Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck said he would not name the lone pharmaceutical chemical found in the city’s drinking water.
Once again a “people’s servant” concludes that he knows what’s best for you.
The Open Records Project remembers similar arguments against release of sex offender names and addresses. “Trust us” the bureacrats said. Of course we […]

It’s not scarlet, and it’s not a letter, but a bill before the state Legislature that would require drunk drivers to put florescent yellow license plates on their cars makes quite a few think of author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale of Hester Prynne wearing the scarlet letter A for adultery… and wearing the shame.
Open Records works […]

A Santa Clara County resident infected with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis flew back to the United States earlier this month without alerting authorities of her illness - potentially threatening fellow passengers and people at Stanford Hospital’s emergency room with whom she came into contact.
Citing federal patient confidentiality rules, health authorities would not name the […]

Twenty patients of an oncology clinic in the Dallas area were sickened by medical syringes contaminated with bacteria. The bacterium, called Serratia marcescens, can cause fever and chills but generally responds to antibiotics.
Some of the Dallas-area patients became so ill after the bacterial exposure that they required hospitalization.
However, Texas Department of State Health […]

Should adult adoptees have access to their birth records and be able to learn the identity of their birth parents?
It is a question with two sides, that of the adoptee and that of the adoptee’s biological parents.
On one hand, every child seems to have an inner need to know from where they came.
On the other, […]

Whether it’s a hernia repair or heart bypass, doctors with a lot of experience performing a given operation tend to have better results. The problem for patients in choosing a physician has been finding out which ones have the know-how.
In a little-noticed decision last week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of […]

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady.
Clinton’s calendars, appointment logs and memos are stored at her husband’s […]

Suwalee Iamkhong was an AIDS infected Thai stripper who immigrated to Canada. Her husband, Percy Whiteman, met her when she danced at a Canadian club called Zanzibar. They married 8 years ago, but after 4 years she fell ill with one of the many AIDS-defining diseases. He is now infected.
Suwalee’s identity is […]

Virginia Tech officials claim that federal privacy statutes prevent them from releasing the medical records of the campus shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, to the Governor’s panel investigating the murder of 32 students.
The Open Records Project has argued since its inception that federal privacy statutes and the Supreme Court rulings that preceeded them are not only not […]

Virginia Tech college student, Cho Seung-Hui had been judged mentally ill and a danger to himself and others yet his parents didn’t know. Virginia Tech was prevented from telling them by FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
FERPA was one of a series of “privacy” laws passed following Supreme Court Justice William […]