#file under: memes: stanford | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

samclownchester · 5 years ago

Text

Supernatural Rewatch 01x06

Skin

(Next Episode | Masterlist | Previous Episode)

So we start out with Sam and Dean talking about Sam’s attempts at maintaining contact with his college friends.

Dean: So you lie to them? Sam: No, I just don’t tell them everything Dean: Yeah, that’s called lying.

Interesting … considering how Dean reacts to being lied to in later seasons, it is interesting to note that he kind of has this black and white view of it while Sam is more comfortable telling people what they are comfortable hearing (look back at 01x01 and their different reactions to their dad letting them know about monsters at a very early age) Dean doesn’t like half-truths, even for other’s protections. (Not that he never lies throughout the series, this is another good idea for analysis)

Sam: So, what am I supposed to do, just cut everybody out of my life? You’re serious? Dean: Look it sucks but, a job like this, you can’t get close to people, period.

This episode we get to see more of Sam’s focus on people he cares about.

Did Sam really just ask his friend Becky to make them sandwiches?? Wow. (I know that this was to get her out of the room, but this was before “make me a sandwich” became such a big meme. It’s extra funny that they do it again in season 15 (When Deans asks the woman to leave so he can confront the Djinn) but they’re much more self-aware about it)

Dean: “One thing I learned from Dad, not matter what kind of shapeshifter it is, there is one sure way to kill it”

Sam: “silver bullet to the heart”

So they have dealt with Shapeshifters before, or at least Dean has. But maybe it was a different kind? One that didn’t shed the way this one does?

Dean: I hate to say it, but this is exactly what I’m talking about. You lie to your friends because if they knew the real you, they’d be freaked.

(file under – the queer coding of Sam Winchester)

Ok, I don’t know how much we can rely on the Shifter’s words about how Dean feels but, assuming we can;

Shifter!Dean: You got to go to college … I had to stay home with Dad, you don’t think I had dreams of my own? But Dad needed me, where the hell where you? … deep down, I’m just jealous. You got friends; you could have a life. Me? I know I’m a freak, and sooner or later everybody’s gonna leave me. … You left. Hell, I did everything Dad asked me too and he left me too. No explanation, nothing just – left me with your sorry ass.

So, this tells us that Dean did have dreams of his own, that he’s thought about a life away from hunting (contrary to what he tells Lilith in Season 15). It’s also interesting because we usually see the word “freak” applied to Sam, when he realizes he’s psychic, when he gets addicted to demon blood, later when he is defending Jack. But here we see that Dean feels like a freak in his own way. He knows that he can never have a normal life, never be seen as normal by other people, so he doesn’t even try. Sam tries to have friends, tries to give them the portions of himself that they can handle, but Dean knows nobody in the normal world will be able to understand him – how he grew up, what he’s been through – so he doesn’t let anyone get too close.

In 15x07 we learn that Dean did have friends in his 20’s. Hunter friends, but still friends. He hunted with Lee while Sam was in college. So why do we never hear about him? Why doesn’t Dean call him up sometimes, or fondly remember him? (well, realistically because the writers didn’t invent Lee until they wrote season 15) But, there’s a canon reason too. Dean mentions that he thought Lee had died by the time he sees him in 2020. He obviously cared about Lee, enjoyed spending time with him, but he didn’t make the effort to stay in contact, to find out if his friend had lived or died, most likely because he was afraid of losing him. It’s easier to walk away from people than have them walk away from you. In this episode (1x06) we see Dean chooses to stay disconnected from people around him.

Sam needs people, so he adjusts himself to their expectations and their comfort, but Dean would rather have no connection than a partial one, or one that will inevitably end in hurt.

“you mean like a Vulcan mind meld?” (Ok, so Dean canonically watched Star Trek, at least enough to immediately think of this reference. good to know. For reasons) “maybe he needs to keep us alive, for the psychic connection” (Ok, maybe never mind about the shapeshifter in season 13, I don’t know if she would be able to get the thoughts of the deceased loved ones. )

“maybe this thing was born human but was different. Hideous and hated. Until he learned to become someone else.”

Ok, so this line is said by the shifter, as Dean, about the shifter, but I want to talk about how it applies to Sam. Sam Winchester is born human, but he has demon blood. We learn in season 8 that, although he didn’t know about the demon blood or about his psychic abilities until his 20’s, as a child he felt that he was “not clean.” Not only is raised to fight and kill monsters, very unlike a normal kid, he also has this intrinsic sense of … wrongness. Additionally, he has never been encouraged by his father to be himself or to pursue his own interests. He likely doesn’t believe that anything about who he is is good or worth anything. So, he learns to be something else. He goes to college and tries to leave his entire life behind him. He doesn’t open up about his real life to anyone, not even his girlfriend. He tries to adapt. Fit in, even though he doesn’t fit. Then he goes hunting with Dean, but he won’t tell Dean about his visions, he doesn’t open up to him. He dutifully plays the role of little brother, and hides anything that could cause Dean worry or pain. We see this repeat throughout the seasons, Sam adapting, tucking away parts of himself, letting go of his opinions, his views on things, letting Dean be right. The one time when he doesn’t do this is with Jack. He sees himself in Jack, a scared little boy who is so afraid of being evil, and he can’t watch what happened to him happen to somebody else. He has to step in, speak up on Jack’s behalf. He CAN’T tuck his feelings away this time, because it’s not himself on the line. He doesn’t often stand up for himself, but he will stand up for other people.

Shifter: All alone, close to no one. All he wants is somebody to love him. He’s like me

Rebecca’s eyes: *THE F*** IS THIS GUY SERIOUS*

SAME Rebecca SAME

EUGH I forgot how gross shifting was.

Ok, well Dean is officially a wanted man. Wow, to go from a few torture/murders to attempting to assassinate the president. He really has beefed up his resume.

The Samulet!! Weird that the shifter took that from Dean and wasn’t able to replicate it … O.O That’s such a good little detail to let us know that it’s important.

Oh, so now Rebecca knows the truth about Sam.

Rebecca: “Will you call us sometime?” Sam: “It might not be for a little while.”

