Mr. Cuomo's office argued Tuesday that it was unfair and misleading to compare the Lopez and Brown settlements because the Brown settlement followed a public legal filing, and because the settlement was subject to disclosure under Freedom of Information requirements.
By transparency, we mean that governments must enact pro-disclosure laws (freedom of information bills) that citizens' participation in disclosure processes are mainstreamed, formalized and celebrated and harnessed.
However, disclosures under freedom of information laws have shown that the Home Office has been handed NPD data on 18 occasions since 2012, while police requests for information from the dataset were granted 31 times.
Investigative news reports coupled with disclosures from freedom of information requests corroborate Napolitano's public statements: If you are young, Muslim and angry, the government has you in its crosshairs.
The State Department cited national security and executive privilege considerations in exempting the passages from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
As late as January of this year, no less august a political personage than Ms Harman herself introduced a motion to try to exempt MPs' expenses from disclosure under the Freedom of Information law.
But that decision, which involved a question of constitutional law, did not come up at the argument on Wednesday, which considered the quite different issue of what Congress meant when it exempted some files from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
The city's Law Department argued in its brief that it could claim that the mailing list was exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Law and simultaneously "disclose exempt information to a party requesting that information" — that is, the memorial foundation, which is a private corporation.
Civilian courts in the US "have protected ICRC reports from public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act," Pohl wrote, "but none have concluded there is privilege from discovery in a criminal proceeding," referring to a trial phase concerning the production of evidence.
Urging the court not to take the case, Chicago argued that the tracing process itself alerts suspects to the fact that an investigation is under way, and that disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act would neither reveal sensitive details of the inquiry nor alert suspects to something they did not already know.
