assisted reporting and information systems — but is still a down-to-earth guy who never forgot the value of traditional, hands-on digging. Back in 1986, he was on a team at Newsday looking into the federal Synfuels Corp., a scandal-plagued agency that was shut down in the wake of his stories.

"I remember once we were looking for property records on a Synfuels Corp. project linked to [former CIA Director) Bill Casey," he told me. "I wound up going down to Plymouth, N.C., (population 4,000), and I found this musty old office with two older women sitting there, knitting. There was no index book, nothing computerized. But when I explained what I was looking for, one of the women remembered the parcel of land I was talking about and pulled out the exact documents for me."

Porterfield has devoted a tremendous amount of time to teaching and mentoring, showing young reporters how to use public records to find stories. "I’m glad to see [President Obama’s] new directive on openness, but I hope it trickles down to the independent agencies," he said. "Because there’s been way, way too much secrecy." (Tim Redmond)

Beverly Kees Educator Award

ALAN GIBSON


Alan Gibson is reclaiming the Founding Fathers from conservatives with

his recent book Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (University Press of Kansas, 2007). It examines the progressive ideals that guided early American political thought.

"The Founding Fathers are often captured by conservatives," Gibson told the Guardian. "But there is no clear line of legacy. It is much more complex than that. Conservative restoration politics are dangerous and not historically accurate."

As an undergraduate, Gibson cultivated an interest in issues of separation of church and state, which led to doctoral studies on James Madison, the namesake of the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual Freedom of Information awards. "Madison was the most progressive of all [the Founding Fathers] when it comes to freedom of the press," Gibson said. "He helped develop the idea that American government should be responsive to public opinion, and the role of newspapers was to make sure that an authentic public opinion was set forth." Gibson, a political science professor at California State University-Chico, lectures at various colleges across the country. Understanding the Founding will be published in paperback later this year. (Laura Peach)

Professional Journalists

MARJIE LUNDSTROM


Journalists often get alarming tips about practices within Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies, but it has always been a nearly impossible task to overcome privacy protections and get even basic information about how CPS handles reports of child abuse or neglect.

"It’s a difficult agency to write about, for some good reasons," Sacramento Bee reporter Marjie Lundstrom, who set out in 2007 to investigate complaints about Sacramento’s CPS, told the Guardian. "They operate in such a vacuum with very little public scrutiny."

She had started to piece together some information from coroner’s records and other public documents when Senate Bill 39 went into effect in January 2008, "and it was just amazing what it opened up."

The bill reveals CPS files in cases where the child has died, allowing Lundstrom to expose the negligence of CPS workers in responding to abuse reports, even those from doctors. "I do feel like what we were able to show, because of the law, where workers made flagrant mistakes that costs kids their lives," she said.

But many CPS records are still secret. Next, after writing several stories about CPS that sparked a grand jury investigation, Lundstrom intends to expose problems within the internal accountability procedures at CPS. (Steven T. Jones)

HILARY COSTA AND JOHN SIMERMAN


When the news broke last September that 15-year-old Jazzmin Davis had been murdered by her aunt after suffering months of abuse and neglect in her Antioch home, Bay Area News Group reporters Hilary Costa and John Simerman submitted a public records request about the girl’s case history with the San Francisco Human Services Agency.

The city denied the request for nearly two months, using a privacy claim. Undeterred, the journalists took the step of testing out Senate Bill 39, a relatively new piece of legislation that mandates public disclosure of findings and information about children who have died of abuse or neglect. A judge eventually ordered that the records be released.

Although highly redacted, the nearly 700-page paper trail told the girl’s story in the form of hand-written notes, report cards, medical records, caseworker visits, and other detailed documents. The records led to a package of stories that exposed a series of failures and violations of state regulations by an HSA social worker, raising questions about agency practices and spurring a review of hundreds of other foster care cases.

"This story’s been so important to me," Costa told the Guardian. "It felt like somebody owed it to Jazzmin to find out what happened to her." (Rebecca Bowe)

Interactive Media

AUTUMN CRUZ AND MITCHELL BROOKS


Sacramento Bee photographer Autumn Cruz had been covering the trial of three-year-old K.C. Balbuena’s murder for several months when she came up with the concept of creating an interactive online courtroom. With the help of Bee graphic journalist Mitchell Brooks, Cruz made public the essential pieces of evidence and information to those outside the courtroom doors.

Viewers can take a virtual tour of the exhibits and documents, along with video and audio statements and interrogations. "As a journalist, you’re fighting every day for your right to information," Cruz told the Guardian.

Although Balbuena’s mother and roommate were found guilty of the murder in early 2008, Cruz laments her inability to bring back the child she grew to know so intimately only after his life was cut short. "I think my bringing his plight to the public will hopefully prevent similar things from happening to other children." (Joe Sciareillo)

Citizen

BERT ROBINSON


Journalist Bert Robinson is a longtime journalist who now serves as assistant managing editor for the San Jose Mercury News. But he’s being honored for his work as a citizen serving on San Jose’s Sunshine Reform Task Force.

"We set out on our sunshine ordinance adventure a few years ago. We found we were faring worse in court, and we couldn’t afford increased court costs," Robinson, a member of the California First Amendment Coalition, told the Guardian.

The project received political endorsements across the spectrum, but the initiative has had problems with the city council’s Rules Committee, controlled by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who has supported sunshine in the past.

"We achieved progress with public meeting requirements, but when you get into public records, city staff argue that rules are ‘too cumbersome’ … They say all sorts of things might happen if they become public, [which is] entirely hypothetical," Robinson said.

Task Force work that was slated to last six months has now dragged on for two years. "The city process grinds you down," Robinson said. But he says he’s committed to seeing it through. (Ben Terrall)

Legal Counsel

JAMES EWERT


James Ewert, an attorney with the California Newspaper Publishers Association, has long battled what he calls widespread secrecy in government. So in 2004, he played an instrumental role in providing greater public access to government meetings and records, resulting in the passage that November of Proposition 59, the Sunshine Amendment of California’s constitution.

Most recently Ewert helped Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) with legislation protecting teachers from retribution from administrators when they defend the First Amendment rights of journalism students. Next Ewert hopes to allow greater scrutiny of public/press partnerships and how tax dollars are used in labor negotiations by the public university systems.

Ewert says the public’s right to know is still severely hampered by public safety concerns, including restrictions on journalists’ rights to interview prisoners and obtain information about police officers. But luckily for the public, Ewert is still on the job. (Andrew Shaw)

Student Journalists — High School

REDWOOD BARK


Before April 2008, Drew Ross had never had to defend the existence of the Eureka High School Redwood Bark, where he was the editor. But after arriving on campus one Monday morning to find that former principal Robert Steffen had removed 450 copies of a 20-page color edition of the paper, Ross and his staff fought back.

Steffen claimed that the nude, dream-like drawing by artist Natalie Gonzalez had ushered in a handful of complaints from students and parents. Steffen justified the action by saying he was "stomping out the flames before they became a forest fire."

"We told him we wanted to hold onto the paper but he recycled them," Ross told the Guardian. "We don’t make the paper for it to be thrown away. And we lost a lot of advertising on this."

Ross complained about censorship and got help from the Student Press Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union. By the next day, the censorship story went front page at newspapers and Internet sites all over the country. Eventually Steffen not only sent out a public apology, he paid for the next 20-page color edition.

"We are now armed with knowledge of our rights," Ross said. "And the community knows the Redwood Bark has rights." (Deia de Brito)

SHASTA HIGH SCHOOL’S THE VOLCANO


Shasta High School student Amanda Cope speaks passionately about freedom of speech after her brush with censorship, telling the Guardian, "We are preserving the validity of the Constitution. Free speech is a protection, a safety, that lets us function normally without fear."

Cope was editor-in-chief of the Shasta High School student paper, The Volcano, when a controversy flared over the paper’s end-of-year issue, which featured a front-page image of a student burning an American flag. Shasta High principal Milan Woollard was already considering shutting down The Volcano when the issue came out and publicly stated: "This cements that decision."

But following a maelstrom of objection from Cope and the rest of The Volcano staff in what looked like a form of censorship in schools, the school district reversed its decision. "I think a lot of students feel they are marginalized in society. They’re teenagers. They don’t have many rights and they feel like they’re squished by adults and people in general," Cope said. "The student paper becomes an outlet for those feelings, and a way for students to explore their world." (Juliette Tang)

THE SCOTS EXPRESS


Last November, the principal of Carlmont High School in Belmont shut down the student paper, The Scots Express. School officials claimed that the paper lacked adequate faculty oversight after it published a satirical article about the writer’s sex appeal.

Editor-in-chief Alex Zhang fought back against what he saw as censorship and rejected school officials’ justifications. "I just wanted my paper back," he told the Guardian.

In response to the uproar over what many saw as a muzzling of the press, the Sequoia Union High School District began training Carlmont staff on First Amendment rights and mandated an overhaul of the school’s freedom of speech policy. The district is planning an expansion of its journalism programs in the school curriculum and a partnership with the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

Zhang is working on relaunching the publication in late March under the faculty oversight of English teacher Raphael Kauffmann. "You can’t have a democracy without freedom of information," Zhang said. "And I’m proud to be one of those young journalists who care about the freedom of information." (Joe Sciarrillo)

Advocacy

KATHI AUSTIN


As the Guardian chronicled in a cover story last year ("Hunting the lord of war," June 23, 2008), San Francisco-based human rights investigator Kathi Austin has spent almost two decades tracking down and exposing those who have made a business out of human rights violations.

Most recently, Austin helped bring the notorious Viktor Bout, a Russian entrepreneur accused of illegally trafficking weapons to brutal regimes from Colombia to the Congo.

"A human rights violation is considered a violation that is carried out by a state actor," Austin told the Guardian. "We were trying to change the whole field of human rights to philosophically say we should be going after these private perpetrators as well."

Thanks largely to Austin’s work, Bout was arrested in Thailand in March 2008 and will likely face criminal charges in the United States. Despite working in treacherous places like Angola and Rwanda, doing meticulous and time-consuming research, Austin said her approach is simple: "What’s wrong and who’s doing it?"

Her patience and persistent pursuit of international justice have led Austin to positions at the U.N., the World Bank, the Center for Human Rights, and the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few. A Paramount picture featuring Angelina Jolie as Austin is reportedly in production — a fittingly karmic return of celebrity for someone who has worked so long under the public radar. (Breena Kerr)

Electronic access

MAPLIGHT.ORG


Once upon a time, before 2005, the only way to connect the dots between the dollars contributed to politicians and the special access and favorable laws they subsequently granted to contributors was to wade through reams of campaign finance filings. While everyone knew that money talked, few knew just how much campaign cash was dictating public policy.

But now, thanks to MAPlight.org, a Berkeley nonprofit that uses sophisticated analytical tools to produce visually pleasing, easy-to-use charts, there is now a fun, simple way to follow the money.

MAPlight began by putting up data connected to the pro-consumer bill informally known as the Car Buyer’s Bill of Rights. "The data showed that car dealers gave twice as much to Sacramento legislators who voted to kill the bill than to those who voted to pass it," executive director David Newman recalled.

Next, MAPlight pioneered the combination of campaign dollars and politicians’ votes when it launched its U.S. Congress site in May 2007. Most recently its research showed that House members who voted for the $700 billion financial bailout bill received 50 percent more money from the financial services industry than those who voted against it.

Newman plans to expand to all 50 states. "Wherever there is journalism to be done, MAPlight can provide support and help promote openness and transparency in government." (Sarah Phelan)


The Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists hosts its annual James Madison Awards dinner March 18 in the New Delhi Restaurant, 160 Ellis St., SF. The no-host reception begins at 5:50 p.m. followed by dinner and the awards programs at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $50 for SPJ members and $70 for non-members. For reservations or information, contact Freedom of Information Committee chair David Greene at (510) 208-7744 or dgreene@thefirstamendment.org or visit www.spjchapters.org/norcal.

Newsom’s state secrets

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EDITORIAL On January 21st, his second day in office, President Barack Obama announced that he was dramatically changing the rules on federal government secrecy. His statement directly reversed, and repudiated, the paranoia and backroom dealings of the Bush administration.

"The Freedom of Information Act," the new president declared, "should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."

The following day, Jan. 22, we sent an e-mail to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard. "Now that President Obama has made a dramatic change in federal FOI policy," we asked, "would Mayor Newsom would be willing to issue a similar executive order in San Francisco?"

Ballard’s response:

"We wholeheartedly agree with the President on this issue. The mayor has charged my office with handling sunshine requests for the executive branch of city government, and he has directed us to cooperate swiftly and comprehensively to all sunshine requests, and to err on the side of openness."

That, to put it politely, is horsepucky.

As we report in this issue, it’s difficult, and at times insanely difficult, to get even basic public information out of Newsom’s office. Take his calendar: by law, the mayor is required to make public his appointments calendar. Other public officials manage to do that — in fact, the president of the United States, who has a tad more national and personal security issues than the mayor of San Francisco, lets the press know what he’s doing almost every minute of every day.

Most days, though, what we get from Newsom’s office is a statement like, "The mayor has no public events scheduled today." Or, "The mayor is holding meetings at City Hall." Meetings with whom? What private events is he attending? What’s he do all day? What lobbyists, activists, public officials, or campaign donors is he talking to in his City Hall office? Why is that some huge state secret?

Or take the city’s terrifying budget problems. When Board of Supervisors President David Chiu began holding meetings with key stakeholders to look for a solution, Newsom refused to show up, saying there was no need. The mayor claimed he was holding his own meetings with everyone who needed to be involved.

That was news to many of the people in Chiu’s sessions. So who was the mayor talking to? The mayor’s office won’t tell us — and the limited calendar information he releases doesn’t shed any light, either.

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force has repeatedly found Newsom directly in violation of the Sunshine Ordinance. Legions of reporters have run across the slammed door, the ducking, the non-responsiveness, and the general hostility of the mayor’s press office. As the White House comes out of the dark ages and starts to set new standards for open and honest government, San Francisco is not only lagging behind — this city’s chief executive is actively resisting.

We’re getting tired of this. The city attorney, district attorney, and Ethics Commission all have the mandate and ability to enforce the Sunshine Ordinance, but none have made that a priority. At this point, the only way the executive branch is going to comply is if the supervisors give the Sunshine Task Force the authority and resources to do its own enforcement.

In the meantime, somebody on the board ought to introduce Obama’s exact policy statement, replacing "Freedom of Information Act" with "San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance." And the Sunshine task force should begin an investigation into how the mayor’s press office is defying, on a regular basis, both the letter and the spirit of the city’s open-government law. *

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

The historian and political scientist Alan Gibson argues that much of the contemporary discussion the founders of the United States misses the political point. In his new book, Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions, Gibson, a professor at California State University, Chico notes that conservatives often claim the framers of the Constitution for their own agenda — a position he calls historically inaccurate.

James Madison in particular was very much a progressive thinker, says Gibson (who is one of the winners of the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ freedom of information awards this year, see page 15). The fourth president of the United States particularly believed that a free press was crucial to democracy.

I thought about that this week as I followed the news that the San Francisco Chronicle may shut down — and read stories from the Chauncey Bailey Project and the Chronicle about the murder of the Oakland journalist. On March 7, the project reported that an Oakland homicide inspector had close ties with the head of Your Black Muslim Bakery, Yusef Bey IV, who it now appears may have played a role in the killing. The Chronicle reported March 8 that Bailey was caught up in a power struggle at the bakery (and that the publisher of the Oakland Post was afraid to run Bailey’s stories). These detailed investigative pieces will almost certainly help ensure that Bailey’s killers are brought to justice. Without this press attention, the Oakland cops would have gotten away with bungling the case.

Without full-time, paid reporters on the job, those stories would never have come to light.

I’m as pissed at the Chron as anyone, and I’ve been watching the paper self-destruct for many years. And I’m not sure what sort of financial model will keep a daily paper going in the next decade.

But I know that a model exists — because it has to. Democracy can’t survive without a free press, and a free press can’t survive without staff to do the work. That’s something to remember as we celebrate the James Madison Awards and our annual Freedom of Information issue. * *

Editorial: Newsom’s state secrets

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(Scroll down for Executive Editor Tim Redmond’s best argument to save the Chronicle and how it ties in to James Madison’s birthday, our annual Freedom of Information issue, and the annual SPJ/FOI awards dinner.)

It’s difficult, and at times insanely difficult, to get even basic public information out of Newsom’s office.

EDITORIAL On January 21st, his second day in office, President Barack Obama announced that he was dramatically changing the rules on federal government secrecy. His statement directly reversed, and repudiated, the paranoia and backroom dealings of the Bush administration.

“The Freedom of Information Act,” the new president declared, “should be administered with a clear presumption: in the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.”

Obama sunshine, at home

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By Tim Redmond

The Obama policy on open government is really remarkable, and the memo his press secretary sent out goes far beyond what I’ve seen from almost any political official. Check it out:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release January 21, 2009

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Freedom of Information Act

A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In our democracy, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government. At the heart of that commitment is the idea that accountability is in the interest of the Government and the citizenry alike.

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.

All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

So I’m wondering: Perhaps the Honorable Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, should send out a similar memorandum to city agencies. It could say, for example:

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.

I asked Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, about that, and here’s what he told me. (Those of you have have tangled with the mayor’s office over public records, please hold your puke):

We wholeheartedly agree with the President on this issue. The mayor has
charged my office with handling sunshine requests for the executive branch
of city government, and he has directed us to cooperate swiftly and
comprehensively to all sunshine requests, and to err on the side of
openness.

Coulda fooled me.

I eagerly await the Newsom Sunshine Memo.

Sunshine, at last

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4

By Tim Redmond

After eight years of brutal secrecy in Washington, including orders from the Justice Department directing agencies to defy Freedom of Information Act requests, this is one of the most refreshing things I’ve ever seen:

In an attempt to deliver on pledges of a transparent government, Obama said he would change the way the federal government interprets the Freedom of Information Act. He said he was directing agencies that vet requests for information to err on the side of making information public — not to look for reasons to legally withhold it — an alteration to the traditional standard of evaluation.

Just because a government agency has the legal power to keep information private does not mean that it should, Obama said. Reporters and public-interest groups often make use of the law to explore how and why government decisions were made; they are often stymied as agencies claim legal exemptions to the law.

“For a long time now, there’s been too much secrecy in this city,” Obama said.

He said the orders he was issuing Wednesday will not “make government as honest and transparent as it needs to be” nor go as far as he would like.

“But these historic measures do mark the beginning of a new era of openness in our country,” Obama said. “And I will, I hope, do something to make government trustworthy in the eyes of the American people, in the days and weeks, months and years to come.”

Project Censored

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0

› amanda@sfbg.com

The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely discuss how the fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored.

Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey of the top 25 stories the mainstream media failed to report or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news sources, vetted by students and faculty, and ranked by judges, the stories were not necessarily overtly censored. But their controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo, or general under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by media analysis, in a book of the same name published annually by Seven Stories Press.

"This year, war and civil liberties stood out," Peter Phillips, project director since 1996, said of the top stories. "They’re closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since 9/11."

Whether it’s preventing what one piece of legislation calls "homegrown terrorism" by federally funding the study of radicalism, using vague concerns about security to quietly expand NAFTA, or refusing to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war, the threat of terrorism is being used to silence people and expand power.

"The war on terror is a sort of mind terror," said Nancy Snow, one of the project’s 24 judges and an associate professor of public diplomacy at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Snow — who has taught classes on war, media, and propaganda — elaborated: "You can’t declare war on terror. It’s a tactic used by groups to gain publicity and it will remain with us. But it’s unlikely that [the number of terrorist acts] will spike. It spikes in the minds of people."

She pointed out that the number of terrorist attacks has dropped worldwide since 2003. Some use the absence of fresh attacks as evidence that the so-called war on terror is working. But a RAND Corporation study for the Department of Defense released in August said the war on terror hasn’t effectively undermined Al Qaeda. It suggested the phrase be replaced with the less loaded term "counterterrorism."

Both Phillips and Snow agree that comprehensive, contextual reporting is missing from most of the coverage. "That’s one of my criticisms of the media," Snow said. "They spotlight issues and don’t look at the entire landscape."

This year the landscape of Project Censored itself is expanding. After talking with educators who bemoan the ongoing decline of news quality and want to help, Phillips launched the Truth Emergency Project, in which Sonoma State partners with 23 other universities. All will host classes for students to search out untold stories, vet them for accuracy, and submit them for consideration to Project Censored.

"There’s a renaissance of independent media," Phillips said. He thinks bloggers and citizen journalists are filling crucial roles left vacant by staff cutbacks throughout the mainstream media. And, he said, it’s time for universities, educators, and media experts to step in and help. "It’s not just reforming the media, but supporting them in as many ways as they need, like validating stories by fact-checking."

The Truth Emergency Project will also host a news service that aggregates the top 12 independent media sources and posts them on one page. "So you can get an RSS feed from all the major independent news sources we trust," he said. Discerning newshounds can find reporting from the BBC, Democracy Now!, and Inter Press Service (IPS) in one spot. "The whole criteria," he said, "is no corporate media."

Carl Jensen, who started Project Censored in 1976, said the expansion is a new and necessary phase. "It answers the question I was always challenged with: how do you know this is the truth? Having 24 campuses reviewing all the stories and raising questions really provides a good answer. These stories will be vetted more than Sarah Palin."

Phillips said he hopes to expand to 100 schools within the year, and would like the project to bring more attention to the dire need for public support for high quality news reporting. "I think it’s going to require government subsidies and nonprofit organizations doing community media projects," he said. "It’s more than just reforming at the FCC level. It’s building independent media from the ground up."

Phillips likens it to the boom in microbrewed beer and the spread of independently-owned pubs: "If we can have a renaissance in beer-making, following established purity standards, then we can do it with our media, too." But for now, we have Project Censored, whose top 10 underreported stories for 2008 are:

1. HOW MANY IRAQIS HAVE DIED?


Nobody knows exactly how many lives the Iraq War has claimed. But even more astounding is that so few journalists have mentioned the issue or cited the top estimate: 1.2 million.

During August and September 2007, Opinion Research Business, a British polling group, surveyed 2,414 adults in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces and found that more than 20 percent had experienced at least one war-related death since March 2003. Using common statistical study methods, it determined that as many as 1.2 million people had been killed since the war began.

The US military, claiming it keeps no count, still employs civilian death data as a marker of progress. For example, in a Sept. 10, 2007, report to Congress, Gen. David Petraeus said, "Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December."

But whose number was he using? Estimates range wildly and are based on a variety of sources, including hospital, morgue, and media reports, as well as in-person surveys.

In October 2006, the British medical journal Lancet published a Johns Hopkins University study vetted by four independent sources that counted 655,000 dead, based on interviews with 1,849 households. It updated a similar study from 2004 that counted 100,000 dead. The Associated Press called it "controversial."

The AP began its own count in 2005 and by 2006 said that at least 37,547 Iraqis had lost their lives due to war-related violence, but called it a minimum estimate at best and didn’t include insurgent deaths.

Iraq Body Count, a group of US and UK citizens who aggregate numbers from media reports on civilian deaths, puts the figure between 87,000 and 95,000. In January 2008, the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government did door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households and put the number of dead at 151,000.

The 1.2 million figure is out there, too, which is higher than the Rwandan genocide death toll and closing in on the 1.7 million who perished in Cambodia’s killing fields. It raises questions about the real number of deaths from US aerial bombings and house raids, and challenges the common assumption that this is a war in which Iraqis are killing Iraqis.

Justifying the higher number, Michael Schwartz, writing on the blog AfterDowningStreet.org, pointed to a fact reported by the Brookings Institute that US troops have, over the past four years, conducted about 100 house raids a day — a number that has recently increased with assistance from Iraqi soldiers.

Brutality during these house searches has been documented by returning soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and independent journalists (See #9 below). Schwartz suggests the aggressive "element of surprise" tactics employed by soldiers is likely resulting in several thousands of deaths a day that either go unreported or are categorized as insurgent casualties.

The spin is having its intended effect: a February 2007 AP poll showed Americans gave a median estimate of 9,890 Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, a number far below that cited in any credible study.

Sources: "Is the United States killing 10,000 Iraqis every month? Or is it more?" Michael Schwartz, After Downing Street.org, July 6, 2007; "Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian killing fields," Joshua Holland, AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007; "Iraq conflict has killed a million: survey," Luke Baker, Reuters, Jan. 30, 2008; "Iraq: Not our country to return to," Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008.

2. NAFTA ON STEROIDS


Coupling the perennial issue of security with Wall Street’s measures of prosperity, the leaders of the three North American nations convened the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The White House–led initiative — launched at a March 23, 2005, meeting of President Bush, Mexico’s then-president Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin — joins beefed-up commerce with coordinated military operations to promote what it calls "borderless unity."

Critics call it "NAFTA on steroids." However, unlike NAFTA, the SPP was formed in secret, without public input.

"The SPP is not a law, or a treaty, or even a signed agreement," Laura Carlsen wrote in a report for the Center for International Policy. "All these would require public debate and participation of Congress, both of which the SPP has scrupulously avoided."

Instead the SPP has a special workgroup: the North American Competitiveness Council. It’s a coalition of private companies that are, according to the SPP Web site, "adding high-level business input [that] will assist governments in enhancing North America’s competitive position and engage the private sector as partners in finding solutions."

The NACC includes the Chevron Corporation, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Merck & Co. Inc., New York Life Insurance Co., Procter & Gamble Co., and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

"Where are the environmental council, the labor council, and the citizen’s council in this process?" Carlsen asked.

A look at NAFTA’s unpopularity among citizens in all three nations is evidence of why its expansion would need to be disguised. "It’s a scheme to create a borderless North American Union under US control without barriers to trade and capital flows for corporate giants, mainly US ones," wrote Steven Lendman in Global Research. "It’s also to insure America gets free and unlimited access to Canadian and Mexican resources, mainly oil, and in the case of Canada, water as well."

Sources: "Deep Integration," Laura Carlsen, Center for International Policy, May 30, 2007; "The Militarization and Annexation of North America," Stephen Lendman, Global Research, July 19, 2007; "The North American Union," Constance Fogal, Global Research, Aug. 2, 2007.

3. INFRAGARD GUARDS ITSELF


The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have effectively deputized 23,000 members of the business community, asking them to tip off the feds in exchange for preferential treatment in the event of a crisis. "The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does — and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials," Matthew Rothschild wrote in the March 2008 issue of The Progressive.

InfraGard was created in 1996 in Cleveland as part of an FBI probe into cyberthreats. Yet after 9/11, membership jumped from 1,700 to more than 23,000, and now includes 350 of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies. Members typically have a stake in one of several crucial infrastructure industries, including agriculture, banking, defense, energy, food, telecommunications, law enforcement, and transportation. The group’s 86 chapters coordinate with 56 FBI field offices nationwide.

While FBI Director Robert Mueller has said he considers this segment of the private sector "the first line of defense," the American Civil Liberties Union issued a grave warning about the potential for abuse. "There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations — some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers — into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI," it cautioned in an August 2004 report.

"The FBI should not be creating a privileged class of Americans who get special treatment," Jay Stanley, public education director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program, told Rothschild.

And they are privileged: a DHS spokesperson told Rothschild that InfraGard members receive special training and readiness exercises. They’re also privy to protected information that is usually shielded from disclosure under the trade secrets provision of the Freedom of Information Act.

The information they have may be of critical importance to the general public, but first it goes to the privileged membership — sometimes before it’s released to elected officials. As Rothschild related in his story, on Nov. 1, 2001, the FBI sent an alert to InfraGard members about a potential threat to bridges in California. Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley, received the information and relayed it to his brother Gray, then governor of California, who released it to the public.