(and she was never heard from again … I imagine because Sam started to realize that Dean was right. It’s easier to stay away from connections. This is also probably a part of his growing guilt, and fear that anyone close to him will be hurt. It is interesting to think … now that she knows the truth and the fake version of him no longer exists in her mind, he doesn’t try to maintain the relationship?)

DEAN: Sorry, man.

SAM: About what?

DEAN: I really wish things could be different, you know? I wish you could just be….Joe College.

SAM: No, that’s okay. You know, the truth is, even at Stanford, deep down, I never really fit in.

DEAN: Well, that’s ‘cause you’re a freak.

SAM: Yeah, thanks.

DEAN: Well, I’m a freak, too. I’m right there with ya, all the way. (SAM laughs.)

SAM: Yeah, I know you are.

I know Dean means this as a playful joke, but it’s the first time we see Sam being referred to as “a freak” which will occur much more after this.

#supernatural #supernatural rewatch #01x06 #1x06 #1x6 #skin #shapshifter #dean winchester #sam winchester #character analysis #sam is a freak #I love him so much someone protect him

3 notes · View notes

synnefo-nefeli · 7 years ago

Note

How about... Klapallo 49?

For this meme and the prompt “coming home”

He’s lost track of all the places he’s lived in his 25 years, although some stand out more than others.

There’s the family manor tucked in the hills of Mittenwald, looming cold and austere on the hillside over the almost fairy-tail like village. It’s where the “commons” his father was oft to remark lived, and considering Klavier had the best tutors and home schooling, money could buy Klavier has few memories in the village town.

The manor is cold and impersonal, and despite it being the ancestral seat of his father’s fathers, Klavier never felt he belonged among the severe and proper halls. Staff kept the immense galleries and rooms neat and orderly, everything had to be in its proper place. It wasn’t until he’s older that Klavier realized that while at any point at least four people and a staff of fifteen lived within the house and grounds, the manor never felt lived in. It was more of a museum to showcase his family’s wealth and past achievements. The current occupants left to spend a lifetime hoping to find a place among the walls for the future generations to remember them by.

The manor is cold and chilling, and sometimes he can’t believe he grew up in such a place.

Kristoph however, fit in perfectly.

Themis Academy is the first place he’s lived, after the manor and the first time he’s lived in a foreign country.

It’s a boarding school and he has to share a room- it’s and odd thing to have to share your space when you’re twelve (a whole two years younger than most of your classmates) when you’ve never had to before.

He’s not alone per se, Kristoph is an hour (plane ride) away at Stanford.

His roommate is nice, a foreign student like himself, so they have that to bond over at least. Joo-won will go on to be one of Klavier’s closer friends at Themis, and years later, Joo-won joins the record label and is assigned to The Gavinner’s legal council.

Klavier remembers being excited for this new chapter in his life, his first adventure, really. Excited to learn about the Law, eager to explore “LaLa Land” itself and see if he could make his rock-star dreams come true. He’s prepared himself for the homesickness.

In fact he’s read up on the feeling and ways to treat the melancholy so he won’t waste a second of this new life missing out on his old.

It’s almost three months into his semester when he realizes, that the homesickness never came.

Tour-busses are an experience all to their own. The Label has spared no expense on customizing their small fleet of buses to have every luxury and comfort as they spent hours on the road.

It’s somewhere between the lulling bouncing for hours on an airplane and wonder one gets when they wake up in a new port of call, when on a cruise boat.

It’s a surreal experience- he’s on a bus for hours and days at a time, watching countrysides drift by, but he has a sound proofed room to practice for the next concert and a small state of the art recording booth should the muses deign to visit.

The bands moves around too much for Klavier to get attached to any one place. He supposes the bus is his home now, considering the hours he’s racked up in his moving living quarters, but at times Klavier feels the detachedness of the family manor. The bus is always pristine and nice, and despite who is occupying it, never really has a personal touch other than the Record Label’s branding.

The feeling of comradely, however, is nice. When he’d left Themis to return to Germany for his badge, he’d missed having his friends about him while he studied. Now he had his bandmates, his closest and creative kindred spirits.

Jam-sessions that are never recorded and only live in their memories, long running games of Spades in his bunk, eating and touring across so many cities and countries, that sometimes Klavier has to scroll back through years of Instagram posts (his personal- not the Label’s- they’d scrubbed a majority of the Gavinner’s posts, especially ones that featured Daryan) to specifically remember them all.

It’s a nice adventure filled with the warmth Klavier needs after his disastrous debut and to distract him from his nightmares of that case. But he never feels safe.

Each night when he and Daryan bid each other goodnight and climb into their respective buses, Klavier willingly pushes down the nagging sense of fragility of the distraction he’s chosen to take him far away from his brother and Phoenix Wright.

After nearly a decade of being on the road, he comes back to Los Angeles as a prosecutor. He’s divested himself from any stipends the Label provides, because despite still being a Rock Star, he’s also a public servant. The waters of the “Dark Age of the Law” churn constantly with scandals and public opinion towards their Justice System sinks lower and lower by the day, and Klavier is loath to add any reason for his peers and public to mistrust him.

“Go in to court with clean hands and all that jazz,” he thinks, “well, as clean as my hands can be…”

Fortunately he’s amassed a nice nest egg through being a world-famous rockstar and his endorsement deals.

He buys a nice home in the Hollywood Hills…because, well..what else is he to do? He’s Klavier Gavin after all.

It’s a spacious Spanish-style, with rooms for days, a pool as big as his other celebrity neighbors; high-privacy walls so the celebrity tour-buses won’t see him, with a price tag that will certainly give him an amazing tax-break and justifies the home values of the neighborhood.

He doesn’t balk at the price; it’s a good investment for him. Other celebrities blow their money on cars, drugs, women, and gambling. Property no matter what is a good place to put his money (and his guitars) so he doesn’t think it a waste.

What is a waste, is the interior decorator who is tasked to create the space worthy of “Klavier Gavin’s” flare. The decorator and his team do and amazing job of it, Klavier figures.

