Missouri National Guard exempt from Sunshine Law

" Members of the Missouri National Guard have been disciplined for looting in Joplin after the massive tornado last year, but the Guard refuses to release information about the incidents, citing an exemption from Missouri's open records law.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday that the Guard did not respond to the newspaper's open records request for details this month. The Guard said it is not subject to the open records law, which was created to make state government accountable."


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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Why does Florida always out-sunshine California?

"Why does Florida always out-sunshine California?

Here's Florida's latest transparency coup: Gov. Rick Scott has made his top aides' email accounts available on the Internet for all to see. The public can go online and peek into inbox and sent email folders at any time: no public record requests, no long waits, no government lawyers trying to scrub everything clean.

Florida continues to be the national leader in government transparency, using the type of technology that ought to be second-nature here but isn't. California, a state overflowing with supposed innovation, is one where governments remain shrouded in darkness."


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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

BillionGraves cemetery database

"BillionGraves aims to provide an expansive family history database for records and images from cemeteries located around the world by engaging volunteers using BillionGraves mobile applications. Digitized images of each gravestone will be tagged with GPS coordinates to make finding an ancestor’s graves a very simple matter of using a mobile cell phone. Their database is growing every day as volunteers gather images of headstones from around the world. Their goal is to collect images and GPS coordinates of one billion graves, which we feel is a very realistic goal."


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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

Vermont police reject records request for dispatch logs

"The Vermont State Police have rejected a request to turn over copies of their police dispatching log for Easter weekend, when a then-state trooper is accused of assaulting two Windham County men in Wilmington who he thought had stolen his canoe.

The Burlington Free Press made the request two months after the Vermont Supreme Court ruled police logs are public except in limited circumstances. The state police’s freedom of information officer, Heidi Storm, rejected releasing any of the logs, however, in a four-paragraph email sent Tuesday afternoon."

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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator

San Francisco Bay Area immigration records added to archive

"Tens of thousands of old West Coast immigration records the government once sought to throw away will instead become publicly available Tuesday at a Bay Area archive.
Photographs, letters, health records, interview transcripts and other historical documents were destined for a recycling bin or a remote Midwestern storage facility.
"We changed that plan. We're making them permanent," said spokeswoman Sharon Rummery of U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services.

Archivists credit the advocacy of the late U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, and his successor, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, for helping to save the collection.
The documents will be housed in San Bruno, at the National Archives at San Francisco, and open to the public beginning Tuesday."


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Location Oakland, Ca | San Francisco, Ca | California - Private Investigator