Steve Maviglio, Davis’s press secretary at the time, told Rothschild, "The governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’<0x2009>"

Source: "The FBI deputizes business," Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, Feb. 7, 2008.

4. ILEA: TRAINING GROUND FOR ILLEGAL WARS?


The School of the Americas earned an unsavory reputation in Latin America after many graduates of the Fort Benning, Ga., facility turned into counterinsurgency death squad leaders. So the International Law Enforcement Academy recently installed by the Unites States in El Salvador — which looks, acts, and smells like the SOA — is also drawing scorn.

The school, which opened in June 2005 before the Salvadoran National Assembly approved it, has a satellite operation in Peru and is funded with $3.6 million from the US Treasury and staffed with instructors from the DEA, ICE, and FBI. It’s tasked with training 1,500 police officers, judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement agents in counterterrorism techniques per year. It’s stated purpose is to make Latin America "safe for foreign investment" by "providing regional security and economic stability and combating crime."

ILEAs aren’t new, but past schools located in Hungary, Thailand, Botswana, and Roswell, N.M., haven’t been terribly controversial. Yet Salvadoran human rights organizers take issue with the fact that, in true SOA fashion, the ILEA releases neither information about its curriculum nor a list of students and graduates. Additionally, the way the school slipped into existence without public oversight has raised ire.

As Wes Enzinna noted in a North American Congress on Latin America report, when the US decided it wanted a training ground in Latin America, El Salvador was not the first choice. In 2002 US officials selected Costa Rica as host — a country that doesn’t even have an army. The local government signed on and the plan made headlines. But when citizens learned about it, they revolted and demanded the government change the agreement. The US bailed for a more discreet second attempt in El Salvador.

"Members of the US Congress were not briefed about the academy, nor was the main opposition party in El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí-National Liberation Front (FMLN)," Enzinna wrote. "But once the news media reported that the two countries had signed an official agreement in September, activists in El Salvador demanded to see the text of the document." Though they tried to garner enough opposition to kill the agreement, the National Assembly narrowly ratified it.

Now, after more than three years in operation, critics point out that Salvadoran police, who account for 25 percent of the graduates, have become more violent. A May 2007 report by Tutela Legal implicated Salvadoran National Police (PNC) officers in eight death squad–style assassinations in 2006.

El Salvador’s ILEA recently received another $2 million in US funding through the congressionally approved Mérida Initiative — but still refuses to adopt a more transparent curriculum and administration, despite partnering with a well-known human rights leader. Enzinna’s FOIA requests for course materials were rejected by the government, so no one knows exactly what the school is teaching, or to whom.

Sources: "Exporting US ‘Criminal Justice’ to Latin America," "Community in Solidarity with the people of El Salvador," Upside Down World, June 14, 2007; "Another SOA?" Wes Enzinna, NACLA Report on the Americas, March/April 2008; "ILEA funding approved by Salvadoran right wing legislators," CISPES, March 15, 2007; "Is George Bush restarting Latin America’s ‘dirty wars?’<0x2009>" Benjamin Dangl, AlterNet, Aug. 31, 2007.

5. SEIZING PROTEST


Protesting war could get you into big trouble, according to a critical read of two executive orders recently signed by President Bush. The first, issued July 17, 2007, and titled, "Blocking property of certain persons who threaten stabilization efforts in Iraq," allows the feds to seize assets from anyone who "directly or indirectly" poses a risk to the US war in Iraq. And, citing the modern technological ease of transferring funds and assets, the order states that no prior notice is necessary before the raid.

On Aug. 1, Bush signed another order, similar but directed toward anyone undermining the "sovereignty of Lebanon or its democratic processes and institutions." In this case, the Secretary of the Treasury can seize the assets of anyone perceived as posing a risk of violence, as well as the assets of their spouses and dependents, and bans them from receiving any humanitarian aid.

Critics say the orders bypass the right to due process and the vague language makes manipulation and abuse possible. Protesting the war could be perceived as undermining or threatening US efforts in Iraq. "This is so sweeping, it’s staggering," said Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration official in the Justice Department who editorialized against it in the Washington Times. "It expands beyond terrorism, beyond seeking to use violence or the threat of violence to cower or intimidate a population."

Sources: "Bush executive order: Criminalizing the antiwar movement," Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 2007; "Bush’s executive order even worse than the one on Iraq," Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, Aug. 2007.

6. RADICALS = TERRORISTS


On Oct. 23, 2007, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed — by a vote of 404-6 — the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act," designed to root out the causes of radicalization in Americans.

With an estimated four-year cost of $22 million, the act establishes a 10-member National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism, as well as a university-based Center of Excellence "to examine the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of domestic terrorism," according to a press release from the bill’s author, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Los Angeles).

During debate on the bill, Harman said, "Free speech, espousing even very radical beliefs, is protected by our Constitution. But violent behavior is not."

Jessica Lee, writing in the Indypendent, a newspaper put out by the New York Independent Media Center, pointed out that in a later press release Harman stated: "the National Commission [will] propose to both Congress and [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff initiatives to intercede before radicalized individuals turn violent."

Which could be when they’re speaking, writing, and organizing in ways that are protected by the First Amendment. This redefines civil disobedience as terrorism, say civil rights experts, and the wording is too vague. For example, the definition of "violent radicalization" is "the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."

"What is an extremist belief system? Who defines this? These are broad definitions that encompass so much…. It is criminalizing thought and ideology," said Alejandro Queral, executive director of the Northwest Constitutional Rights Center in Portland, Ore.

Though the ACLU recommended some changes that were adopted, it continued to criticize the bill. Harman, in a response letter, said free speech is still free and stood by the need to curb ideologically-based violence.

The story didn’t make it onto the CNN ticker, but enough independent sources reported on it that the equivalent Senate Bill 1959 has since stalled. After introducing the bill, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), later joined forces with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on a report criticizing the Internet as a tool for violent Islamic extremism.

Despite an outcry from civil liberties groups, days after the report was released Lieberman demanded that YouTube remove a number of Islamist propaganda videos. YouTube canned some that broke their rules regarding violence and hate speech, but resisted censoring others. The ensuing battle caught the attention of the New York Times, and on May 25 it editorialized against Lieberman and S 1959.

Sources: "Bringing the war on terrorism home," Jessica Lee, Indypendent, Nov. 16, 2007; "Examining the Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act," Lindsay Beyerstein, In These Times, Nov. 2007; "The Violent Radicalization Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007," Matt Renner, Truthout, Nov. 20, 2007

7. SLAVERY’S RUNNER-UP


Every year, about 121,000 people legally enter the United States to work with H-2 visas, a program legislators are touting as part of future immigration reform. But Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) called this guest worker program "the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery."

The Southern Poverty Law Center likened it to "modern day indentured servitude." They interviewed thousands of guest workers and reviewed legal cases for a report released in March 2007, in which authors Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds wrote, "Unlike US citizens, guest workers do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a competitive labor market — the ability to change jobs if they are mistreated. Instead, they are bound to the employers who ‘import’ them. If guest workers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting, or other retaliation."

When visas expire, workers must leave the country, hardly making this the path to permanent citizenship legislators are looking for. The H-2 program mimics the controversial bracero program, established through a joint agreement between Mexico and the United States in 1942 that brought 4.5 million workers over the border during the 22 years it was in effect.

Many legal protections were written into the program, but in most cases they existed only on paper in a language unreadable to employees. In 1964 the program was shuttered amid scores of human rights abuses and complaints that it undermined petitions for higher wages from US workers. Soon after, United Farm Workers organized, which César Chávez said would have been impossible if the bracero program still existed.

Years later, it essentially still does. The H-2A program, which accounted for 32,000 agricultural workers in 2005, has many of the same protections — and many of the same abuses. Even worse is the H-2B program, used by 89,000 non-agricultural workers annually. Created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, none of the safeguards of the H-2A visa are legally required for H-2B workers.

Still, Mexicans are literally lining up for H-2B status, the stark details of which were reported by Felicia Mello in The Nation. Furthermore, thousands of illegal immigrants are employed throughout the country, providing cheap, unprotected labor and further undermining the scant provisions of the laws. Labor contractors who connect immigrants with employers are stuffing their pockets with cash, while the workers return home with very little money.

The Southern Poverty Law Center outlined a list of comprehensive changes needed in the program, concluding, "For too long, our country has benefited from the labor provided by guest workers but has failed to provide a fair system that respects their human rights and upholds the most basic values of our democracy. The time has come for Congress to overhaul our shamefully abusive guest worker system."

Sources: "Close to Slavery," Mary Bauer and Sarah Reynolds, Southern Poverty Law Center, March 2007; "Coming to America," Felicia Mello, The Nation, June 25, 2007; "Trafficking racket," Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India, March 10, 2008.

8. BUSH CHANGES THE RULES


The Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice has been issuing classified legal opinions about surveillance for years. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) had access to the DOJ opinions on presidential power and had three declassified to show how the judicial branch has, in a bizarre and chilling way, assisted President Bush in circumventing its own power.

According to the three memos:

"There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it";

"The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II," and

"The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations."

Or, as Whitehouse rephrased in a Dec. 7, 2007, Senate speech: "I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them. I get to determine what my own powers are. The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is. I tell the Department of Justice what the law is."

The issue arose within the context of the Protect America Act, which expands government surveillance powers and gives telecom companies legal immunity for helping. Whitehouse called it "a second-rate piece of legislation passed in a stampede in August at the behest of the Bush administration."

He pointed out that the act does not prohibit spying on Americans overseas — with the exception of an executive order that permits surveillance only of Americans whom the Attorney General determines to be "agents of a foreign power."

"In other words, the only thing standing between Americans traveling overseas and government wiretap is an executive order," Whitehouse said in an April 12 speech. "An order this president, under the first legal theory I cited, claims he has no legal obligation to obey."

Whitehouse, a former US Attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island’s governor, and Rhode Island Attorney General who took office in 2006, went on to point out that Marbury vs. Madison, written by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1803, established that it is "emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

Sources: "In FISA Speech, Whitehouse sharply criticizes Bush Administration’s assertion of executive power," Sheldon Whitehouse, Dec. 7, 2007; "Down the Rabbit Hole," Marcy Wheeler, The Guardian (UK), Dec. 26, 2007.

9. SOLDIERS SPEAK OUT


Hearing soldiers recount their war experiences is the closest many people come to understanding the real horror, pain, and confusion of combat. One would think that might make compelling copy or powerful footage for a news outlet. But in March, when more than 300 veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan convened for four days of public testimony on the war, they were largely ignored by the media.

Winter Soldier was designed to give soldiers a public forum to air some of the atrocities they witnessed. Originally convened by Vietnam Vets Against the War in January 1971, more than 100 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians described their war experiences, including rapes, torture, brutalities, and killing of non-combatants. The testimony was entered into the Congressional Record, filmed, and shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Iraq Veterans Against the War hosted the 2008 reprise of the 1971 hearings. Aaron Glantz, writing in One World, recalled testimony from former Marine Cpl. Jason Washburn, who said, "his commanders encouraged lawless behavior. ‘We were encouraged to bring ‘drop weapons,’ or shovels. In case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent.’<0x2009>"

An investigation by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in The Nation that included interviews with 50 Iraq war veterans also revealed an overwhelming lack of training and resources, and a general disregard for the traditional rules of war.

Though most major news outlets sent staff to cover New York’s Fashion Week, few made it to Silver Spring, Md. for the Winter Soldier hearings. Fortunately, KPFA and Pacifica Radio broadcast the testimonies live and, in an update to the story, said they were "deluged with phone calls, e-mails, and blog posts from service members, veterans, and military families thanking us for breaking a cultural norm of silence about the reality of war." Testimonies can still be heard at www.ivaw.org.

Sources: "Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan eyewitness accounts of the occupation," Iraq Veterans Against the War, March 13-16, 2008; "War comes home," Aaron Glantz, Aimee Allison, and Esther Manilla, Pacifica Radio, March 14-16, 2008; "US Soldiers testify about war crimes," Aaron Glantz, One World, March 19, 2008; "The Other War," Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, The Nation, July 30, 2007.

10. APA HELPS CIA TORTURE


Psychologists have been assisting the CIA and US military with interrogation and torture of Guantánamo detainees — which the American Psychological Association has said is fine, despite objections from many of its 148,000 members.

A 10-member APA task force convened on the divisive issue in July 2005 and found that assistance from psychologists was making the interrogations safe and the group deferred to US standards on torture over international human-rights organizations’ definitions.

The task force was criticized by APA members for deliberating in secret, and later it was revealed that six of the 10 participants had ties to the armed services. Not only that, but as Katherine Eban reported in Vanity Fair, "Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the CIA."

In particular, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of whom are APA members, honed a classified military training program known as SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape] that teaches soldiers how to tough out torture if captured by enemies. "Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on SERE trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror," Eban wrote.

And, as Mark Benjamin noted in a Salon article, employing SERE training — which is designed to replicate torture tactics that don’t abide by Geneva Convention standards — refutes past administration assertions that current CIA torture techniques are safe and legal. "Soldiers undergoing SERE training are subject to forced nudity, stress positions, lengthy isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exhaustion from exercise, and the use of water to create a sensation of suffocation," Benjamin wrote.

Eban’s story outlined how SERE tactics were spun as "science" despite a lack of data and the critique that building rapport works better than blows to the head. Specifically, he said, it’s been misreported that CIA torture techniques got Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah to talk, when it was actually FBI rapport-building. In spite of this, SERE techniques became standards in interrogation manuals that eventually made their way to US officers guarding Abu Ghraib.

Ongoing uproar within the APA resulted in a petition to make an official policy limiting psychologists’ involvement in interrogations. On Sept. 17, a majority of 15,000 voting members approved a resolution stating that psychologists may not work in settings where "persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights."

Sources: "The CIA’s torture teachers," Mark Benjamin, Salon, June 21, 2007; "Rorschach and awe," Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, July 17, 2007.

OTHER STORIES IN THE TOP 25


11. El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror

12. Bush Profiteers Collect Billions from No Child Left Behind

13. Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq

14. Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste

15. Worldwide Slavery

16. Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights

17. UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights

18. Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers

19. Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction

20. Marijuana Arrests Set New Record

21. NATO Considers "First Strike" Nuclear Option

22. CARE Rejects US Food Aid

23. FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs

24. Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror

25. Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

Read them all at projectcensored.org

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CENSORED IN SAN FRANCISCO

Good stories are going untold everywhere, but Project Censored can’t cover it all. The project focuses on national an international news, but in a place politically, environmentally, and socially charged as the Bay Area, there’s plenty going on that major media sources ignore, underplay, black out, or misreport.

We called local activists, politicians, freelance journalists, and media experts to come up with a list of a few Bay Area censored stories. Post a comment and add your own!

>> The truth about Prop. H: Pacific Gas and Electric Company has been spending millions to tell lies about the Clean Energy Act, Proposition H. But the mainstream press has done nothing to counter that misinformation.

>> The dirty secret of the secrecy law: Vioutf8g San Francisco’s local public records law, the Sunshine Ordinance, carries no penalty, so city agencies do it at will. The failure of the district attorney and Ethics Commission to enforce the law has undermined open-government efforts.

>> The military red herring: The real politics of the JROTC ballot measure have little to do with this particular program. Downtown and the Republican party are using the measure as a wedge issue against progressives

>> The mayor’s war on affordable housing: Mayor Gavin Newsom, who touts his record on homelessness, has actually opposed every major affordable-housing measure proposed by the Board of Supervisors in the last five years. And since Newsom became mayor the city homeless population has increased — but shelter closings have cost the city 400 beds.

>> The hidden cost of attacking immigrants: The San Francisco Chronicle and Mayor Gavin Newsom have been demanding a crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the name of law enforcement – but the move has made immigrants less likely to cooperate with the police and thus is hindering criminal-justice

Dirty secrets under the big top

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› steve@sfbg.com

The circus has come to town. Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, the largest and most profitable show of its kind in history, is in Oakland this week, and will be headed to San Jose next week. Spectators will see trapeze acts, clowns — and animals, particularly elephants, performing the trademark stunts that are considered the highlight of the event.

But the show may soon be over.

Ringling Bros. has been battling with animal welfare advocates for a generation or more, and a landmark federal lawsuit headed to trial in October could finally answer the question of whether rough, regular treatment of endangered Asian elephants by circus handlers constitutes illegal animal abuse.

At stake is the future of performing animals in circuses, particularly this 138-year-old global institution. Circus officials say that if the court prohibits the use of tools like leg chains and the ankus (an elephant training tool that activists call a bull hook and handlers call a guide), they’ll stop touring with elephants — a feature that they admit is their biggest draw.

The case, originally filed eight years ago by three national animal welfare groups and former Ringling Bros. elephant handler Tom Rider, has unearthed a treasure trove of damning inside documents from both Ringling Bros. and the US Department of Agriculture, the agency that regulates circuses and ensures their compliance with the Endangered Species and Animal Welfare acts.

Among the allegations are claims of repeated injuries to elephants by ankus-wielding handlers, efforts to conceal animal abuse from the public and government regulators, the preventable deaths of three baby elephants, prevalence of tuberculosis (the same strain contracted by humans) in elephants and handlers, and a pattern of high USDA officials overriding the enforcement recommendations of agency investigators and ignoring evidence of abuse.

"Ringling Bros. engages in these unlawful activities by routinely beating elephants to ‘train’ them, ‘discipline’ them, and keep them under control; chaining them for long periods of time; hitting them with sharp bull hooks; ‘breaking’ baby elephants with force to make them submissive; and forcibly removing nursing baby elephants from their mothers before they are weaned, with the use of ropes and chains," reads the federal lawsuit filed by American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Animal Welfare Institute, the Fund for Animals, and Rider. It will be heard in US District Court in Washington, DC, starting Oct. 7.

Despite its major implications, the case has drawn surprisingly little media attention. But it’s a remarkable story, full of juicy documents, an abundance of YouTube video footage that appears to show Ringling Bros. animal abuse — along with Ringling Bros.’ role in derailing the career of a prominent Bay Area television news anchor and the intriguing involvement of shadowy CIA operatives.

Critics say Ringling Bros.’ extensive advertising makes media outlets pull punches, but another reason the circus has avoided bad press may lie with other Ringling lawsuits that contain some astounding revelations of how the circus — or more specifically, circus owner Kenneth Feld and his Feld Entertainment, the world’s largest live entertainment company — treats those who seek to expose its secrets.

DIRTY CIRCUS TRICKS


Power and illusion have always been mainstays of the circus, ever since P.T. Barnum reportedly said, "There’s a sucker born every minute." Elephants and other exotic animals have always been important features of the show as well, going back to the 1860s when James Anthony Bailey displayed Little Columbia, the first elephant ever born in a circus.

The nation’s three largest circuses — Barnum’s, Bailey’s, and the Ringling Brothers‘ — gradually merged into one by 1919 and enjoyed growing popularity until entering into a period of decline during the Great Depression. That decline continued through the Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, when more than 100 people died inside a Ringling Bros. tent, and into the 1950s, when television became popular.

But music promoter Irvin Feld began to turn the circus around in the late ’50s, bringing in new acts and increasing the circus’s profitability. In 1967 he bought the company and later passed control of the circus to his only son, Kenneth, who has prospered along with the show.

Kenneth Feld made Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans in 2004, with a reported net worth of $775 million. Feld Entertainment made the Forbes list of the nation’s top companies in 2000, ranking 404th with a reported annual revenue of $675 million and profits of $100 million.

Feld also owns and operates such shows as Disney on Ice, Disney Live, High School: The Musical, and the Siegfried and Roy tiger-taming act.

But all is not well in the Feld empire.

When Feld had a falling out with his top lieutenant, Charles Smith, in 1998, Smith filed a wrongful termination lawsuit that exposed the nefarious inner dealings of "The Greatest Show on Earth," including alleged animal abuse, public health threats, and the use of a top former CIA official to spy on, infiltrate, and sabotage animal welfare activists and journalists.

Among other things, the case brought to light charges that some of the elephants have been exposed to or have contracted tuberculosis.

Joel Kaplan, a former private investigator who worked for Feld, alleged in a deposition in the Smith case that TB was a serious problem among the pachyderms. "I think it’s immoral to have elephants traveling in every arena in the country with tuberculosis," noted Kaplan, who filed his own lawsuit and settled for $250,000. He stated that he had been told by a Ringling Bros. veterinarian that "about half of the elephants in each of the shows had tuberculosis and that the tuberculosis was an easily transmitted disease to individuals, to human beings."

Also included in the case was a deposition by Clair George, the No. 3 person in the CIA until 1987, when he was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-contra scandal (he was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992). George admitted to working for Feld and conveyed chilling tales of sabotage, including the case of freelance journalist Jan Pottker, who wrote a 1990 magazine profile of the Feld family which included allegations that Irvin Feld maintained a longstanding homosexual relationship outside his marriage.

To deter her from writing a book about the Feld family, George outlined a scheme to have one agent befriend her and another seduce her, spy on her progress, feed her conflicting information, and even get her a book deal on another project to divert her, with a $25,000 advance allegedly paid by Feld.

"I undertook a series of efforts to find out what Pottker was doing and reported on the results of my work to Mr. Feld," George wrote in a sworn affidavit. "I was paid for this work by Feld Entertainment or its affiliates. I prepared my reports in writing and presented them to Mr. Feld in personal meetings."

Amy McWethy, a spokesperson for Feld Entertainment, refused to discuss the cases or their implications.

The statements of George and Kaplan describe secret bugging and phone tapping, bribes and clandestine cash settlements to silence critics (including Smith, who settled his lawsuit for $6 million), and infiltration of groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

"As part of my work for Feld Entertainment," George wrote in his affidavit, "I was also asked to review reports from [Feld executive vice president] Richard Froemming and his organizations based on their surveillance of, and efforts to counter, the activities of various animal rights groups."

National security reporter Jeff Stein (now with Congressional Quarterly) wrote the definitive account of Feld’s alleged black ops for Salon.com ("The Greatest Vendetta on Earth," 8/30/01), and was also allegedly targeted for surveillance and retribution, according to a story in the May/June 2002 issue of Columbia Journalism Review ("Investigations: The scary circus," by Jay Cheshes).

Stein’s original stories were followed up by 60 Minutes in May 2003, which essentially repeated the allegations.

The next year, KTVU anchor Leslie Griffith got onto the circus story, doing lengthy, investigative reports on the animal abuse lawsuit revelations for KTVU in 2004 and 2005, just as Ringling Bros. was coming to town.

Then Griffith left the station — at least in part because of the backlash she says she felt from both her corporate bosses and Ringling Bros., whose internal documents reveal an aggressive strategy to counter negative media coverage.

A training manual made public as part of the lawsuit outlines how the circus responds to reporters:

"Immediately upon learning about negative stories about Ringling Bros., the Animal Issues Department will put in place the [Rapid Deployment Force]," it states. "The Animal Issues Department will directly contact the editor/news director…. Armed with videos, literature and other information, the Animal Issues Department Head will demand a retraction or equal time and will work in concert with the grass roots campaign…. If the editor/news director refuses the request, Legal will be informed to determine what recourses exist."

Griffith says it was after KTVU was targeted by this effort that she was barred from doing any more circus stories and her relationship with the station began to deteriorate. "All of a sudden my hair wasn’t good enough, my makeup wasn’t good enough — after 25 years of doing the news."

Officially Griffith and KTVU parted on good terms with mutual statements of respect. Even today, KTVU general manager Tim McKay (who was station manager when Griffith left) speaks highly of Griffith, telling the Guardian, "Leslie worked here for a number of years and did a fantastic job."

McKay said he didn’t know about any contact from Ringling Bros. or Griffith being told to back off the circus stories (he said he would check and get back to us, but didn’t as of press time), saying only, "We stand behind the stories as they aired. There was a whole lot of attention given to their accuracy."

But it’s clear that Ringling Bros. was aware of and upset by Griffith’s work. In 2005 Ringling Bros. attorneys argued in court against efforts by the ASPCA and the other lawsuit plaintiffs to obtain financial records and veterinary records on the Ringling elephants, telling the judge: "To shovel this stuff into the public record and try to draw inferences from it, or put it in out of context, lends itself to all sorts of abuse, the very kind of abuse that we contend took place on the San Francisco television station last week."

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered Ringling to turn over the documents, but kept many (mostly the financial documents) under protective seal, keeping their contents hidden from the public.

Griffith, who won dozens of major journalism awards over her 25-year career, says the public suffers when journalists are muzzled. "If they took anything from me," she said, "it was my bully pulpit."

ELEPHANTS AND TB


If Griffith still had that bully pulpit and the ability to freely use it, she told us she’d be talking about mycobacterium tuberculosis in elephants. After doing extensive research into the issue — interviewing top experts and traveling across the country to review voluminous court files — Griffith has come to believe Ringling Bros. Circus poses a serious threat to public health.

"You can talk about the [animal] abuse, but with a worldwide epidemic brewing, I’d say the story is the tuberculosis," Griffith told us. She has been writing periodically on elephants and TB on her blog (lesliegriffithproductions.com), the Huffington Post, and prominent news sites such as Truthout, which published her piece, "The Elephant in the Room," a year ago.

"There are several alarming issues for epidemiologists: drug resistance, inability to diagnose if an elephant has been cured, and disease spreading to handlers who work with them and to the public who attend circus performances," Griffith wrote in the article, relying on public documents and experts on both the circus and infectious disease.

Griffith’s star source has been San Francisco–based epidemiologist Don Francis, who helped discover the HIV virus and became the first director for the Center for Disease Control’s AIDS Laboratory. The Guardian talked to Francis, who has reviewed Ringling documents and concluded that the elephants do indeed pose a threat to public health. He told us he’s particularly troubled by records that appear to show elephants being treated with multiple drugs, meaning they could have multidrug-resistant TB (MDR TB), "which really scares me." Ringling denies that any elephants have MDR TB, for which there is essentially no cure.

But Francis remains concerned. "A trumpeting elephant could definitely aerosolize this stuff," Francis told the Guardian — and that would keep small particles of the virus airborne long enough for them to be inhaled by handlers or circus crowds. Children and those with weak immune systems, such as people with HIV, would be especially susceptible to contracting TB from these particles.

Although Francis said he couldn’t say whether any circus attendees have been infected with TB from elephants — and we’ve been shown no evidence that anyone’s ever contracted TB from attending a circus — he sees no basis for Ringling’s claims that the elephants are safe. "I don’t know that anyone has asked the question. I’m not sure anyone has ever tied it together," Francis said.

Both Griffith and Rider maintain that all of Ringling’s elephants have been exposed to TB at one time or another and that the standard annual process used to test for infection — trunk washing — is inadequate to determine if they are carrying and transmitting the virus.

"Every elephant traveling with Ringling has been exposed to TB, and many of them have TB," Rider, a former Ringling elephant handler, told us.

In fact, Kaplan testified in court that he was asked "to find a physician who would test the people in the circus to see if they had tuberculosis but who would destroy the records and not turn them in to the Centers for Disease Control," as the law requires.

Ringling and USDA documents unearthed by the lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests show that at least eight elephants tested positive for TB and that many others have been exposed to them. Ringling veterinarian Danny Graham told the Guardian that two non-traveling elephants are currently being treated for TB, but couldn’t say how many have tested positive in the past.

Yet Ringling officials maintain that active tuberculosis is not a problem in the circus, that their diagnosis and treatment regimens are adequate to protect the health of the elephants, circus employees, and the public, and that no elephants that tested positive for TB have then performed in front of the public.

Graham said the trunk wash, which detects when a TB infection has shed out of the lungs and can be transmitted, is an effective indicator of whether an animal is contagious. "Shedding is when it can be passed to other elephants," she told us. "What our trunk washes look for is a shedding of the bacteria."