It’s a shame because between being a world-famous Rock Star and a full-time prosecutor, he’s barely lives in the home he’s bought in the Hollywood Hills.

At least the “Hollywood Homes” Tours enjoy it.

Two years since coming back to the courts full-time, he’s moved to Century City. It’s a duplex- still luxerous to match his tastes, but fits his needs better than the house in Hollywood Hills ever did. That home he sold and re-invested the money elsewhere, to the frustration of the Hollywood Tourism Board.

He lives in the duplex with Vongole. It’s closer to work, it’s in a section of the city that lets him have the glitz and glamour but also allows him to hit dive bars and be close to the local-music scene. Sometimes his colleagues come over to work on cases with him, and he doesn’t have to worry if his living space makes his co-workers feel out of place.

It’s a good place to live and he’s happy. But he can’t shake the feeling that his apartment is more of a means to an end.

The first time he feels it, he’s not at the address of his formally listed residence. He still lives in Century City, but since his and Apollo’s relationship has become more serious, Klavier finds himself more and more at Apollo’s small studio apartment in Atwater Village.

The day’s weather had been so hot he’d soaked through his dress shirt before he’d climbed all the way up the steps of the court. The cases he’d dealt with- hellish as if to match the weather.

And despite winning his cases, Klavier’s mood remained sour. At the office, Edgeworth had given him almost all of Payne’s pending cases, as the man had been suspended (again) by the Chief Prosecutor.

A long day of paperwork, re-filing the cases that his intern had sloppily sorted (because they’d had a hot date that evening and needed to leave early), and the discovery that all of his cases over the rest of the month would take him to court houses on opposite sides of the city daily, Klavier was thoroughly exhausted by the time he parked his motorcycle at Apollo’s building.

It’s when he steps off the elevator on the third floor that he smells it. Smells the aroma of ground pork and onions; the air spiced with garlic and a feeling that his chasing away his dark mood.

He realizes he knows this smell. The grocery cart parked outside of the apartment door with a box with a few scraps of corn husks, further confirms his suspicion that Apollo’s cooking. Tamales, if Klavier isn’t mistaken.

Sure enough when he enters, he’s greeted to the sight of Apollo’s back and the ties of the red apron his boyfriend is wearing. He’s busy forming the filling mixture with his hands, and on the small stove of the galley kitchen, the heat is rising in the dutch oven to cook off the stuffed corn husks.

When Apollo turn to smile at him, Klavier is drawn to press up behind him. Wrap his arms about the smaller frame and kiss Apollo’s warm cheek. Apollo smiles and wiggles under the touch; hands are caked in cornmeal and meat and their size difference leaves Apollo with not much else than to say,

“Welcome home.”

It’s such a normal thing to say. Apollo’s said it many times before- but tonight’s the first time that Klavier realizes that this is his home.

It’s not Apollo’s key on his key ring, or that Klaiver didn’t have to announce that he was coming over; nor the place he’s standing in at that very moment. It’s this person, this beautiful human in his arms. Who loves Klavier in all his glimmerousness, whose passion matches Klavier’s own for law and life. This man who smiles at him when he comes through the door and asks him about Klavier’s day, who is cooking dinner for them as if it’s the most normal and expected thing in the world.

He feels warm and safe, and a mixture of so many things at once. That he is feeling them all at the same time confirms to him, that no matter where work or music takes him, his home and heart is here. With Apollo.

Klavier’s response is a deep kiss, and a happy sigh. Apollo flusters, squawks and calls him a “sap”, but Klavier can see he’s smiling and so he does it again.

“What’s gotten in to you?” Apollo breathless, and still covered in tamale mixture, “are you that happy that we’re having tamales for dinner.”

“Ja, it’s an appropriate response given that I am about to have the best in LA,” Klavier grins and enjoys Apollo’s blush.

“Well if you help me, you’ll be able to eat them sooner-”

Klavier smiles and leans over Apollo to wash his hands in the sink before pulling another apron out of the drawer. Apollo shifts to make room for him at the counter;pushes the bowl of tamale mixture between them for Klavier to access.

May I always have a place besides you, Liebling he thinks and they proceed to ask each other about their respective days at work as dinner is made.

#ace attorney #klapollo #klavier gavin #apollo justice #free form #writing #fanfic #asks #prompt fills

16 notes · View notes

theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

Link

Several stories showing racial profiling of black Americans by police and white Americans continue to go viral — in one video, a white woman calls the cops on a black man babysitting two white children in Georgia. In another, a white student calls 911 when she sees a black classmate sleeping in a dormitory common room. In this essay, a former police dispatcher remembers the racist calls she used to take every day and law enforcement’s rules that forced her to respond to every caller, regardless of the incident.

It was the end of an 18-hour shift. My butt hurt from sitting in one place with only a couple of five-minute bathroom breaks. My brain hurt from staying awake that long, and my stomach ached from all the coffee I’d drunk to keep myself alert.

But the phones rarely stopped.

“911, what’s the address of your emergency?” I said into the headset.

The man gave me his address and then said, “There’s a woman pushing a shopping cart in front of my house.”

This one stumped me. I worked in a large metropolitan area. Yes, the city where I worked was affluent, and most people used their cars to get groceries. But surely he’d seen a person using a personal grocery cart before.

“I’m sorry, I’m not getting it. What’s the problem?” I waited for more clarification as I racked my brain for the correct penal code under which this infraction might fall.

“You need to get out here now.”

“Um.” A dispatcher has to be cautious about how she phrases things. Of all the jobs in emergency services — firefighters, police officers, nurses, doctors — dispatchers are the only ones who are recorded during every single thing they do. Everything they say — and their whole job is speaking — is part of public record. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re reporting.”

“She’s black.”

My heart sped up as it did every day when I heard this kind of thing. This Northern California city was affluent and very white, bordering Oakland, much of which was neither. “Sir, I’m still not seeing the problem. Is she being loud? Is the noise of the cart disturbing your peace?”

His tone got harsher. “Where do you live?”

I was so startled by the question that I answered it. “Oakland,” I said.

