Connecticut FOI Law Blogby Attorney Mark Dumas

This week’s freedom of information tip should be pretty obvious, but maybe not obvious enough.

Here it is: don’t use your government email address to send racy emails to your girlfriend or boyfriend.

Why do I bring this up? Well, a Washington official did just that and it cost his town $5,000 for an independent investigation.  Worse yet,  Bob Sternoff, the guilty Kirkland City Council member, sent some of the emails while the city council was in session.

Maybe playing solitaire during sessions isn’t quite as bad after all…

[h/t: Open Government Blog]

I’ve written before about text messages as public records. We know that text messages are — at least in some circumstances — public records under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act and that the same logic would apply under Connecticut law.

Now it looks like the issue is spreading South, where a the city of Deltona, Florida has banned text messaging during public meetings because of concern about FOI laws and records retention.  The FOI Advocate points out that this concern has some merit, since sometimes the only way to obtain text messages — even for a municipality — is by issuing a subpoena to the service provider.  Since some text messages are deleted automatically within a few days, that means that records could be gone before a city could even obtain a copy.

About a month ago, I wrote about Senator Lieberman’s efforts to eliminate the 8¢ per page fees for downloading records from PACER, the federal courts public record system.  There haven’t been any changes in fees yet, but the federal courts have made one change relevant to Connecticut.   Thanks to a recent vote of the federal Judicial Conference,  it will be easier to find out about sealed cases.

Here’s what the federal court systems’ blog has to say about the rule change:

The Conference, acting at its March 17 meeting, voted to have Internet lists of civil and criminal cases in district courts include a case number and generic name, such as “Sealed vs. Sealed,” for each sealed case.

Such lists for each of the 94 district courts are generated by the Judiciary’s Case Management/Electronic Case Files system and are accessible through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system.

Currently, PACER lists of sequentially numbered district court cases skip the sealed cases, but a member of the public could query the missing case number directly and would see a message stating that the case “is under seal.”

The Conference in 2007 strongly encouraged district courts to change the message that PACER users receive when querying a sealed case-from “this case does not exist” to “this case is under seal.” The latest Conference action is consistent with and further implements the 2007 Conference policy by providing the public with information to confirm the existence of a sealed case.

The Conference left it up to the individual district courts to determine what additional information about sealed cases, such as the initials of the assigned judge or the date of filing, should be available to the public.