Yet Ringling records show at least one case in which the necropsy on a dead elephant, Dolly, showed TB in the lungs even though the trunk wash results were negative.

A Ringling FAQ sheet on "Tuberculosis in Elephants," by Dr. Dennis Schmitt, chair of veterinary services for Ringling’s Center for Elephant Conservation, admits that humans and elephants get the same kind of TB. "However there has been no proven case of tuberculosis bacterium being transmitted from elephants to humans," he writes.

He uses a similarly legalistic, underlined approach on questions of whether humans can contract TB from elephants and whether there have been studies indicating so, saying neither has been "proven." And he flatly denies that any elephants have MDR TB.

Two Ringling officials interviewed by the Guardian — Graham and Janice Aria, director of animal stewardship training — went further than Schmitt and flatly denied that any elephants that tested positive for TB ever performed.

"None of the elephants in our traveling unit have ever tested positive for TB," Aria told the Guardian. "No, none of our traveling elephants have ever tested positive for TB," Graham said in a separate interview.

THE USDA INVESTIGATES


But Ringling veterinary records unearthed in the latest lawsuit cast some doubt on the claims of circus officials. Three of the seven elephants that traveled with Ringling Bros. Blue Unit to Oakland — Juliet, Bonnie, and Kelly Ann — appeared in one redacted veterinary document, marked as exhibit "FELD 0021843."

Kelly Ann’s entry includes this notation: "Moved from CEC to Blue Unit. Just finished TB treatment." Juliet was listed as "currently being treated for presumptive TB" and Bonnie had "blood drawn for Tb Elisa," an expensive TB test that often follows a positive reading in the trunk wash test. Documents connected to a 1999 USDA inspection also list Kelly Ann and "Juliette" among 10 elephants administered drugs for treating TB.

Asked whether Kelly Ann has ever undergone TB treatment and informed of the document, Aria told the Guardian, "From my knowledge, that is not true."

McWethy, the Feld corporate communications manager who arranged and monitored our interviews with Aria and Graham, initially said she was not familiar with the document, and even if she was, "the court requested that the parties not discuss the specifics of the suit." In actuality, the judge has not issued a gag order in the case, and plaintiffs spoke freely about details of the case.

Later, after she reviewed the document at our request, McWethy confirmed that Kelly Ann had been exposed to TB in 1999 and that the circus decided to treat her for the disease. "But she’s never tested positive," McWethy said.

In June 2001, the tuberculosis issue was enough of a concern to the USDA that the agency initiated what one official document called an "investigation regarding allegations that Ringling was using known TB-infected animals in circus performances." But information on the results of that investigation was redacted by the USDA from later documents.

In a 2003 report written by the three plaintiff groups in the latest lawsuit, "Government Sanctioned Abuse: How the United States Department of Agriculture Allows Ringling Bros. Circus to Systematically Mistreat Elephants," they conclude: "Although tuberculosis is an extremely contagious disease, and Ringling’s elephants are publicly exhibited throughout the country, including elephants that go in and out of both the breeding and retirement facilities, the public has been kept completely in the dark about this investigation, the agency’s decision to ‘override’ the conclusions of its own inspectors and investigators, and the reasons this investigation was closed with no further action."

WATCHING THE CIRCUS


Feld — the man and his company — are big contributors to top elected officials of both major parties. Campaign finance records show that since 1999, Feld has given at least $104,900 to Republicans and $35,150 to Democrats on the federal level and in his home state of Maryland.

Benefiting disproportionately from Feld’s largesse are members of the House Agriculture Committee (which oversees the USDA). The contributions include almost $10,000 to former Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Tracy), $6,500 to the campaign and committees of Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia (the committee’s ranking Republican), and $6,500 to Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.). Representatives from the two states where Ringling Bros. bases its animals off-season, Texas and Florida, also took in $13,300 and $28,000 respectively, more than those from other states. Animal welfare advocates say Feld’s wealth, power, and political connections have caused the USDA to go easy on Ringling Bros.

"This cozy relationship between the USDA and Ringling Bros. is going to be exposed during the trial," Tracy Silverman, the attorney for Animal Welfare Institute, told the Guardian.

Plaintiffs will make an example of the death of a four-year-old elephant named Benjamin, who drowned in a Huntsville, Texas, pond July 26, 1999 after refusing to heed trainer Pat Harned’s commands to get out. That death came a year after another baby elephant, two-year-old Kenny, died after being used in three circus performances in one day, despite warnings from veterinarians that he was severely ill.

"The United States Department of Agriculture’s final ‘Report of Investigation’ concerning the incident concluded that Benjamin’s trainer’s use of an ‘ankus’ on Benjamin ‘created behavioral stress and trauma which precipitated in the physical harm and ultimate death of the animal.’ On information and belief, the routine beatings of Benjamin were a contributing factor to his death," the animal welfare groups wrote in the lawsuit.

The USDA investigator recommended Ringling Bros. be charged with vioutf8g the Animal Welfare Act, yet the USDA’s General Counsel’s Office overrode those conclusions and issued its own: "Suddenly, and without any signs of distress or struggle, Benjamin became unconscious and drowned." Ringling and USDA officials say the animal died of a previously undetected cardiac arrhythmia, and the final report omitted any mention of the ankus or behavioral stress.

Animal welfare activists and lawyers say this is just one of many examples of senior USDA officials overriding recommendations of front-line investigators and veterinarians, then blocking access to reports and other evidence that might support or disprove the final conclusions. Indeed, the lawsuit identifies more than a dozen such examples.

USDA spokesperson Jessica Milteer told the Guardian she couldn’t comment on specific examples, but said supervisors are ultimately responsible for interpreting field reports. "Things are pretty much done on a case-by-case basis. We try to work with a facility to come into compliance."

But she said that it’s not true the USDA goes easy on Ringling Bros. because of its power or political connections. She said there are currently two open investigations into Ringling Bros. (she would not provide details) and that facilities like Ringling get annual inspections unless they’re found to have problems or risk factors.

"Since 2005 Ringling has been inspected 52 times," Milteer said, indicating the USDA is indeed concerned about some of the things it has observed at Ringling Bros.

USE OR ABUSE?


Aria, the Ringling trainer, said banning the use of the ankus "would not allow elephants to travel anymore." Feld and other top officials have made similar public statements. She bristled when hearing the ankus referred to as a bull hook. "We call them guides," she told the Guardian. "It is used to reinforce a verbal cue."

Aria and McWethy dismissed videos that appear to show handlers inflicting violent blows on elephants, saying they are often selectively edited and spliced in with footage of non-Ringling elephants and handlers. Activists insist this isn’t true and that much of the footage clearly shows abuse at Ringling Bros. For example, one video shows a person identified as a Ringling Bros. elephant handler striking violently at an elephant after saying on camera that he never does so. Another shows Ringling elephants being paraded through a town and one slow elephant being sometimes pulled along by an ankus behind the ear, with a closeup then showing a bloody puncture wound in the spot.

"From the videos I have seen, so much of it is repackaged and old stuff that doesn’t apply to us at all, not at all," Aria told us.

Graham, who worked for Ringling for the two years she has been a veterinarian and who interned with the circus before that, said she visits the elephants at least once a week and "I have never seen a trainer use an ankus inappropriately." Further, she said, she has never seen an injury she thinks was caused by the ankus: "If I see anything, it’s generally superficial abrasions."

Rider and animal welfare activists say the hook on the ankus is used to inflict pain on the sensitive parts of an elephant, mostly behind their ears or on the backs of their legs, as a negative stimulus to encourage the animals to perform tricks or obey commends. If it was simply a "guide," they say, it wouldn’t need a hook.

But Aria said the ankus is akin to a leash, a means of keeping the elephants near them. "It’s a ‘come-to-me’ cue," she told us. "This comes from decades and decades of use."

Sorting out whether such traditions are actually a form of animal abuse is the purpose of the fall trial.

"The circus is really good at creating the illusion of the happy performing elephants," Kathy Meyer, an ASPCA attorney who has been handling the case from the beginning eight years ago, told us. But she said that it’s clear from the documents, videos, testimony, and common sense that the ankus is often used to inflict pain, which is prohibited under federal animal welfare rules, particularly those governing endangered species, which allow Ringling to have elephants only for conservation reasons.

"So we’re asking the judge to enjoin them to stop them from using these practices," she said.

Many veterinarians and wildlife experts agree that it’s not possible for elephants performing in circuses to be treated humanely. The Amboseli Trust for Elephants last year released a letter signed by 14 leading elephant researchers, with almost 300 years of combined experience working with elephants in the wild, arguing for an end to the practice.

"It is our considered opinion that elephants should not be used in circuses. Elephants in the wild roam over large areas and move considerable distances each day. They are intelligent, highly social animals with a complex system of communication…. Elephants in circuses are bought and sold, separated from companions, confined, chained, and forced to stand for hours and frequently moved about in small compartments on trains or trucks. They are required to perform behaviors never seen in nature," they wrote.

Aria said she didn’t agree with those conclusions, saying she looks out her office window every day: "I see elephants and get to see them all day doing the most amazingly athletic things." And she said only those with a propensity to perform are taken on the road, which is about one-third of their 53 elephants. "You can separate the ones who want to do it from the ones who don’t want to do it," said Aria, who joined Ringling Bros. as a clown in 1972. Later, she earned a bachelor’s degree in special education and worked as a teacher during the ’90s. She was named to her current post in 2006.

"All the elephants here are happy and thriving," Aria said, noting there are only about 35,000 Asian elephants still alive and that many, in places like Sri Lanka where she has visited, are regularly abused and killed. "Good for the Feld family that they support elephants from their births to their deaths."

PRESERVATION OR EXPLOITATION?


The path to the courthouse has been long and difficult, with Feld getting a similar earlier case dismissed and this one moving to trial only after threats and stern warnings by Judge Sullivan against any more stall tactics by the defendants.

"It’s been very difficult to get to this point," Meyer, the ASPCA lawyer, said, adding that that just being able to have their day in court is already a huge victory. "To have this issue aired in a public forum will be helpful for educating the public."

Silverman said she was most shocked by documents obtained by the plaintiffs — and introduced as part of the case — showing elephants chained up to 100 hours at a time, for an average of 26 hours when traveling between shows. "In no way did I imagine the bulk of the evidence that would support our claims," Silverman said. "These animals live their lives in chains."

In addition, many members of the public might not be aware that Ringling Bros. obtains its elephants under the Endangered Species Act for the purpose of protecting and propagating an endangered species, and the ESA contains strict rules against physical abuse of those animals.

"There’s no humane way to have a circus with elephants because it has to travel year-round," Rider told the Guardian. "If you take away the chains and the bull hooks, an elephant isn’t going to do anything."

Rider, who worked with Ringling elephants for more than two years, "saw several of the other elephant handlers and ‘trainers’ routinely beat the elephants, including baby elephants, and he saw then routinely hit and wound the elephants with sharp bull hooks," according to the lawsuit.

Ringling officials such a trainer Aria contend the elephants are well-cared for. Yet she also admits that the elephants are the key to the Felds’ lucrative business empire.

"They are our flagship animal," Aria said. "People come to the circus to see the elephants."

As such, a ruling that goes against Ringling could financially cripple the company, which is why animal welfare advocates say Feld has taken such an aggressive stance with his critics, harassing, threatening, and sabotaging them. As Silverman said, "You see that with Leslie Griffith, and it’s that kind of thing that they do all over the country."

Hunting the lord of war

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Accused illegal arms dealer Victor Bout’s long-awaited arrest by Thai police officers March 5 was an important victory against unchecked human rights abuses around the world, and a personal vindication for the San Francisco woman who helped bring Bout to international attention.

Bout arrived at the luxurious Sofitel Hotel in Bangkok believing he was to meet with two senior leaders of the Marxist guerrilla army known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The men, it turned out, were paid informants operating on behalf of US drug enforcement officials.

Through an associate, the 41-year-old Bout allegedly promised to sell the duo large quantities of weapons to continue FARC’s decades-old insurgency against the Colombian government. According to an April federal grand jury indictment filed in New York, the arms included surface-to-air missiles, AK-47s, C-4 explosives, land mines, and even people to help train FARC soldiers in using the weapons.

Among those most relieved — and surprised — at the arrest was a relentlessly determined human rights investigator who lives in San Francisco. Kathi Lynn Austin, 48, has been pursuing the notorious trafficker and war profiteer for more than a decade.

Bout, a former USSR Air Force officer, is widely reputed to be one of the world’s most active criminal arms dealers, perhaps best known for his spectral presence on the African continent. There, he cultivated professional relationships with its litany of brutal dictators and helped fuel some of the most appalling human rights tragedies of the last century.

Austin and other investigators, as well as journalists and law enforcement officials in several countries, say that Bout expertly structured a business empire of shell companies, dubiously licensed cargo planes, and endless arms accumulations from former Soviet stockpiles — all of which were intended to minimize evidence linking his name to illegal weapons dealing.

But the work Austin did to penetrate that shell and expose Bout was so notable and dramatic that Paramount Pictures announced in December 2007 that superstar Angelina Jolie would play her in a drama inspired by Bout’s infamous career.

It’s a stunning achievement for someone who 15 years ago struggled to convince even her colleagues in the human rights community that the end of the Cold War and the globalization of organized crime made nonstate actors like Bout as much of a threat to peace as the tyrannical governments they’d been naming and shaming for years.

"A human rights violation is considered a violation that is carried out by a state actor," Austin told the Guardian. "We were trying to change the whole field of human rights to philosophically say we should be going after these private perpetrators as well."

Austin has helped document Bout’s convoluted network since about 1994, first as a consultant for Human Rights Watch and later as arms and conflict director for the Washington, DC–based Fund for Peace, for which she maintained a San Francisco office, before eventually working for the United Nations.

After returning to San Francisco in June from an 18-month UN mission in East Timor, Austin agreed to talk about her investigations of Bout over several hours of interviews near the North Beach apartment where she’s been holed up writing material for the Paramount script.

Seeing Austin in a crowded coffee shop with clear features and wide, earnest eyes, it’s not easy to imagine her charging through the world’s hellholes: Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and other African conflict zones where the UN has imposed longstanding but ineffective arms embargos.

The work of Austin and others repeatedly helped show that death and destruction could continue indefinitely for the right price paid to savvy arms brokers like Bout, while the United States failed to regard the plight of civilian populations across Africa as vital to its interests.

As the world would learn in 2004, even the US military relied on Bout’s planes to conveniently bring its partially privatized war machine down on Iraq, making this story about more than just Bout and his pursuers.

Following Bout’s arrest in Thailand, federal prosecutors here charged him with conspiring to kill US nationals and attempting to illegally acquire anti-aircraft missiles.

In 1997 the United States designated FARC a terrorist group for kidnapping and murdering American citizens in Colombia. US officials also consider Colombia the globe’s largest supplier of cocaine, a trade that’s kept the leftist rebels afloat.

Bout allegedly told DEA informants that an ongoing, violent campaign by the FARC to counter America’s cocaine fumigation efforts in Colombia was his fight, too, and that he could supply the guerrillas with everything they needed.

Days after this story goes to press, however, he’s due for a court hearing in Bangkok, where a judge will decide whether to extradite him to the United States. That means Bout could face a criminal trial on American soil. To Austin, that’s long overdue. She had lost hope that her country would subdue a top-tier enabler of gross human rights violations. A secret sting operation led by American narcotics agents was the last thing Austin believed would lead to Bout’s capture — and for good reason.

She first became aware of his name in 1994, shortly after witnessing one of the brightest moments in contemporary African history. On April 24 of that year, Austin stood near the polling station as Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner of 27 years, marked his ballot in South Africa’s first fully democratic election. She’d been invited to attend after working as a researcher in the Natal province documenting political violence and the apartheid government’s desperate attempts to preserve decades of white control through upheaval and destabilization. No one was sure Mandela would reach the ballot box.

"We got up at three, four in the morning to load a bus," Austin recalls. "Nobody told us exactly where it was. We had to go under cover of darkness. When we got there, he voted just after the sun came up."

The inauguration party weeks later spilled out everywhere in Johannesburg. Austin mingled with foreign journalists and drank champagne. But one of the greatest parties of the century turned glum as vague reports mounted describing trouble in a nearby country, one smaller than Maryland and at the time unknown to most Americans: Rwanda.

"Nothing was really clear. It was all very ambiguous," Austin remembers. "We just kept hearing these reports that 10 Belgian peacekeepers had been killed and the UN was pulling out and people were dying on a massive scale."

The Rwandan genocide would become one of the greatest human atrocities since the Holocaust as extremists from the ethnic Hutu majority massacred at least 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates with gruesome efficiency while the world stood by.

As details emerged, Austin raised money in the United States and worked to get to the beleaguered African nation as soon as possible. Meanwhile, a Tutsi-led military offensive defeated the Hutu Power government in the capital city of Kigali by July 1994 and supposedly ended the genocide. But as Austin and others would learn, the violence was far from over.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed toward the eastern border of neighboring Zaire, among them the perpetrators of the genocide. Hidden inside refugee camps, Hutu militias renewed their strength and began amassing weapon caches with the quiet support of Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

Austin fearlessly penetrated the militia encampments, persuading exiled Hutu military leaders to disclose how they had obtained antitank grenades and high-caliber ammunition. The list included Col. Théoneste Bagosora, considered to be a chief architect of the genocide. Her trick? Austin told them she was a researcher for the neutral-sounding Institute of Policy Studies — which was technically true — and simply needed to hear their side of the story.

"It was a really treacherous place to be," Austin said. "At the time I appeared young, nonthreatening. I didn’t often say I was with Human Rights Watch…. In any kind of organization, people are motivated by many different things. You find those sources that for some reason or another want to help out or are so ego-driven they don’t think that any information they give to you is going to be used somehow against them."

She also interviewed members of flight crews who gave her information on cargo companies hired by the Mobutu government to secretly supply its Hutu allies with weapons by falsifying official flight plans and end-user certificates, key legal requisites designed to curtail transnational arms shipments.

According to her later Human Rights Watch report, "The militias in these camps have taken control of food distribution, engage in theft, prevent the repatriation of refugees through attacks and intimidation, carry out vigilante killings and mutilations of persons suspected of crimes or of disloyalty … and actively launch cross-border raids."

What didn’t make sense was how the suspected ringleaders of the genocide could obtain weapons despite the return of peacekeepers to the area and an arms embargo on Rwanda imposed by the UN.

CIA investigators later discovered that planes belonging to Bout were involved in supplying the outlaw Hutus, according to Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun’s definitive book on Bout, Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible (Wiley, 2007).

Austin also came to that conclusion by the end of an eight-month fact-finding trip to the region carried out in 1994 and 1995. Her findings for Human Rights Watch helped propel her to international notoriety as more NGOs focused on illegal arms flows coming from private brokers.

"The Rwandan genocide was really the watershed, for me and for Bout," Austin said. "In the early years, he’s building his empire and I’m beginning to narrow what I want to investigate. I was becoming more and more convinced that in all the wars I was looking at, it was logistics. It was all about who could bring in the guns, the fuel — keep the war going."

Back then, Bout was still a bit player among many weapons suppliers working on the continent, according to Austin. But he soon did something that would significantly boost his career and help make him what another Bout pursuer once described as "the McDonald’s of arms trafficking." He switched sides and helped the new post-genocide Rwandan leadership topple the neighboring Zairian presidency of Mobutu, Bout’s own longtime client.

Zaire is known today as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bout would make yet more money years later aiding another warlord who attempted a violent coup inside the country, Jean-Pierre Bemba. The International Criminal Court last month charged Bemba with mass brutality and rape committed against civilians between 2002 and 2003.

"He [Bout] has no loyalty," a Bout associate told Merchant of Death authors in 2006. "His loyalty is to his balls, his sweet ass, and maybe his wallet."

Probably Bout’s most cynical move occurred in Afghanistan. At the start of his career, in the early 1990s, he allegedly maintained an intimate business relationship with commanders of the Northern Alliance, the tribal army that fought Taliban extremists for years until gaining power in Afghanistan with US help following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

US officials began openly acknowledging in 2005 that Bout earned as much as $50 million also furnishing the Taliban with military equipment during its reign over the country.

Austin’s upbringing is the antithesis of what one might expect from an international human rights investigator. The oldest of five kids, she played guitar in a country-and-western band with the rest of her siblings, embarking on tours throughout the South from their home in Richmond, Va.

"We would play for people who had no money," she said. "We’d camp out for three days just to give them some music."

In the ’60s , the family of Baptists played at small African American churches during the climax of Southern segregation and against the backdrop of racist terror. They defied the neighbors and invited black friends over for dinner or socialized with them publicly. The Austins were largely apolitical, but Kathi says her parents insisted on human decency and encouraged a basic sense of justice and rebellion.

Her exposure to the destitution of many formerly enslaved black families in the South translated seamlessly in her own mind to Africa, a continent that fascinated her. But her understanding of the continent was limited.

"I just wanted to go save Africa one day. It was what I said I wanted to do with my life when I was really young…. I had this kind of missionary zeal, this very naïve, humane impulse."

Few people in her family considered going to college, but Austin hungered for academic achievement, securing a scholarship to the University of Virginia in the late ’70s.

Civil rights turmoil at the school politicized her and transformed her deeply. A model Organization for African Unity held for college students each year at Howard University in Washington, DC had the greatest impact. She attended it devotedly for several years. After competitive debates, politicians, professors, and other experts would speak to the students about Africa’s colonialist history and the anti-Apartheid movement.

"I really began to understand a lot of the underpinnings of what was going on with the African liberation movement in South Africa," she said. "I became engrossed in it and learned a lot intellectually and got a good sense of what I thought."

Austin began to zero in on the Ronald Reagan administration’s agenda of undermining Soviet communist influence in the region. The United States covertly backed the UNITA rebels in Angola against a communist-led liberation movement there, and continued to support the white-dominated and separatist apartheid regime of South Africa.

She wanted to investigate the unsavory relationships Reagan’s White House had developed on the African continent in its crusade to defeat communism during the Cold War. But Austin was aware of only two think tanks in the capital that examined such issues and had a reputation for attracting left-leaning luminaries. One was the nonprofit National Security Archive, a repository of declassified intelligence and foreign policy documents obtained largely through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Headquartered at George Washington University, lawmakers concerned about US covert activities abroad and some of the nation’s best-known journalists, including New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, palled around at the independent, nongovernmental research library after it was founded in 1985 by a group of muckracking reporters and scholars.

Austin’s internship there in 1988 created a new realm of possibility — solo investigations — and sparked an interest in following the intricate paper trails that accompanied her growing knowledge of Africa’s geopolitical landscape, frequent outbreaks of low-intensity conflicts, and evasive weapons procurers.

But she still had never been to Africa. "That was my big ambition," she said. "If there’s anything about me it’s that I’ve got to see for myself."

As her ties to Washington expanded, she joined a World Bank urban rehabilitation team, writing political and economic background reports on Angola in 1989, believing she could make a difference inside the ill-reputed lender to developing countries.

She didn’t, but it was enough to give her first contact. After that trip to Angola, Austin used her savings to stay behind, joining a UN mission overseeing the withdrawal of Cuban troops above the 19th parallel, who were there as a result of Angola’s years-long civil war. She later went to Mozambique on a MacArthur Foundation grant and interviewed private mercenaries operating there for a report called "Invisible Crimes" that included a simple investigative formula she would employ for years to come: What’s wrong? And who’s doing it?

"Through the years, you realize just what kind of danger she’s in," her sister, Cindi Adkins, said from Virginia. "We would go days, weeks, months without hearing from her. My mom would say, ‘We have to call the Red Cross and see if we can find out that she’s okay.’<0x2009>"

Wanting to escape Washington culture, she moved to North Beach in 1997 after becoming entranced by San Francisco’s slower pace. Between missions, she’d spend full days at Caffe Sapore on Lombard Street writing a book about arms trafficking she’s still working on today.

Stanford University’s Center for African Studies invited her to become a visiting scholar for a year, researching arms proliferation and lecturing students, while the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, did the same thing shortly afterward.

But the San Francisco–based Ploughshares Fund became one of Austin’s biggest supporters, helping her finance the creation of a local arms and conflict office for the Fund for Peace, an antiwar think tank in Washington.

"At that time, one of the areas we did a lot of funding in was the control of small arms and light weapons," said Deborah Bain, Ploughshares’ communications director. "Kathi was someone who did a lot of very courageous work tracking arms flows around the world. We were very impressed with the work she was doing and the kinds of results she was getting."

By then the UN had grown to understand the need for knowledgeable people on the ground who could travel across various war-torn African countries and gather evidence on who was vioutf8g arms embargos and how they were doing it. In the coming years, Austin served as a consultant and official expert on panels that investigated sanctions violations in Liberia, the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Sudan, and Sierra Leone with teams of other human rights investigators who’d long followed Bout’s operations.

Her ex-boyfriend, Todd Ewing, a foreign economic development specialist and Bay Area native who began dating her in East Africa during the ’90s, described Austin as intense and ambitious. While his own blonde hair and six-foot frame made him conspicuous in the region, he said Austin’s "big brown eyes" and polite manner enabled her to slyly convince gritty characters to talk.

"Her MO at that time would be to just disappear for months [on fact-finding trips]," Ewing said. "I always liked to describe her as a sort of spy for the good guys."

Observers say that history handed the equally ambitious Victor Bout a perfect storm in 1991 at just 24 — an age when many Americans are looking for their first post-collegiate job.

The Soviet empire dissolved that year, ending the Cold War between Russia and the United States. Economic globalization expanded and gave every creative entrepreneur with good connections, criminal or legit, a chance to make a fortune. Aging Cold Warriors in the Beltway during the Bill Clinton era and later in George W. Bush’s cabinet maintained a stark binary ideological view of the world and failed to take seriously the growing threat posed by transnational criminals who had exchanged ideology for profit.

After the Berlin wall fell, corrupt Russian oligarchs infamously plundered the country’s assets as they were privatized following years of state control. Some robbed Russia’s rich oil reserves. Bout sought its military installations and airfields containing rows of cheaply available and unused commercial planes, all essentially abandoned by the central government.

Profiles of Bout put him in Angola — and possibly Mozambique — working as a translator for Russian peacekeepers when the Soviet Union broke up. US officials say Victor Anatolijevitch Bout was born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a deeply impoverished former Soviet state, and speaks several languages.

Bout told the New York Times in a rare 2003 interview that he purchased three Antonov aircraft for next to nothing in 1992 and used them to exploit a gap in the transit market, at first ferrying innocuous cargo like flowers from South Africa to the Middle East.

But the mogul quickly fostered connections to old Eastern bloc manufacturing and storage facilities in places like the Ukraine and Bulgaria, which were filled with AK-47s — ubiquitous in the developing world — ammunition, tanks, helicopters, and other military equipment.

Over time, investigators say he erected a complex web of cargo and airline companies designed to throw off suspicion. If one firm faced too much attention from aviation authorities, another was created to hold the assets. Otherwise, bribery, fraud, and forged documents were used, according to a report on Bout created by the US Treasury Department. In many African countries, aviation regulations are weak and international law is rarely enforced.

"Unless confronted with documentary evidence to the contrary, Bout’s associates consistently deny any involvement with Bout himself or playing any role in arms trafficking," the treasury report from 2005 reads.

US officials believed by then that he controlled the largest private fleet of Soviet-era aircraft in the world and employed hundreds of people, overseen partly from a nerve center in the United Arab Emirates, at the time a fast-growing and highly unregulated intercontinental transportation hub east of Saudi Arabia.

The Treasury report and other investigations say Bout became a confidante of the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, supplying him with gunships and missile launchers. Taylor is currently on trial in the Hague for directing horrifying atrocities in neighboring Sierra Leone, ranging from widespread and extreme sexual violence to drugging and forcing children into combat.

