Washblog

The national segment was pretty good.  Most of the of issues were familiar to anyone who has been paying attention.  Government has continuously become more secretive, there are ever more exemptions for FOIA requests, the number of documents being classified as secret continues to grow, post-9/11 classification has been misused and abused, etc.  

Some highlights were the recent push to make it illegal to talk about secrets, the notion that governments should proactively publish everything, that government should step-up to the 21st century, etc.

The local segment was also pretty good.  I really enjoyed it and learned quite a bit.  The moderator was Steve Wilson (newspaper editor), Rep Toby Nixon (R-WA45), State Auditor Brian Sonntag, and Michele Earl-Hubbard (media law lawyer).  (Full bios are in the press release linked above.)  Wilson had the day's money quote of "Open records requests are a tool that gets sharper through use."

Earl-Hubbard related a recent case where the city government asserted attorney-client previlege when asked to make records public.  She also talked about the recent Seattle Times investigative report on the courts sealing cases.  It's all pretty nauseating.  I really had the impression that Michele Earl-Hubbard is fighting the good fight.

Rep Toby Nixon responded to questions about the role of the legislature in FOIA exemptions.  He says that it's a constant struggle and defended some of the exemptions, like not allowing the government to publicly release a company's competitive information.

There audience had a lot of really good questions.  I didn't take notes, so you'll all just have to watch the segment.

I didn't realize this event was being taped.  I wanted to attend, because I thought it might help embolden my own efforts, maybe learn from others.

During his opening statements, Rep Toby Nixon mentioned that elections should be open and verifiable.  Ah ha!  I found my opening for a question.  

I asked about the role of open records in relation to corporations, contractors, etc.  I related how Sequoia Voting Systems in Sno Co claims the method of counting votes is a tradesecret, thereby disallowing the citizens from seeing how the elections are administrated.  I also related how the Secretary of State's Office disgarded the rule requiring the source code for voting machines to be held in escrow.

Nixon's answer was very interesting.  He talked his efforts to extend the current performance audits done on touch screen voting systems (DREs) to the optical scanners (which died in the Rules Committee this year).  But he also defended a company's right to their intellectual property.  Which is something I hope to followup on with Nixon in the future.  

Perhaps I'm a bit hard core on this, but my thought is that if the public pays for it, then the public owns it.  To illustrate the difference, consider our state's voter registration database.  It's was developed by outsiders.  But the state owns and administers it.  That, to me, is the correct solution.  Whereas with voting machines, it literally is a black box, unwarranted and untested.  It may or may not work; the vendor is not liable.  No one may inspect how it works without permission; the vendor claims that counting votes -- a core mechanicism of any democracy -- is a trade secret.

Okay, I think that's all I have to say.  Time to return to work.  If something else comes up, I'll post in a comment.