On Monday the Associated Press wrote that officials in Ferguson, Missouri, have been charging exorbitant fees to turn over public records like e-mails and texts from city officials. The informational paywalls come in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, that spurred weeks of protests in the St Louis suburb.
The AP notes that charging high fees for public records is a tactic that some government agencies use to discourage journalists and activists from discovering unflattering or problematic information. Officials in Ferguson have said that forwarding certain e-mail and text messages requires expensive IT analysis, despite the fact that public records laws in Missouri maintain that public access to government records should be provided at little to no cost.
“Ferguson told the AP it wanted nearly $2,000 to pay a consulting firm for up to 16 hours of work to retrieve messages on its own e-mail system, a practice that information technology experts call unnecessary,” the AP wrote on Monday. “The firm, St. Louis-based Acumen Consulting, wouldn't comment specifically on Ferguson's contract, but said the search could be more complicated and require technicians to examine tape backups.”
Ars Technica contacted the city of Ferguson for comment on what kinds of e-mail, text, or backup analysis the city is employing and charging press organizations for. A spokesperson referred Ars to the city's media consultant, but the consultant has not yet responded to our inquiries.
In another incident, the AP says that the city of Ferguson billed the news organization $135 per hour for a whole day's work to recover “a handful of e-mail accounts since the shooting.” Conversely, The Washington Post was quoted fees of at least $200 to receive “city officials' e-mails since Aug. 9 discussing Brown's shooting, citizen complaints against Ferguson officers, and Wilson's personnel file." Ferguson city officials quoted Buzzfeed “an unspecified thousands of dollars” to pull “e-mails and memos among city officials about Ferguson's traffic-citation policies and changes to local elections.”
In Missouri, public departments can charge press organizations for records, but those records must be furnished at “the lowest charges for search, research, and duplication," the AP says. The news outlet has requested fee waivers on the basis that providing the records is in the public interest, but those fee waivers have been denied.
On Monday, Mike Cavender, the Executive Director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, wrote a letter asking the Missouri attorney general to investigate what he called "exorbitant" fees. “Missouri law permits such records to be provided free of charge if the material is deemed to be in the public interest,” Cavender wrote. “Certainly, the Brown case fits that description. As you know, public agencies may charge legally responsible fees to cover the costs involved, and news organizations are willing to pay such reasonable fees. However, the current demands being made drastically exceed such parameters.”
The Missouri ACLU told Ars that it had not received any formal complaints yet regarding the high fees for copies of public records, but it did note that Ferguson city officials refused to provide the incident report regarding the fatal shooting early in August. The ACLU chapter filed a lawsuit citing the Missouri Sunshine Law, which requires public disclosure of certain documents, and the court ruled in the ACLU's favor. The Ferguson city police turned over a heavily redacted copy of the incident report on August 22.
Charging high fees for public information is not a new development in government, but it is a contentious subject among the tech- and transparency-minded. Journalists and activists can sometimes try to negotiate down the costs of providing public records, occasionally by requesting that the records be provided digitally (often this means on a CD), rather than on paper. Open-data activist Aaron Swartz—who committed suicide after being charged with multiple counts of computer hacking, wire fraud, and other crimes—caught the attention of the Feds after circumventing the paywall preventing access to millions of public records on PACER (otherwise known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, a dinosaur of a service that recently purged a decade's worth of public documents during a database update).
The situation in Ferguson has also brought up issues over whether citizens can publicly record police activities in that state, and this has sped up the adoption of body cams on police officers.
reader comments
136