When treasury officials here finally moved to seize Bout’s assets and bar Americans from doing business with him in 2004, they concluded that he had received diamonds extracted from Sierra Leone in exchange for supplying arms to Taylor.

That year saw one of Austin’s boldest attempts to confront the trafficking of illicit goods, on an airport tarmac in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at that time under its own arms embargo. A UN team Austin worked with uncovered piles of questionable registration records during a surprise inspection of two dozen planes, some of which fit Bout’s profile, as their Russian crews stood by, annoyed.

"I only told one or two high-ranking UN officials to get their permission, so we could be sure it didn’t get leaked out," Austin said. "None of the people involved in the actual inspection knew about it until that morning…. I’m still surprised it was so effective. I’m not sure it would work again."

International aviation rules require pilots to maintain several different types of documents, but the group found that 21 planes had invalid registration papers, two had false airworthiness certificates, and three had no insurance to speak of — telltale signs of smuggling. The group determined that weapons in the area were being exchanged for illegally mined columbite-tantalite, or coltan, a valuable mineral contained in some modern electronic devices such as cell phones.

The revelation led the UN Security Council to place Douglas Mpamo, a prominent alleged Bout manager in the region, on the DRC sanctions list, along with a pair of well-known Bout subsidiaries. With Austin’s help, another reputed top Bout lieutenant named Dimitri Popov made a similar security watch list in the United States.

Meanwhile lower-level bureaucrats in the US State and Treasury departments collected evidence on Bout for years, assisted by Austin, who occasionally met with them to relay information she had gathered on fact-finding missions. She testified to Congress about the proliferation of small arms, too, but after Sept. 11, the White House drifted away from a growing campaign to stop Bout.

"I don’t think the Bush administration should get any credit for the fact that Victor Bout was arrested," Austin said. "I think it has to do with the DEA being insulated from the policy influences of the administration. They kept the case so secret they were able to succeed. In the past, once it became an interagency issue or problem, bureaucratic inertia and turf wars entered in and always raised some obstacle to the actual pursuit of Bout."

Eventually, that bureaucratic inertia began to look like something far more shameful.

On April 26, 2005, several state and federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, IRS, and Dallas Police Department, raided two homes and an office in Richardson, Texas, looking for evidence that Bout’s tentacles had reached the United States.

The properties belonged to a Syrian-born American citizen named Richard Chichakli, who had served in an aviation regiment of the US Army during the first Gulf War. After being discharged in 1993, Chichakli helped create a free trade zone in the United Arab Emirates.

That’s where Chichakli likely first met Bout. Chichakli later returned to the US and became licensed as an accountant and an expert in military contracting. Officials found records showing that the 49-year-old Chichakli had created American companies connected to Bout.

Also discovered during the raid were wire transfer statements showing hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time moving from Bout-connected companies in the UAE to Chichakli in Texas, and credit card invoices managed by Chichakli listing Bout’s lavish purchases at businesses serving the nouveau riche of Moscow.

The raids were the result of a July 2004 executive order signed by President Bush — who, facing pressure from the UN, authorized the raids and prohibited Americans from doing business with Bout due to his connections to Taylor in Liberia.

The White House’s action came years after Austin and other investigators compiled their own research on Bout’s role in arming African warlords. Thirty companies and four individuals were added to a blocking order as a result. Federal court records from the case include extensive references to UN reports on Bout, including some Austin worked on, like one citing witnesses who saw a Bout-connected plane transporting large volumes of arms and ammunition through a Congolese airport between February and May 2004. Something was finally being done, or so it seemed.

But Austin and her colleagues were furious to learn that the US Defense Department hired Bout’s vast air armada with taxpayer money nearly 200 times in 2004 alone to ferry supplies and construction materials into Baghdad after the start of the Iraq war.

Merchant of Death co-author Braun, a Los Angeles Times national correspondent, reported for the paper in December 2004 that two well-established Bout companies, Air Bas and Irbis, had contracted with the US Air Force and Army as well as private companies like FedEx and Kellogg Brown & Root, the much-maligned former Halliburton subsidiary. The State Department had circulated a list of Bout companies warning its officials not to use them, Braun wrote, but the Pentagon made no similar effort.

A fuel purchase agreement included in Chichakli’s court file shows that the Defense Department used Air Bas "for official government purposes" just nine days after Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold questioned top defense officials, including then–Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, about such contracts. But Wolfowitz didn’t acknowledge what he eventually characterized as the "inadvertent" use of Bout’s planes for Feingold until months later.

When Austin delved into the issue in 2005 with fellow Merchant of Death author Farah, a former West African bureau chief for the Washington Post, the pair obtained new information for an article in the New Republic showing that the US military also used Bout-controlled companies during a four-month period in 2005, long after the "inadvertent" contracting had first been publicized.

The discoveries were a major letdown for Austin. She’s discussing with some NGOs the possibility of suing the federal government for vioutf8g its own presidential executive order. But Austin knows that even if Bout lands in a US prison for life, there will be someone else to take his place. It’s already happening, she says. As dark as it sounds, Austin will never have to go without a job.

"I’ve seen so much of the same thing go on year after year," Austin said. "You just have to take it in stride and keep coming back punching and hitting. That’s just the nature of the beast, the nature of the work that I do. You just have to keep going."

Freedom of Information: Sunshine in the digital age

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Public records used to be dusty old documents, stuck in dog-eared files or bound in aging folders. They were held in back rooms or the basements of city halls, available during government hours — and often, only by written request.

These days, a lot of that information is stored on hard drives and servers. That can make it harder to access and easier to hide — or it can give the public vast new access. That’s what this year’s Freedom of Information issue — our 22nd — is all about.

On one front, the advocates of secrecy are pushing hard to keep electronic data under strict controls. The state Legislature is considering a bill that would prohibit the release of electronic data embedded in a public record. The county of Santa Clara tried to set a $100,000 price on access to a public database.

But on the other hand, sunshine advocates are pushing for ways to use the same technology to make government more open. We’ve been in the forefront of sunshine battles for more than two decades; this is just the next step. (Tim Redmond)

>>2007 James Madison Award winners
Society of Professional Journalists Northern California announces First Amendment award winners

>>A citizen’s guide to fighting secret government
Local and national organizations that offer a wide range of resources for journalists, citizen activists, and hell-raisers

>>More sunshine — easily and at no cost
Technology can allow the city to take a huge step forward in public access — right now
By Kimo Crossman

>>Battleship metadata
Legislation on mapping software would create an expensive new category of public records
By Sarah Phelan

>>Virtual meeting
Open government laws prohibit online official discussions, but they’ve happened anyway
By Bryan Cohen

>>The leaks go on
A federal court judge says prior Wikileaks ruling was unconstitutional
By Megan Ma

>>Sunshine experiment in Palo Alto
Posting e-mails from council members on the city’s Web site
By Emma Lierley

Freedom of Information: Sunshine experiment in Palo Alto

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The Palo Alto City Council is conducting a unique experiment in its efforts to comply with the Ralph M. Brown Act, which requires government bodies to conduct business in a public way.

Palo Alto now posts e-mails from council members on the city’s Web site (www.cityofpaloalto.org/council), providing easy access to all with Internet capabilities. The e-mails were first posted online following a 2003 settlement of a Brown Act lawsuit against the city of Palo Alto by two local newspapers — Palo Alto Weekly and The San Jose Mercury News.

Eight private e-mails were in question, disclosing the votes of a closed city council session, and while the city never admitted guilt in vioutf8g the Brown Act, language in the settlement established the practice of posting council e-mails on the Web site and making them available in council agenda packets prior to meetings.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, questions the merits of the system.

"Some people would look at this and think it is a giant and serial violation of the Brown Act — but I wouldn’t necessarily say that," Scheer told the Guardian, noting that the prohibition on serial meetings bans such an approach. But he said that this is an interesting experiment, as long as council members don’t deliberate by e-mail. But assistant city manager Emily Harrison told us the messages avoid Brown Act violations by sticking to basic questions about agenda items, which the public can scrutinize.

The city of San Francisco has no such system in place, and e-mails to and from the Board of Supervisors is available only through direct request. Frank Darby, the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force administrator, said that the city had never looked into putting one in place.

"We are not required to post e-mails [under the Sunshine Ordinance]," Darby said. However, he added, the city "constantly monitors" itself to ensure that it is in accordance with the Sunshine law. "There may be some people who disagree and feel that maybe we should put every e-mail online — but currently the Sunshine Ordinance does not require that e-mails be made available online."

Freedom of Information: Battleship metadata

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› sarah@sfbg.com

On Valentine’s Day, Assemblymember Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana) introduced Assembly Bill 1978, legislation that seeks to define computer mapping systems and make them available to commercial interests at a fee — a one-two punch that freedom of information advocates fear constitutes a serious blow to the California Public Records Act.

Noting that computer mapping systems, computer programs, and computer graphic systems do not constitute public records under current law, Solorio’s bill seeks to amend the CPRA to define computer mapping systems to include "assembled model data, metadata, and listings of metadata, regardless of medium, and tools by which computer mapping systems are created, stored, and retrieved."

AB 1978 would also allow "commercial interests, who are most benefited by these systems, to obtain the portion of these systems developed by a public agency, at a fee designed to offset the agency’s cost of maintenance for the computer mapping systems."

But Oakland-based Bruce Joffe, who works as a geographic information consultant to cities, counties, and state agencies in California, warns that AB 1978 would allow public agencies to charge the public more for this data than the cost of duplication.

"It would severely weaken the CPRA and reduce the public’s access to government records," said Joffe, noting that as the law currently stands, CPRA requires state and local agencies to make their records available and, upon request, to provide copies on payment of any applicable fee.

Solorio aide Hazel Miranda told the Guardian that the intent of the bill is to protect software, not to restrict access to information.

"Our intent is to protect the software, not to restrict the information that is given out on it," Miranda said, noting that the bill’s sponsor is the government of Orange County. "The concern was that a lot of corporations were taking this information — and when the information is given out, you have to give out the software, too — and using it to their own benefit."

Joffe, who was the California First Amendment Coalition’s technical advisor when CFAC successfully sued Santa Clara County over access to the county’s tax maps, disagrees.

"When you give information out, you are not giving out software, you are giving out data in export format," said Joffe, who believes Solorio wants to change the law so that AB 1978’s sponsor, Orange County, which has sold its tax maps for $400,000 in the past, can continue to sell its data.

Holly Fraumeni, the AB 1978 lobbyist with the well-connected firm Putf8um Advisors, deferred questions to Bruce Matthias of Orange County’s legislative affairs, who told us, "The County of Orange has never disagreed on sharing public data. We are not trying to hide data down here. If you want it on a disk, we charge 25 cents. All we are doing is updating language in the bill. Our exclusive intent is to protect the software we’ve developed." Records show Orange County paid Putf8um Advisors $60,000 between October 1 and December 31, 2007.

CFAC executive director Peter Scheer believes AB 1978 is an attempt to take the information that CFAC has tried to make freely available and put it back under lock and key, so that it is proprietary information that can be sold.

Recalling how, years ago, the only way you could see a county’s tax maps was as an engineer’s rendering on paper, Scheer observed that when this data is computerized and made publicly available, "individuals and businesses can create all kinds of valuable tools or simply post the raw data on the Internet."

Blair Adams, chief consulting officer at San Francisco’s Department of Technology and Information Services, says the city’s GIS data has been publicly available for five years.

"We have no intent to change that," Adams said. "Our motto is ‘Go have it, and help us make it better.’<0x2009>"

But while San Francisco treats this data as a public record and copies it for the price of a blank DVD, Santa Clara and Orange counties have treated it as a revenue generator.

"They charge an arm and a leg, and another arm and leg, and whatever other appendages they can think of," said Scheer, noting that Santa Clara County charges $100,000 for a full base map of its real estate parcels — data that can be used to determine whether properties are assessed correctly, and whether pothole repairs are carried out equitably.

"Likely clients willing to purchase this data would be utilities, phone companies, and developers, who can’t do without it," Scheer said. "But public health and safety departments need access to it, too."

Joffe agrees, and it’s something he has plenty of experience with. He helps cities and counties create geographic information systems that allow ambulances to take the most efficient routes, the Department of Public Works to carry out better capital improvements, and the police to conduct better crime analysis.

"Every department uses it, and because it’s in the government system, therefore it is a public record, and the public has the right to access those records at no more cost than it takes to duplicate them," Joffe said. He added, "If AB 1978 passes, we’ll lose considerable access."

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Freedom of Information: A citizen’s guide to fighting secret government

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San Francisco has the best local sunshine law in the country — and there are still problems getting access to information. Even though the digital age in which we live affords government agencies with myriad ways to give citizens more access to public documents, there is too often little official will to create transparency. And often, bureaucrats are downright hostile to public scrutiny. But help is out there. This guide to local and national organizations offers a wide range of resources for journalists, citizen activists, and hell-raisers who want to track their tax money and hold their government accountable.

LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS


The California First Amendment Coalition is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to "promote and defend the people’s right to know" by improving compliance with state and federal access laws. CFAC’s Web site contains an archive of articles dealing with FOI issues, the texts of state FOI laws, and other useful resources. 534 Fourth St., Suite B, San Raphael, CA 94901. (415) 460-5060, cfac@cfac.org, www.cfac.org.

The California Newspaper Publishers Association is the umbrella organization to which most newspapers in the state belong, so it has an acute interest in open government. Its FOI Watch newsletter (also available online) includes a clearinghouse of sunshine news from around the state. 708 Tenth St., Sacramento, CA 95814. (916) 288-6015, tom@cnpa.com (general counsel Thomas Newton), www.cnpa.com.

Californians Aware, run by former CFAC general counsel Terry Francke, helps activists and organizations get access to public meetings and records and offers resources on the Web for citizens, public officials, journalists, and attorneys. 2218 Homewood Way, Carmichael, CA 95608. (916) 487-7000, info@calaware.org, www.calaware.org.

The Center for Investigative Reporting sponsors workshops on investigative techniques for journalists and university students. The center’s Web-based magazine provides FOI information, tips for journalists, and updates on past CIR investigations. 2927 Newbury St., Suite A, Berkeley, CA 94703. (510) 809-3160, center@cironline.org, www.muckraker.org.

The DataCenter provides on-call research, consultation, and referrals to justice organizations regarding FOI issues. It also offers research and action training. Services are free or on a sliding scale, depending on one’s ability to pay. 1904 Franklin St., Suite 900, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 835-4692, ext. 376, www.datacenter.org.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online First Amendment organization, works to uphold digital free speech, empower the online public, and protect privacy on the Internet. It provides stories and alerts on its Web site, with daily updates. Effector, an e-mail newsletter, is available through the site. 454 Shotwell St., S.F., CA 94110. (415) 436-9333, information@eff.org, www.eff.org.

The First Amendment Project is a public interest law firm that provides legal representation, educational programs, and low-cost or free advice for journalists, public interest organizations, and individual citizens with public records and FOI-related issues. In a joint publication effort with the Society of Professional Journalists, the project offers three free pocket guides, on the Brown Act, California’s Open Meeting Law, and accessing court records. The Web page has information on using the California Public Records Act as well as on getting court records. 1736 Franklin St., 9th floor, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 208-7744, fap@thefirstamendment.org, www.thefirstamendment.org.

Media Alliance is a nonprofit media center that offers classes on journalism skills, including how to find and use public records. 1904 Franklin St., Suite 500 Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 832-9000, information@media-alliance.org, www.media-alliance.org.

The Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter, FOI Committee fights for open access to information and educates members of the public on FOI issues. The group provides a subscription e-mail list for journalists and others involved in FOI and First Amendment issues in California as well as putting on the James Madison FOI Awards. 222 Sutter St, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108 (415) 321-1700, www.spj.org/norcal.

NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS


The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information conducts research and educates the public in mass-media law and the First Amendment, including public access to government meetings and records and litigation information. University of Florida, College of Journalism and Communications, 3208 Weimer Hall, P.O. Box 118400, Gainesville, FL 32611-8400. (352) 392-2273, www.jou.ufl.edu/brechner.

The Center for National Security Studies works with concerned citizens and groups to expose secret government policies and offers free assistance to those seeking records under the Freedom of Information Act. It also coordinates related litigation. 1120 19th St. NW, 8th floor, Washington, D.C. 20036. (202) 721-5650, cnss@cnss.org, www.cnss.org.

The FOIA Blog, created by an FOIA Washington attorney, has an updated list of documents currently being released by several government agencies infoprivacylaw@yahoo.com, www.thefoiablog.typepad.com.

The Freedom of Information Center of the University of Missouri School of Journalism has a collection of more than one million articles and documents about access to information at the local, state, and federal levels. The center works to ensure compliance with sunshine laws around the country. Its Web site contains links, updates, and tips on FOI inquiries. A free e-mail newsletter provides information on developments in FOI access and issues; you can sign up by contacting umcjourfoi@missouri.edu. University of Missouri, 133 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. (573) 882-5736, daviscn@missouri.edu, www.missouri.edu/~foiwww.

GovernmentDocs allows people to browse and search thousands of pages acquired through the FOIA and sunshine laws. Registered users can review and comment on documents. www.governmentdocs.org

GovTrack provides information on the U.S. Congress. It compiles information on federal legislation, voting records, and other congressional date and simplifies the language for ordinary citizens. It also indexes all bills, as well as changes to them, in Congress and all roll call votes www.govtrack.us.

Investigative Reporters and Editors provides educational services for investigative reporters and editors. The group’s Web site offers FOI-related resource guides, a database of FOI stories, tips for using the Freedom of Information Act, and a database of previous FOI requests. University of Missouri School of Journalism, 138 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. (573) 882-2042, www.ire.org

The National Freedom of Information Coalition is composed of First Amendment organizations dealing with FOI issues. It provides resources for the media, government officials, lawyers, and citizens who want access to public information. The coalition also offers seminars and workshops to media professionals, attorneys, academics, students, and the public on FOI issues and helps nurture start-up FOI groups and Internet sites. Its Web site offers links to relevant legislation and organizations state by state, as well as an Internet mailing list, FOI-L. 133 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. (573) 882-5736, cdavis@nfoic.org, www.nfoic.org.

OMB Watch is a member of the Public Access Working Group, a coalition of organizations promoting greater access to government information. OMB Watch offers an online newsletter, OMB Watcher, available on its Web site or by e-mail, which typically includes articles on FOI issues. To subscribe to the weekly e-mail version, e-mail join-ombwatcher@lyris.ombwatch.org. 1742 Connecticut NW, Washington, D.C. 20009. (202) 234-8494, www.ombwatch.org.

The Project on Government Secrecy is an advocacy and public education project of the Federation of American Scientists. The project has an extensive archive and provides regular news updates through its Web site and e-mail newsletter, Secrecy News. 1725 DeSales Street NW, 6th floor, Washington, D.C. 20036. (202) 454-4691, www.fas.org/sgp/index.htm.

Project Vote Smart provides information on local, state, and national candidates, including voting records, issue positions, campaign contributions, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. The database is accessible by calling the toll-free hotline at 1-888-VOTE-SMART. 1 Common Ground, Phillipsburg, MT 59858. (406) 859-8683 comments@vote-smart.org, www.vote-smart.org.

The Radio-Television News Directors Association is the world’s largest professional organization devoted to electronic journalism. It lobbies for cameras in courtrooms and strong FOI laws and provides coverage of FOI issues on its Web site. 1600 K St. NW, Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20006. (202) 659-6510, www.rtnda.org.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press operates the 24-hour FOI Service Center at 1-800-336-4243 to answer emergency questions from journalists and others with open-records problems. 1101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 1101, Arlington, VA 22209. (703) 807-2100, rcfp@rcfp.org, www.rcfp.org.

The Society of Professional Journalists advocates for open access to information and educates members of the public on FOI issues. The society’s Web site has an FOI section with extensive links to resources and information, including a list of FOI advocacy organizations. 3909 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, IN 46208. (317) 927-8000, questions@spj.org, www.spj.org.

State Sunshine and Open Records shares information, guidance and advice on developments and news about open records at the state and local level. They also have an extensive list of links to other sunshine blogs. www.openrecords.wordpress.com.

The Student Press Law Center works with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to cover FOI and other First Amendment issues reutf8g to high school and college journalists. It offers free advice, lawyer referrals, and analysis. 1101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209. (703) 807-1904, admin@splc.org, www.splc.org.

The Sunlight Foundation develops a database to ensure transparency in government and fiscal accountability. They digitize new info and provide access to existing information. 1818 N Street NW, Suite 410, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 742-1520. www.sunlightfoundation.com.

WikiFOIA helps people understand the FOI Act on a state and federal level by providing a how-to-guide about open records requests, as well information on how to make that request. www.wikifoia.pbwiki.com.

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND RESOURCES


The Guardian Web site has extensive information and links concerning international press-freedom issues. For details on journalists under fire, including frontline dispatches and reports from the battle to keep the world safe for journalists, go to www.sfbg.com/journalists/. For updates, dispatches, and links to national and international FOI groups, go to www.sfbg.com/FOI.

The UK FOI Blog provides a glimpse into how FOI issues are dealt with across the pond by listing news and developments on FOI in Great Britain. www.foia.blogspot.com.

Local government resources

The Government Information Center, on the fifth floor of the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch, stocks public documents published by the city. These include annual reports for committees and departments, minutes and agendas of official meetings, environmental impact reports, and city audits, ordinances, and resolutions. San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St., S.F., CA 94102. (415) 557-4500, www.sfpl.org.

The Oakland Public Ethics Commission responds to complaints and holds hearings on possible violations of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. Records, tapes of the commission’s meetings, agendas, and minutes can be picked up at the commission’s office. 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza, 4th floor, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 238-3593, ethicscommission@oaklandnet.com, www.oaklandnet.com/government/public_ethics/webpage.html.

The Office of Information and Privacy, U.S. Department of Justice, provides online versions of frequently requested records, opinions, policy statements, and guides to the Freedom of Information Act. The guides include detailed instructions for filing FOIA requests, average response times for different governmental offices, and a wealth of other useful information. The text of the FOIA is available on the office’s Web site. 1425 New York Ave., Suite 11050, Washington, D.C. 20530. (202) 514-3642, www.usdoj.gov/oip/oip.html.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records is an online database of court records and decisions. Web access is 8¢ a page, and requires registration through the Web at www.pacer.psc.uscourts.gov. P.O. Box 780549, San Antonio, TX 78278. 1-800-676-6856, pacer@psc.uscourts.gov.

The San Francisco Ethics Commission monitors and enforces the Sunshine Ordinance and the city’s governmental-ethics, campaign-finance, and lobbyist-reporting laws. Individuals can file complaints regarding violations of the Sunshine Ordinance. The commission meets the second Monday of each month at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall, Room 408. 25 Van Ness, Suite 220, S.F., CA 94102. (415) 252-3100, ethics.commission@sfgov.org, www.sfgov.org/site/ethics_index.asp.

The San Francisco Law Library is open to the public, though only government officials, state bar members, and judges can check out items. Main reference library: Mon.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Veterans War Memorial Building, 401 Van Ness, Room 400, S.F. (415) 554-6821. Courthouse reference room: Mon.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., 400 McAllister, Room 512, S.F. (415) 551-3647. Financial District branch: Mon.-Thurs., 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., noon-4 p.m., 685 Market St., Suite 420, S.F. (415) 882-9310, www.ci.sf.ca.us/site/sfll_index.asp.

The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force oversees compliance with San Francisco’s sunshine law by investigating complaints from individuals who believe city officials have withheld records or conducted meetings in violation of the law. The task force meets the fourth Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m. City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244 (meetings held in Room 408), S.F. For complaint forms and other information call (415) 554-7724 or go to http://www.sfgov.org/site/sunshine_index.asp

PUBLICATIONS


The California First Amendment Coalition publishes the California Journalist’s Legal Notebook, a handy guide to the legal issues surrounding telephone interviews, press passes, gags on sources, and other journalism-related topics ($36.25, $30.88 for CFAC members, shipping included). Also by CFAC is The New Brown Act: How the Open Meeting Law Has Been Revised ($12.75, $7.39 for CFAC members, shipping included). (415) 460-5060.

The Oakland Public Ethics Commission publishes a free brochure, How to Notice a Public Meeting under the Oakland Sunshine Ordinance and the Brown Act, useful for making sure a public meeting follows the requirements of the Brown Act. (510) 238-3593, (510) 238-6620, ethicscommission@Oaklandnet.com, www.oaklandnet.com/government/public_ethics/webpage.html.

Access to Courts and Court Records in California, Open Meeting Laws in California, and The California Public Records Act are free, convenient, quick-reference guides published by the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter, and the First Amendment Project. (510) 208-7744, www.thefirstamendment.org/freepress.html.

The ACLU Freedom of Information Project publishes Using the Freedom of Information Act: A Step-by-Step Guide (#4002, $3) and Your Right to Government Information (#1190, $5.95), which covers a broader range of topics, including how to get into public meetings. Both publications can be ordered online through the ACLU’s e-store or by phone. ACLU Publications, P.O. Box 4713, Trenton, NJ 08650-4713. 1-800-775-2258, www.aclu.org.

The Government Printing Office publishes The Freedom of Information Act Guide and Privacy Act Overview ($63), a 986-page guide to the FOIA produced by the Justice Department. It can be ordered by phone at 1-866-512-1800 or online at bookstore.gpo.gov. The Citizen’s Guide is available in its entirety online at www.fas.org/sgp/foia/citizen.html.

The Freedom of Information Clearinghouse Guidebook is a free brochure about making FOIA requests and appealing agency decisions. It’s available online through the Freedom of Information Clearinghouse. www.citizen.org/litigation/free_info/index.cfm.

Paper Trails: A Guide to Public Records in California ($12.89), written by Stephen Levine and Barbara Newcombe, is published by the Center for Investigative Reporting and supported by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. It can be ordered from the CIR. An abridged, online version is coming soon. 2927 Newbury St., Suite A, Berkeley,, CA 94703. (510) 809-3160, www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/

The fourth edition of the Investigative Reporters’ Handbook ($61, $51 for Investigative Reporters and Editors members), by Steve Weinberg, Brant Houston, and Len Bruzzese, is a comprehensive and accessible guide for novice and experienced journalists that shows how to locate and use more than 500 sources of public information. (573) 882-3364, www.ire.org/store/books.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press supplies a wealth of publications on public access and other First Amendment topics. How to Use the Federal FOI Act ($5) is a handbook on FOI rights, with instructions for appealing if your request is denied, and includes sample letters. The First Amendment Handbook ($7.50) is a journalist’s pocket guide to FOI issues. Two guides — Judicial Records: A Guide to Access ($3) and Access to Electronic Records ($5) — analyze state laws and decisions regarding access to legal records and government electronic data. Tapping Officials’ Secrets is a set of guides to state public records and open-meeting laws ($10 a state). The News Media and the Law is a quarterly magazine that includes updates on legislation pertinent to FOI ($30 a year for four issues). Some of these publications are available in their entirety online; all can be ordered online. 1-800-336-4243, www.rcfp.org.

The second edition of Law of the Student Press ($18) is a vital handbook for student newspapers. It’s extensively annotated but avoids legalese and tries to bring the law to life for students and educators. The Student Press Law Center also publishes Covering Campus Crime, Third Edition ($2) and the Student Press Law Center Report ($15 for three issues a year). (703) 807-1904, www.splc.org.

Citizen Muckraking: How to Investigate and Right Wrongs in Your Community ($9) offers advice on writing press releases, conducting interviews, and using the FOIA. The book, a collaborative effort by the Center for Public Integrity, is available through Common Courage Press. 1-800-497-3207, www.commoncouragepress.com

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