“Seeking nothing in particular and everything in general”
When citizens feel that their jobs, their reputations, or the safety of themselves and their loved ones, might be threatened by a public revelation of something they said to an elected official with the expectation of reasonable privacy, what is the responsibility of the government to protect them from harm, or to protect their communications from disclosure?
Alternately, what is the government’s liability if harm should come to someone because of disclosure of a communication?
The costs are not negligible. Nor are the moral obligations. They are very real.
And what is the appropriate balance between serving the need for transparency in a democracy, and protecting the private rights of citizens? When a concerned citizen, a watchdog organization, or a conscientious public official, feels personally threatened that the information they provide about the public’s safety or constitutional rights, or about observed malfeasance, might be disclosed to the broad public, to whom else can they turn if not to trusted elected officials?
The very core democratic principle of representation could be eroded by unreasonable disclosure.
In fact, council members and their staffers have expressed concern that constituent communications diminished dramatically after attorney Tracie Washington said she would post all of the Council emails she obtained through questionable methods. Washington allegedly obtained Council emails directly from Sanitation Director Veronica White, in collusion with the city’s IT department, and bypassing City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields in complete violation of Mayor Nagin’s policy on public records requests.
Could there now be a public backlash against good transparency policies, caused by actions which burden elected officials, the solvency of government, or the well-being of private citizens?
These are some of the questions in play with a motion filed in Orleans Civil District Court by attorney Steven Lane, the attorney representing the City Council.
Lane asked the court to answer why broad public records requests for email over multi-year periods of time should not be limited in scope, or that the costs of up to $500,000 for review be paid for by the requestor. Various media entities, and attorney Tracie Washington, have submitted such broad requests for emails that 440,000 documents, totaling approximately 2.5 million pages, have to be reviewed.
Lane argued in the filing that these public records requests “seek nothing in particular and everything in general.” The complaint continued, “As in any document production, the party requesting the documents should not be permitted to engage in a fishing expedition with no preconceived notion as to the substance of the document sought to be produced.”
Lane proposed in the filing that document requests “should be limited topic, issue, keyword, or other identifying feature/search term to make the document request reasonable under Louisiana law.” Since the defendants have not submitted delimiting features in their public records search, legal counsel Steven Lane is asking the civil court to rule that they should be held liable for the costs associated with releasing the requested documents.
The NolaStat policy reform agenda takes very seriously privacy concerns. In any event, the NolaStat transparency recommendations focus primarily on administrative data, not communications, but all data fields would have to be thoroughly reviewed for any potential privacy considerations before the data is approved for publication.
