News & Commentary

Vermont's public records law is perhaps the only state law that has no means of enforcement. None. If a public agency -- on the state, county, or local level -- breaks the law, it's up to citizens to go to court and enforce it. Yet even if citizens take the trouble to do that, and win, they still lose. They'll be out the cost of filing the complaint ($262.50) and attorney's fees if they hired an attorney to handle their case (hundreds to thousands of dollars).

Unmanned surveillance drones will soon begin "practicing" along the border with Canada by following the movements of people and vehicles below.

First law enforcement claimed the right to track your whereabouts via your cell phone. Now the California Supreme Court has said police don't need a warrant to search your cell phone. If you're arrested, police can look at numbers you called and text messages you sent.

There is a high wall protecting the secrecy of police investigations, and it can be breached in only very limited circumstances, argued a lawyer for the Vermont Attorney General's Office in Superior Court in Montpelier on Monday. But if Vermonters can't get information about how police are conducting investigations, how can citizens make sure investigations are on the up-and-up and constitutional violations aren't occurring?

We like to think Vermont politics are clean and transparent. They very well might be, but it's sometimes hard to know given the lax reporting requirements for state political campaigns.

Violating Vermont's public records law seems to be catching on. But this time it's not police who are the offenders. It's the state education commissioner.

The ACLU-VT is suing the town of Hartford for denying an investigative journalist access to public records involving the high-profile arrest of an African-American man in his own residence.

Following the events of Sept. 9, 2001, the United States launched a "war on terror" -- a war against an enemy ill-defined and tied to no geographic place. The tactics employed by the U.S. government to wage the war ranged from conventional combat to espionage. They also included torture, a fact denied by the government at the time but since confirmed in thousands of pages of documents obtained by the ACLU through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. On Monday, April 12, librarians, lawyers, professors, students, writers, and others will read from recently released secret documents -- memos, declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

The Washington Superior Court has granted judgment to Christopher Hagan in his lawsuit against the City of Barre, striking the city's residency restriction ordinance that barred individuals with certain criminal convictions from living within most of Barre.