Terry Cowgill blogs at ctdevilsadvocate.com, is a former high-school English teacher who was an editor and senior writer for The Lakeville Journal Company. Follow him on Twitter @terrycowgill.
The cause of freedom of information in Connecticut went through a bleak period last year. The ghastly school massacre in Newtown had prompted frantic lawmakers to pass laws restricting FOI in the dead of night and without public hearings. And just when open-government advocates thought things had quieted down, along came the “Task Force on Victim Privacy and the Public’s Right to Know.”
Beware of any panel with 11 words in its title. The name alone sounds inherently political, contrived as it was to balance competing interests. But the reality is any effort to impose yet more secrecy on government has far less to do with victim’s rights than it does with appeasing emotional constituents and shielding our eyes from what the government is doing in our names and with our money.
Be that as it may, the task force, which was created last year when the General Assembly bravely passed laws restricting access to crime-scene photos on the last day of the legislative session, was stacked in favor of secrecy and everyone knew it.
See the complete story at CT News Junkie.
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