“You wouldn’t understand, then. This isn’t Oakland. We don’t have people like her in this neighborhood. Just send someone out to get rid of her. I’m not talking to you anymore.” The click in my ear was his goodbye.

The worst thing about it? I had to send someone out. Dispatchers usually don’t get to choose which calls lead to the dispatching of emergency personnel and which don’t.

If a person wants to make a report, they get to make a report. You can think of police reports as being like lawsuits. Anyone can make one about anything, no matter how stupid. Shortly after 9/11, I had to send an officer to take a report from a citizen because she’d had a dream about a knife-wielding man from Afghanistan.

Of course, dispatchers do have a tiny bit of control. I sent our one Afghan officer to take the report from her. He was amused; she, not so much.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the white Oakland woman who called the cops because black men were using a charcoal grill at Lake Merritt. She’s been memed and mocked, and the department has been criticized for sending officers out. But it all started with a dispatcher, answering that first phone call.

According to the computer logs, which have been made public, the call came in 11:22 am. A woman reported a 40-year-old heavyset black man using a charcoal grill. The dispatcher spent less than a minute asking her for more information. He typed NFD at the end, which stands for No Further Details.

Here’s where I start guessing things, based on 17 years of dispatching in the Bay Area. I’m guessing that the dispatcher rolled his eyes at this call so hard they almost fell out of his head. Yet another white lady upset over what black people were doing. Every single day of my career, I took that call. Every single day, I wanted to slam down the phone.

Instead, the dispatcher typed NFD. That’s subtle dispatch code for “this caller was a pain in the butt and couldn’t give more information about this lame-ass complaint.” It was entered as a Priority 3 call, which essentially means “not important” — the police officers on duty at that moment had much better things to do in a city like Oakland.

Two hours passed, and police had not responded. But then someone called to report the original caller was still on scene and now fighting with the people barbecuing, which prompted an immediate dispatch. “Life before property” is the code by which emergency services run. Potential property damage reports will hold for hours, if not days, if officers are busy intervening in situations where people are in physical danger. Once it was reported that people were fighting, an officer arrived at the scene of the barbecue eight minutes later.

Am I saying police officers aren’t racist — that they question black citizens more aggressively than white citizens because responding to most complaints is obligatory? Heck no. Many are. We live in a country still mired in institutional racism, including its policing. I’m not in the business anymore, and the relationship between police departments and communities of color was one of the reasons I left to write full time.

But I am pointing out that those cops on the video didn’t look happy to be forced to take the complaint seriously. They had way better things to do that afternoon than investigate some guys cooking out in a park.

In every city in America, 911 rings around the clock. Dispatchers are usually too short-staffed to take real breaks, and they can’t shut the center for weekends and holidays. They are the ones who suck it up and keep hitting the answer button, no matter what.

My co-worker once got a call from a man who said, “My neighbors keep parking in front of my house. And they’re black.”

Dispatchers all have moments when they reach the end of their patience, and that was Bonnie’s moment.

She said, “It’s a city street. Unfortunately, anyone can legally park wherever they like. I’m sure it’s very frustrating for you. Why would you bring race into this?”

“Are you black?”

“I am,” she said.

“Put your supervisor on the phone.”

He filed a police report against her instead of his neighbors.

She went through an internal affairs investigation because, of course, any report against a member of the police department has to be investigated. She was cleared of breaking any technical rules — she had stated clearly that no laws were being broken; she hadn’t had an attitude in her voice.

But she was sternly advised to be more circumspect in the future or her job would be at stake. She told me later, “That was the moment I decided to leave the industry. Every time I answered the phone, I felt like I got punched in the face. And I had to shut up and take it.” A few years later, she became a therapist on San Quentin’s death row. She said her new job was easier than dispatching.

The phone rings again. You mime stabbing yourself in the eyeball as the next caller says that she thinks three kids outside the 7-Eleven are getting ready to rob it.

“Why do you think that?”

“They’re wearing hoodies. You never know what those kinds of kids are carrying in their pockets. Every one of them could have a gun, you know. They probably do.”

“Did you see a gun?”

“Just check.” Click.

You swallow your cold oatmeal, you roll your eyes at your cubicle mate, and you enter the call for eventual dispatch even though you wish you could pretend you never got it. (If you don’t enter the call and something happens, you could lose your job for negligence.) Then you grab the next call.

Of course people should call 911 if it’s an actual emergency. But think before you call the cops to handle your feelings about a barbecue, or where someone is parked, or if they’re playing music on a Saturday afternoon. If you get it wrong (and all of us, living in the privileged bubbles of our own creation, often get it wrong), you could be the reason someone gets hurt or even killed.

With some rudimentary math, I’ve worked out that I’ve answered at least a quarter of a million 911 calls in my career. Amid the meaningless, racially charged calls, I’ve gotten so many by concerned citizens who genuinely want to help someone who is hurt or in danger. Good typically wins over evil. But it’s awfully damn close sometimes. And we all have to pick a side.

Rachael Herron is the best–selling author of the novel The Ones Who Matter Most, named an editor’s pick by Library Journal, as well as more than 20 other novels and memoirs. She received her MFA in writing from Mills College, Oakland, and she teaches creative writing in the extension programs at both UC Berkeley and Stanford.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> I used to be a 911 dispatcher. I had to respond to racist calls every day.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

6 notes · View notes

orbemnews · 4 years ago

Link

Billion-Dollar Paydays in a Pandemic These managers made bank Today, Institutional Investor unveiled the 20th edition of its Rich List, one of the most watched rankings of hedge fund managers’ performance. Every year, financial tycoons pore over the magazine’s estimates of whose fortunes are up the most. Last year, the top 25 managers earned $32 billion even as the economy crashed and markets wobbled. Over all, hedge funds returned 11.6 percent last year, according to Hedge Fund Research, their best performance in a decade but not enough to keep pace with the S&P 500, which was up 16 percent. “It may not be seemly, but it remains fact,” the magazine’s editors wrote. Here are the top earners, according to the list: Izzy Englander of Millennium Management, who earned an estimated $3.8 billion and whose flagship fund produced a 26 percent return. Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who earned $2.6 billion and whose flagship generated a 76 percent return (but whose fund open to outside investors lost big). Chase Coleman of Tiger Global Management, who earned $2.5 billion and whose top fund returned 48 percent. Ken Griffin of Citadel, who earned $1.8 billion and whose main fund returned 24 percent. (The firm has made headlines for other reasons, too.) Steve Cohen of Point72 Asset Management and David Tepper of Appaloosa Management both earned an estimated $1.7 billion. The rest of the best: Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management ($1.6 billion), Andreas Halvorsen of Viking Global Investors and Scott Shleifer of Tiger Global (both $1.5 billion), and Bill Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management ($1.4 billion). HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING New restrictions for the Paycheck Protection Program. For two weeks beginning on Wednesday, only businesses with fewer than 20 employees will be eligible to apply for loans from the glitch-prone emergency aid program. Separately, the Small Business Administration will revise how it calculates loans to help self-employed individuals. Boeing calls for grounding another of its airplane models. The company recommended a worldwide halt to flights using its 777 model with a particular Pratt & Whitney engine. The move came after a United Airlines flight suffered engine failure over Colorado, shedding debris over neighborhoods before landing safely in Denver. Texas’s energy markets come under scrutiny. The state’s uniquely independent and largely deregulated electrical grid has been criticized for being ill-prepared for last week’s severe winter storms and for saddling some customers with thousands of dollars in power bills. Good news for Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Data from Israel showed that just one dose prevented 75 percent of infections, potentially bolstering arguments for delaying second shots. (The research didn’t determine how long single-dose protection lasted.) The drug companies also announced that their vaccine could be stored safely in standard freezers for up to two weeks, which might mean it can be deployed more widely. A security breach highlights Clubhouse’s weaknesses. An unidentified user streamed audio from several chat rooms on the increasingly popular social network to a third-party website. The Stanford Internet Observatory, which first highlighted concerns about privacy on Clubhouse, warned that users should assume all their activity on the app is public and being recorded. Exclusive: Traeger fires up a sale The high-end grill maker has interviewed investment banks in recent weeks for what could be either a sale or an I.P.O., DealBook hears. Traeger, which has about $160 million in operating earnings, is growing quickly: Sales rose more than 20 percent last year. The company is hoping for a valuation that tops $3 billion, which may be too high for a buyer but could match public market appetite. The private equity firm AEA Investors, which acquired control of Traeger in 2017 for an undisclosed amount, declined to comment. Grill sales soared during the pandemic, as people stuck at home lit up the barbecue. Traeger’s wood-pellet-fueled grills can run into the thousands of dollars and come outfitted with Wi-Fi (“WiFire”) technology to adjust heat settings from a smartphone. At-home grilling could slow as economies reopen and people spend less time at home, but in that case, Traeger also sells accessories and grills made for travel. Traeger is the latest company looking to capitalize on a pandemic bump, testing the lofty premiums that investors are willing to fork out. McCormick paid $800 million to buy Cholula hot sauce as home cooking pushed spice sales, and Hormel paid $3.35 billion to buy Kraft Heinz’s once stalled Planters business as consumers sought comfort foods. Shares of Yeti, a maker of fancy coolers, have more than doubled over the past year, giving it a market capitalization of $6.5 billion. “When the pandemic ends, cash could be unleashed like melting snow in the Rockies.” — The Times’s Ben Casselman on the rising expectations among economists that a supercharged economic boom may come at the end of the pandemic. Tesla’s Bitcoin bet is paying off The price of Bitcoin set another record over the weekend, briefly rising above $58,000 per coin. And Elon Musk tweeted about it, cementing his status as one of crypto’s highest-profile backers. Tesla is set to make more profit from buying Bitcoin than selling electric cars, according to a research note by Daniel Ives at Wedbush Securities. A few weeks ago, the company said it had bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in order to diversify its balance sheet. The rapid rise in Bitcoin since then implies a gain, on paper, of roughly $1 billion; that’s more than Tesla earned from selling cars last year, the first time it turned a full-year profit. (Tesla also made more from another tangential business, selling renewable energy credits to other automakers.) Will more companies now follow its lead? Gaudy numbers like this might make C.F.O.s think twice about the cash and low-yielding bonds on their balance sheets. “It’s clearly been a good initial investment and a trend we expect could have a ripple impact for other public companies over the next 12 to 18 months,” Mr. Ives wrote. He expects less than 5 percent of public companies will shift corporate cash into cryptocurrency, which would still be a big jump. The week ahead The House is expected to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill at the end of the week, probably in a party-line vote. The Senate may take it up shortly after. The Fed chair Jay Powell testifies before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will most likely emphasize the need for more economic stimulus. On Tuesday, HSBC reports earnings, and the bank may also announce steps to move top executives from London to Hong Kong, The Financial Times reports. Other earnings highlights include Home Depot on Tuesday, Nvidia on Wednesday, Airbnb and Salesforce on Thursday, and Berkshire Hathaway on Saturday, when Warren Buffett’s widely followed annual letter on the state of business, markets and politics is also expected. THE SPEED READ Deals Today in SPACs: Elliott Management, Michael Dell and the former Xerox chief Ursula Burns have all filed to raise blank-check funds. And Asian tycoons are also eager to get into the game. (Bloomberg, WSJ) A group of activist investors is reportedly seeking nine of 12 board seats at the department-store chain Kohl’s. (WSJ) LVMH is buying half of Armand de Brignac, Jay-Z’s Champagne brand, in a bet that the “superluxury” market — a bottle can cost up to $65,000 — will bounce back from the pandemic. (NYT) Politics and policy The Trump administration quietly and unusually lifted sanctions on the Israeli mining magnate Dan Gertler in its final days, after lobbying from the likes of Alan Dershowitz. (NYT) Tech The venture capital firm Sequoia told investors that it had been hacked, and that some of their personal and financial information may have been stolen. (Axios) Hosts unhappy with Airbnb’s pandemic policies are taking their business elsewhere. (NYT) The British antitrust regulator has told American tech giants to expect a series of investigations into their business practices this year. (FT) Best of the rest The scale of short-selling positions in U.S. stocks has fallen drastically since the meme-stock frenzy. (Axios) McKinsey is facing criticism over its role in France’s slow vaccine rollout. (NYT) “The Boredom Economy” (NYT) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #BillionDollar #Pandemic #Paydays

0 notes

neptunecreek · 6 years ago

Text

The Foilies 2019

Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency

The cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese American family set in Orlando, Florida, in the late 1990s.

In a January episode of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, the Huang family’s two youngest children—overachievers Evan and Emery—decide if they sprint on all their homework, they’ll have time to plan their father’s birthday party.

“Like the time we knocked out two English papers, a science experiment, and built the White House out of sugar cubes,” Evan said. “It opened up our Sunday for filing Freedom of Information requests.”

“They may not have figured out who shot JFK,” Emery added. “But we will.”

The eldest child, teenage slacker Eddie, concluded with a sage nod, “You know, once in a while, it’s good to know nerds.”

Amen to that. Around the world, nerds of all ages are using laws like the United States’ Freedom of Information Act (and state-level equivalent laws) to pry free secrets and expose the inner workings of our democracy. Each year, open government advocates celebrate these heroes during Sunshine Week, an annual advocacy campaign on transparency.

But the journalists and researchers who rely on these important measures every day can’t help but smirk at the boys’ scripted innocence. Too often, government officials will devise novel and outrageous ways to reject requests for information or otherwise stymie the public’s right to know. Even today—20 years after the events set in the episode—the White House continues to withhold key documents from the Kennedy assassination files.

Since 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, privacy and government transparency in the digital age) has published The Foilies to recognize the bad actors who attempted to thwart the quests for truth of today’s Evans and Emerys. With these tongue-in-cheek awards, we call out attempts to block transparency, retaliation against those who exercise their rights to information, and the most ridiculous examples of incompetence by government officials who handle these public records.

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award - City of Greenfield, California

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

Sunshine laws? Tech giants think they can just blot those out with secretive contracts. But two nonprofit groups—Working Partnerships and the First Amendment Coalition—are fighting this practice in California by suing the city of San Jose over an agreement with Google that prevents city officials from sharing the public impacts of development deals, circumventing the California Public Records Act.

Google’s proposed San Jose campus is poised to have a major effect on the city’s infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. Yet, according to the organization’s lawsuit, records analyzing issues of public importance such as traffic impacts and environmental compliance were among the sorts of discussions Google demanded be made private under their non-disclosure agreements.

And it’s not just Google using these tactics. An agreement between Amazon and Virginia includes a provision that the state will give the corporate giant—which is placing a major campus in the state—a heads-up when anyone files a public records request asking for information about them. The Columbia Journalism Review reported Facebook has also used this increasingly common strategy for companies to keep cities quiet and the public in the dark about major construction projects.

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

Courtesy of National Security Counselors

After suing the CIA to get access to information about Trump’s classified briefings, Kel McClahanan of the National Security Law Center was expecting the agency to send over eight agreed-upon documents.

What he was not expecting was for the files—each between three and nine pages each—-to be spread out across six separate CD-ROMs, each burned within minutes of each other, making for perhaps the most unnecessary box set in the history of the compact disc.

What makes this “extra silly,” McClanahan said, is that the CIA has previously complained about how burdensome and costly fulfilling requests can be. Yet the CIA could have easily combined several requests onto the same disc and saved themselves some time and resources. After all, a a standard CD-ROM can hold 700 MB, and all of the files took only 304 MB of space.

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

%3Ciframe%20width%3D%22560%22%20height%3D%22315%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube-nocookie.com%2Fembed%2FLFhT6H6pRWg%3Fautoplay%3D1%22%20frameborder%3D%220%22%20allow%3D%22accelerometer%3B%20autoplay%3B%20encrypted-media%3B%20gyroscope%3B%20picture-in-picture%22%20allowfullscreen%3D%22%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E

Privacy info. This embed will serve content from youtube-nocookie.com

After repealing the Open Internet Order and ending net neutrality, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai doubled down on his efforts to ruin online culture. He released a cringe-inducing YouTube video titled “7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality" that featured his own rendition of the infamous “Harlem Shake” meme. (For the uninitiated, the meme is characterized by one person subtly dancing in a room of people to Baauer’s track “Harlem Shake.” Then the bass drops and the crowd goes nuts, often with many people in costumes.)

Muckrock editor JPat Brown filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails related to the video, but the FCC rejected the request, claiming the communications were protected “deliberative” records.

Brown appealed the decision, and the FCC responded by releasing all the email headers, while redacting the contents, claiming that anything more would cause “foreseeable harm.” Brown did not relent, and a year later the FCC capitulated and released the unredacted emails.

“So, what did these emails contain that was so potentially damaging that it was worth risking a potential FOIA lawsuit over?” Brown writes. “Pai was curious when it was going live, and the FCC wanted to maintain a veto power over the video if they didn’t like it.” The most ridiculous redaction of all was a tiny black box in an email from the FCC media director. Once removed, all that was revealed was a single word: “OK.”

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

When President Trump tweets attacks about the intelligence community, transparency groups and journalists often file FOIA requests (and subsequently lawsuits) seeking the documents that underpin his claims. The question that often comes up: Do Trump’s smartphone rants break the seal of secrecy on confidential programs?

The answer seems to be no. Multiple judges have sided with Justice Department lawyers, concluding that his Twitter disclosures do not mean that the government has to confirm or deny whether records about those activities exist.

In a FOIA case seeking documents that would show whether Trump is under investigation, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that the President’s tweets to that effect are “speculation.” Similarly, in a FOIA suit to get more information about the widely publicized dossier of potential ties between Trump and Russia, U.S. District Judge Amir Mehta said that the President’s statements are political rather than “assertions of pure fact.”

And so, whether Trump actually knows what he’s talking about remains an open question.

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

One of the benefits of public records laws is they allow almost anyone—regardless of legal acumen—to force government agencies to be more transparent, usually without having to file a lawsuit.

But in Washington State, filing a public records request can put the requester at legal risk of being named in a lawsuit should someone else not want the records to be made public.

This is what happened to Sarah Schacht, a Seattle-based open government advocate and consultant. For years Schacht has used public records to advocate for better food safety rules in King County, an effort that led to the adoption of food safety placards found in restaurants in the region.

After Schacht filed another round of requests with the county health department, she received a legal threat in November 2018 from Stanford Law School professor Daniel Ho’s attorney threatening to sue her unless she abandoned her request. Apparently, Ho has been working with the health department to study the new food safety and placard regulations. He had written draft studies that he shared with the health department, making them public records.

Ho’s threat amounted to an effort to intimidate Schacht from receiving public records, probably because he had not formally published his studies first. Regardless of motive, the threat was an awful look. But even when faced with the threat, Schacht refused to abandon her request.

Fortunately, the lawsuit never materialized, and Schacht was able to receive the records. Although Ho’s threats made him look like a bully, the real bad actor in this scenario is Washington State’s public records law. The state’s top court has interpreted the law to require parties seeking to stop agencies from releasing records (sometimes called reverse-FOIA suits) to also sue the original requester along with the government agency.

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

Courtesy of Jessica Huseman

ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman has been digging deep into the child welfare system and what happens when child abuse results in death. While following up on a series of strangulations, she requested a copy of a case file from the St. Joseph County Superior Court in Indiana. Apparently, the clerk on the other end simply took the entire file and ran everything through a scanner. The problem was that the file contained a CD-ROM, and that’s not how CD-ROMs work. “Well this is the first time this had happened,” Huseman posted to Twitter, along with the blotchy black-and-white image of the top of the disc. “They scanned a CD as part of my FOI and didn’t give me its contents. Cool cool.”

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

As tech companies experiment with autonomous vehicles on public roadways, reporters are keeping tabs on how often these cars are involved in collisions. That’s why The Information’s Matt Drange has been filing records requests for the crash data held by state agencies. Some government departments have started claiming that every line of the dataset is its own, individual record and subject to a copy fee. Our winner, the Michigan State Police, proposed to charge Drange a 25-cent fee for each of a 1.9 million-line dataset, plus $20 for a thumbdrive, for a grand total of $485,645.24, with half of it due up front. Runners-up that quoted similar line-by-line charges include the Indiana State Police ($346,000) and the North Carolina Department of Transportation ($82,000). Meanwhile, Florida’s government released its detailed dataset at no charge at all.

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

In 2016, the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), an infamous neo-Nazi group, staged a demonstration at the California State Capitol. Counter-protesters fiercely opposed the demonstration, and the scene soon descended into chaos, leaving multiple people injured. When the dust settled, a member of the public (disclosure: also a co-author of this piece) filed a California Public Records Act request to obtain a copy of the permit the white nationalist group filed for its rally. The California Highway Patrol rejected the request for this normally available document, claiming it was related to a criminal investigation.

Two years later, evidence emerged during criminal proceedings that a CHP detective used the public records request as a bargaining chip in a phone call with the TWP protest leader, who was initially reluctant to provide information. The officer told him how the request might reveal his name. “We don’t have a reason to...uh...deny [the request],” the officer said according a transcript of the call. But once the organizer decided to cooperate, the officer responded, “I’m gonna suggest that we hold that or redact your name or something...uh...until this thing gets resolved.” In light of these new facts, the First Amendment Coalition filed a new request for the same document. It too was denied.

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

In defiance of the law enforcement lobby, California legislators passed a law (SB 1421) requiring police and sheriffs to disclose officer misconduct records in response to California Public Records Act requests. These documents, often contained in personnel files, had historically been untouchable by members of the public and the press.

Almost immediately, police unions across the Golden State began to launch lawsuits to undermine these new transparency measures. But the Inglewood Police Department takes the prize for its efforts to evade scrutiny. Mere weeks before the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2019, the agency began destroying records that were set to become publicly available.

“This premise that there was an intent to beat the clock is ridiculous,” Inglewood Mayor James T Butts Jr. told the LA Times in defending the purge. We imagine Butts would find it equally ridiculous to suggest that the fact he had also been a cop for more than 30 years, including serving in Inglewood and later as police chief of Santa Monica, may have factored into his support for the destruction of records.

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

One Wednesday morning in April, 15 Halifax police officers raided the home of a teenage boy and his family. “They read us our rights and told us not to talk," his mother would later tell CBC. “They rifled through everything. They turned over mattresses, they took drawers and emptied out drawers, they went through personal papers, pictures. It was totally devastating and traumatic."

You might well wonder, what was the Jack Bauer-class threat to geo-political stability? Nothing at all: The Canadian teen had just downloaded a host of public records from openly available URLs on a government website.

At the heart of the ordeal was some seriously terrible security practices by Nova Scotia officials. The website created to host the province’s public records was designed in such a way that every request and response had a nearly identical URL and placed no technical restrictions on the public’s ability to access any of the requests. This meant that regular public records requests and individuals’ requests to access government files about them, which included private information, were all stored together and available on the internet for anyone, including Google’s webcrawler, to access. All that was necessary was changing a number identifying the request at the end of the URL.

What Nova Scotian officials should have done upon learning about leaks in their own public records website’s problems was apologize to the public, thank the teen who found these gaping holes in their digital security practices, and implement proper restrictions to protect people’s private information. They didn’t do any of that, and instead sought to improperly bring the force of Canada’s criminal hacking law down on the very person who brought the problem to light.

The whole episode—which thankfully ended with the government dropping the charges—was a chilling example of how officials will often overreact and blame innocent third parties when trying to cover up for their own failings. This horror show just happened to involve public records. Do better, Canada.

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

When self-described transparency advocate and civic hacker Matt Chapman sent his request to Seattle seeking the email metadata from all city email addresses (from/to/BCC addresses, time, date, etc), he expected some pushback, because it does sound like an incredible amount of data to wrangle.

Seattle’s response: All the data can be yours for a measly $33 million. Officials estimated that it would take 320 years worth of staff time to review the roughly 32 million emails responsive to Chapman’s request. Oh, and they estimated charging an additional $21,600 for storage costs associated with the records. The fee request is the second highest in the history of The Foilies (the Department of Defense won in 2016 for estimating it would take $660 million to produce records on a particular computer forensic tool).

Then the city did something entirely unexpected: It revisited the fee estimate and determined that the first batch of records would cost only $1.25 to process. We get it, math is hard.

But wait—that’s not all. After paying for the batches of records with a series of $1.25 checks, Chapman received more than he ever bargained for. Rather than disclosing just the metadata for all 32 million emails, Seattle had given him the first 256 characters of every email. Those snippets included passwords, credit card numbers, and other personally identifying information.

What followed was a series of conversations between Chapman, Seattle’s lawyers, and the city’s IT folks to ensure he’d deleted the records and that the city hadn’t just breached its own data via a public records request.

Ultimately, Seattle officials in January 2018 began sending the data to Chapman once more, this time without the actual content of email messages. The whole episode doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Seattle officials’ ability to do basic math, comply with the public records law or protect sensitive information.

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

Seattle isn’t the only city to stumble in response to Matt Chapman’s public records requests for email metadata. The Vermont governor’s office also wins for its scissor-and-glue approach to releasing electronic information.

Rather than export the email information as a spreadsheet, the Vermont governor’s office told Chapman it had five interns (three of whom were unpaid) working six hours each, literally “cutting and pasting the emails from paper copies.” Next thing Chapman knew, he had a 43-page hodgepodge collage of email headers correlating with one day’s worth of messages. The governor’s attorney told Chapman it would cost $1,200 to process three more days’ worth of emails.

Chapman pushed back and provided his own instructions on exporting the data using a computer and not, you know, scissors and glue. Sure enough, he received a 5,500-line spreadsheet a couple weeks later at no charge.

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

In the last few years, we’ve seen some great resignation letters from public servants, ranging from Defense Secretary James Mattis telling President Trump “It’s not me, it’s you” to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ forced resignation.

But the Trump DOJ seems to have had enough of the tradition and has now determined that U.S. Attorney resignation letters are private in their entirety and cannot be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, civil servants should have their private information protected by their employer, but that’s precisely what redactions should be used to protect.

Past administrations have released resignation letters that are critical of executive branch leaders. The change in policy raises the question: What are departing U.S. Attorneys now saying that the government wants to hide?

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

After the tragic Parkland shooting, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel went to court to force the Broward County School Board to hand over documents detailing the shooter’s education and disciplinary record. A judge agreed and ordered the release, as long as sensitive information was redacted.

But when reporters copied and pasted the file into another document, they found that the content under the redactions was still there and readable. They broke the story of how the school denied the shooter therapeutic services and alternative education accommodations, but then uploaded the school board’s report with working redactions.

Rather than simply do better with double-checking their redactions next time, the school board struck back at the newspaper. They petitioned the court to hold the newspaper in contempt and to prevent anyone from reporting on the legally obtained information. Although the local judge didn’t issue a fine, she lambasted the paper and threatened to dictate exactly what the paper could report about the case in the future (which is itself an unconstitutional prior restraint).

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award - City of Greenfield, California

The Monterey County Weekly unexpectedly found itself in court after the city of Greenfield, California sued to keep the newspaper from publishing documents about the surprising termination of its city manager.

When Editor Sara Rubin asked the interim city manager for the complaint the outgoing city manager filed after his termination, she got nothing but crickets. But then, an envelope containing details of a potential city political scandal appeared on the doorstep of one of the paper’s columnists.

The weekly reached out to the city for comment and began preparing for its normal Wednesday print deadline. Then, the morning of publication, the paper got a call saying that they were due in court. The city sued to block publication of the documents, to have the documents returned and to have the paper reveal the identity of the leaker.

Attorney Kelly Aviles of the First Amendment Coalition gave everyone a fast lesson in the First Amendment, pointing out that the paper had every right to publish. The judge ruled in the paper’s favor, and the city ended up paying all of the Monterey County Weekly’s attorney fees.

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

Brigham Young University’s Police Department is certified by the state,* has the powers of the state, but says that they’re not actually a part of government for purposes of the Utah transparency law.

After the Salt Lake Tribune exposed that the University punished survivors of sexual assault for coming forward and reporting, the paper tried to get records of communications between the police department and the school’s federally required sexual assault coordinator. BYU pushed back, saying that the police department is not subject to Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act because the police department is privately funded.

This actually turns out to be a trickier legal question than you’d expect. Brigham Young University itself isn’t covered by the state law because it is a private school. But the university police force was created by an act of the Utah legislature, and the law covers entities “established by the government to carry out the public’s business.” Investigating crime and arresting people seems like the public’s business.

Last summer, a judge ruled that the police department is clearly a state agency, but the issue is now on appeal at the Utah Supreme Court. Sometime this year we should learn if the police are a part of the government or not.

*Because BYU police failed to comply with state law, and was not responsive to an internal investigation, the Utah Office of Public Safety notified the department on February 20th that the BYU police department will be stripped of its certification on September 1, 2019. The University police also plan to appeal this decision.

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

Congressional elections can turn ugly, but the opponent of newly elected U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger got a boost when the U.S. Postal Service released Spanberger’s entire personnel file, including her security clearance application, without redaction of highly sensitive personal information.

When a third party requests a person’s federal employment file without the employee’s permission, the government agency normally releases only a bare-bones record of employment dates, according to a Postal Service spokesperson. But somehow Rep. Spanberger wasn’t afforded these protections, and the Postal Service has potentially made this mistake in a “small number” of other cases this year. Security clearance applications (Form SF-86) are supposed to be analyzed and investigated by the FBI, raising questions about how the FOIA officer got the information in the first place. The Postal Service has apologized for the mistake, which they say is human error, but maybe security clearance applications should be kept just as secure as the state secrets the clearance is meant to protect.

The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass, Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, Frank Stanton Fellow Camille Fischer, and Activist Hayley Tsukayama. Illustrations by EFF Art Director Hugh D'Andrade. For more on our work visit eff.org.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2UBMVxO

#Deeplinks

0 notes