Page 32 - Flathead Beacon // 6.17.15

LIKE I WAS SAYIN’
TWO FOR THOUGHT SAME TOPIC, DIFFERENT VIEWS GOVERNMENT SECURITY
KELLYN BROWN
OPEN RECORDS IN MONTANA
AFTER A LONG DRIVE TO BIG SKY, WE ARRIVED a few minutes late to a seminar we had marked on our agenda to hear Mike Meloy speak at the annual Montana Newspaper Association Convention. It’s the first time I’ve met him, but if you work in our business, you’re familiar with his name.
Meloy is as an attorney for the Freedom of Informa- tion hotline in Helena and often works with media orga- nizations across the state, many of which contact him first with questions about the state’s open records laws. He began his seminar by explaining consequences of the recent Montana Legislative Session, both good and bad. Here’s what private citizens now face when they attempt to track down documents government agencies might not want them to see.
In a roughly 50-page bill (HB123) revamping open records laws, and which Meloy doubted many lawmak- ers read, there are new rules that help and hinder your search for information.
First, the good. There are now new requirements, according to Meloy, that agencies keep records for pri- vate meetings. There’s another update requiring agen- cies to respond in writing when it refuses your records request.
Then, there’s the bad, to which Meloy segued by say- ing, “You should hide children and dogs when the Leg- islature comes to town.”
There are still old provisions and a few new ones that can be used to deny access to information. Meloy cited examples and the first he highlighted allows various exceptions to turning over documents
Section 3 of HB123 allows a public officer to withhold information “relating to individual or public safety or the security of public facilities, including public schools, jails, correctional facilities, private correctional facili- ties, and prisons, if release of the information jeopar- dizes the safety of facility personnel, the public, stu- dents in a public school, or inmates of a facility.”
While the government should withhold information if it endangers someone’s safety, Meloy foresees officers withholding what would otherwise be available to the public in order not to violate state law.
Another odd provision of the bill allows the Mon- tana Historical Society to “honor restrictions imposed by private record donors as long as the restrictions do not apply to public information. All restrictions must expire no later than 50 years.” Who will decide if records donated to the Montana Historical Society, a public institute, should be deemed private?
Perhaps the most troubling part of Montana’s updated open records law is the additional costs to obtain records. It’s not unusual for a government agency to charge up to $1 a page for documents, some of which span several years and can cost hundreds of dollars. Of course, you can always travel to the court house and take photographs of records, but some government employees frown on that, too.
Now, obtaining agency records may become more expensive because HB123 includes a provision that allows public agencies to charge those seeking govern- ment documents a fee for the “time required to gather public information,” and the requestor can be asked to “pay the estimated fee prior to identifying and gathering the requested public information.”
To be clear, it is easy to access records in Flathead County, but obtaining records from other municipali- ties across the state can prove difficult and expensive. And allowing various agencies to subjectively charge by the hour to retrieve public documents is another hurdle to a fully transparent government.
BY TIM BALDWIN
The federal government believes that China has
beached government security concerning more than 4 million former and current federal employees. The FBI has described this as an ongoing cyber-war with China and openly admitted that China could use this informa- tion for espionage purposes. The FBI claims it will hold accountable those who did this.
How can America hold China accountable? China supplies us with most retail products, causing a trade deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars; has twice the military ground troops as America; is continually increasing its military budget and spreading its mili- tary geographically; is pressuring American allies in the East; has Russia as an ally; supports totalitarians regime of North Korea and Iran where liberty is only a word; holds hundreds of nuclear warheads; and has over 10 billion in population.
Some political speculators say China is not a threat to America because they need us for economic prosper- ity. Perhaps – for now – but things change. Like scien- tists theorize that the magnetic poles of the Earth sud- denly shift in time, causing dramatic and catastrophic changes in climate, geopolitical poles have been known to shift suddenly – normally through war or revolution. The catalyst cannot be predicted, nor plans be suffi- ciently made for such a shift.
China is not America’s friend. Yet, America sense- lessly depends on China to satisfy our insatiable lust for consumption. How can America hold China account- able under these conditions?
BY JOE CARBONARI
Our thoughts and our actions are private only
when kept to ourselves. When we share with oth- ers we put ourselves at risk of being overheard, intentionally or not. Privacy in communication has always been relative and of infinitely varying value. It depends on what you are communicating and who cares.
For most of us, our phone messages and Inter- net action remain untouched; recorded and indexed and stored, but untouched. We are still inviolate, but clearly vulnerable. Especially so if we are sig- nificant players.
Presidents, and the people who talk to them, are likely targets; top businessmen, top military, and the people who they talk to, and so on. Total privacy in communication requires a personal delivery.
Still we have the Internet and cell phones and people who wish us harm. These messages are easy to intercept and can be decrypted. It should be legal to do so with safeguards, which, recognizably, will never be total.
To my mind the jihadist threat alone is suffi- cient to warrant allowing this threat to privacy as a trade-off for the reduction of threat to life. We need to carefully limit access to our communica- tion records and to which others they connect, and even more guardedly to their contents.
Yes, invasions of privacy are bad, but death is worse. Keep the records, and guard the door.
AMERICAN RURAL DIANE SMITH
WANT TO GET SMARTER? TRY A SMALL TOWN
M
experience and input in their own lives and in their closest advisors. They gather around them a range of experiences and connections that allow them to explore ever vaster reservoirs of information. They don’t fear those with knowledge or expertise that looks different from theirs; they welcome it, knowing that their capac- ity will only be enriched by such “otherness.”
When we moved to Montana so many years ago, it never occurred to me that I would become smarter sim- ply by virtue of being surrounded by folks who knew how to grow wheat, bend metal, ski like an Olympian, or hunt like Daniel Boone. Now, I appreciate each day how much richer and, yes, smarter, my life is for having been touched by those whose skills are so very different from mine. In Denver, Barbara feels it as well. The ability to know and have neighbors of broad diversity used to be a marker of great cities. Today, perhaps that diversity is becoming more evident in rural, small town and small city America than in our grand metropolises.
Barbara and I no longer talk as much about our careers, now our conversations are more about politics, food, and the nuances of recent David Brooks columns. But in almost every conversation, one of us will say, “You’ve gotta hear about this person I just met.” If our biggest cities become patrician ghettos, it will indeed be a huge loss. In the meantime, if you’re interested in get- ting smarter, there are plenty of rural and small town communities happy to leave the light on for you.
Y BEST FRIEND BARBARA (THE MOST brilliant person I know) and I don’t talk
nearly often enough, but we do try to spend some serious quality time together as often as possi- ble. Barbara and I met at the beginning of our careers in Washington, D.C. when we were both working in the telecom industry. Often the only women in the room, we blazed a trail or two together and have always fiercely admired and relied on each other’s intellect and insight. Recently, we have both concluded that we are, actually, getting smarter. Barbara, more humble than I, chalks it up mostly to better wine, age and expe- rience. Being a beer drinker, I’m not buying the wine explanation, but we are obviously older and way more experienced than either of us thought we’d live to be by this time in our lives. However, we have speculated that there may be something else going on as well.
The Financial Times recently ran a story that began, “Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself.” The article sounds the alarm about what happens in cities after gentrification. They call it “plutocratisation,” where only the truly wealthy can afford the lifestyle and even upper-middle-class residents exit due to unaffordabil- ity. These cities ultimately become, according to the article, “patrician ghettos.”
So, what does this have to do with getting smarter? The smartest people I’ve known seek diversity of
Learn more about Diane by following her column here or visit American Rural at AmericanRural.org.
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JUNE 17, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM