Published on thePhoenix.com
See the following email exchange (read up from the bottom). Not sure who's
empowered to accept his resignation, but it's as clear as day: Chris Korzen is
leaving the Maine's
Majority group he founded. Further, he admits that does not understand the
difference between requesting public records from the government to use in a
publicity campaign to promote a political perspective and, well, requesting
public records from the government to use in a publicity campaign to promote a
political perspective. He's just sure that when he does it, it's good, and when
Bruce Poliquin does it, it's bad.
Here's my last message to Chris:
You have made my exact point. Poliquin would likely say he is
exposing abuse of the system, and that you're advertising. All I'm saying is
that I don't want the government determining whether either, both, or neither
of you is telling the truth. Open government and free speech can get messy, but
the mess is better than the alternatives.
Please. Print this, so the world can see how ridiculous my
life has become. If you don't, I will. If exposing abuse of the system is now
synonymous with advertising, then seriously, I quit.
In your 12:21 pm message you finally boiled down your
argument against Poliquin to this:
"He used public information to advertise himself for
business/political/personal purposes."
You did too.
You used
public information (the
results of your FOAA request that included Poliquin's request for the email
list) to advertise yourself (your point of view, your
organization, your political cause) for
business/political/personal purposes (to
promote your perspective on both a potential candidate and an existing state
law).
(Okay, I'll let you off the hook on "personal," but
with the observation that I hear more about Poliquin from MM than I do from the
man himself - which is damn hard to do.)
And you do this all the time - you make FOAA requests,
receive the results, and do with them what you want to.
I feel like I'm in the twilight zone here. How is what
Poliquin did something that we do all the time?
Let me summarize:
-You put out a press release accusing Poliquin of doing
something you do all the time, including the exact same thing you did in order
to discover and publicize his action.
-You claim that what he did is "abuse" of FOAA.
-You claim what you did is not.
-You say that releasing the 10,000 email list would be
"wrong" - though not illegal (and it's clearly legal).
-You admit that Poliquin did not release the email list.
So what message was I supposed to get from the press
release?
Right now I'm at:
Maine's
Majority hates Poliquin so much it'll attack him for doing something MM does
all the time, and is so out-of-its-head bothered by Poliquin's behavior that MM
will attempt to take down Maine's
open-government act in the process.
Somehow I think that's not the message you meant to send.
That's right - he has not.
That's a fair point, and worth having a decent argument over.
It's just not even close to what you said in the press release, or in any of
our correspondence up until this very message. You also haven't claimed that
Poliquin released the 10,000 email records to the public.
I do understand your point. I just think you're wrong. We
released a public document consisting of an email from one public official to
another. We did not release the 10,000 email records - which I do have in my
possession. Releasing those records would have been wrong.
Date: 03/26/2013 12:32 (GMT-05:00)
To: Chris Korzen <chris@mainesmajority.org>
Subject: Re: PRESS RELEASE: Former Treasurer Poliquin abused Freedom of Access
Act to obtain public list for personal use
My point is that you're trying to object to his actions on a
principle so broad it indicts your own actions. (And if the legislature agreed
with you, we'd have no more open government at all - because the government
would always retain control what's done with its information.)
It's extremely simple: You "used public information to
advertise (yourself/your organization/your point of view/your cause) for
business/political/personal purposes."
You object to what he did, but depend on doing the exact same
thing to make your objection. I simply fail to see the difference, and you
haven't made it any clearer.
I think it would be equally interesting to see if a broad
segment of the public thinks we should shut down government transparency in an
attempt to remedy spam.
I don't know where you're going with this, Jeff, but I've
already answered this question.
It's a good question, though, and I hope you're planning to write about it. It
would be interesting to hear what a broad segment of the public thinks
constitutes abuse of the FOAA.
I'm not sure you did either of those things - given that
responding to FOAA is hardly collusion.
But what you're suggesting is that people shouldn't be
allowed to use public information for business/political/personal purposes.
That's pretty broad. So what should they be allowed to use public information
for?
Really? We exposed the government's abuse of the public trust
and collusion with big-monied outside interests. That's exactly what FOAA is
for.
He used public information to advertise himself for business/political/personal
purposes.
Perhaps more succinctly: What do you see as the difference
between what he did and what you did?
And so the legislature has. FOAA stands as it does, making
both your actions and Poliquins perfectly legal and procedurally and morally
defensible. (Private contracts with private companies aside.)
Your complaining about it fails my logic, as follows:
1. It has been for years - and is likely never to change -
legal to get voter registration information from the government, and send to
those addresses mailings for political purposes - whether from a campaign or a
political-action committee, or even an elected official doing constituent
mailings. (I'm pretty sure Maine's
Majority has used this process, too.)
2. It is a long-standing principle of open government that
requests must be granted without regard to the requester's purpose. Example 1:
If you ask for your neighbor's property-tax record from town hall, you must get
it, whether you intend to take out a newspaper ad claiming your neighbor is a
freeloading crony of local politicos who gets a break on his taxes, or whether
you are going to contest your own property-tax assessment based on information
relating to your neighbor's property, or if you want to frame it and put it on
your living-room wall. Example 2: If you ask for correspondence with a state
agency or official, you must get it, regardless of whether you are going to
publish it in print, post it online, issue a press release, or keep it in a
safe-deposit box.
3. Poliquin asked for an email list, which is public record
under FOAA. The government had to give it to him, and can place no restrictions
on what he does now.
4. You asked for correspondence, which is public record under
FOAA. The government had to give it to you, and could place no restrictions on
what you do with it now.
5. You imply that the government should be unable to prevent
you from doing what you did, but definitely claim that the government ought to
stop him from doing what he did.
6. You fail to make a distinction between these two acts,
which are, again, utterly identical in procedural, legal, and moral terms.
7. When offered a suggestion of a more nuanced problem you
might use to refine your argument, you not only reject that argument - which is
an issue of public debate - but reiterate your insistence that the government
should somehow control information that is in the hands of the public (or
perhaps condition release of public information on the intent of the
requester).
8. When asked for a means by which that could happen, you
defer to the body that created the provisions you object to.
What am I missing?
I'll let the Legislature write the laws.
Okay, so what do you think should or shouldn't be allowed?
And how would that be enforced?
I don't have a problem with the public having access to
personal information. I have a problem with the notion that it's OK for the
public to do whatever they want with that information.
What you seem to be saying suggests that my guess was right -
your concern is not about abuse of FOAA, but rather about public access to
personally identifying information, some of which has for many years been
available through FOAA, with no problems.
Unless I'm terribly mistaken, you want to be able to continue
to do what you did - ask a government agency for correspondence (including with
private citizens), get that information unredacted, and announce to the public
that a specific person, whose name you use, has done something or other.
That's exactly what you did. But the way you constructed your
release suggested that you want to outlaw doing that exact thing - because you
claimed that taking a government response to an FOAA request and using it for
whatever you wanted should be prosecuted. Contrary to the language of your
release, I think you and I agree that it's simply not an abuse of FOAA to use
public information for your own gains.
If your concern is that Poliquin can get people's email
addresses in bulk from the state, that's something very different than saying
the government should have control over what the public does with public
records that have been released.
Maybe we just live in different worlds, or maybe we just disagree.
A lot of people I talk with are furious that the BDN tried to publish the names
of concealed weapons permit holders. It doesn't matter that the BDN expressly
said it wouldn't do this; the fact is that they could have, and that was enough
for people. So, in that respect, at least part of FOAA now has a bad name.
We're now likely going to lose the ability to verify that there aren't any
felons running around out there with concealed handguns, because the public is
afraid that information will be misused.
It seems that your point is that it's a necessary consequence
of open government that your name can wind up in the paper or on an
ex-treasurer's email list. It's a fair point. I simply disagree. I think we can
make a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate use of FOAA data, and
that they way to strengthen the legitimate uses is to denounce the illegitimate
uses.
It's the same thing with SPAM. The law allows you to buy
lists, harvest email addresses from web sites, etc. You can send these folks an
individual email or compare them with your own list. But as soon as you send
them a bulk email asking them to buy something you're on the hook for big
penalties. That's a legal distinction between a legitimate and in illegitimate
use of information. We can do the same with the FOAA.
Since when does open government have a bad name? People give
themselves bad names. Open government is an admirable concept. And almost never
are open-government rules given criminal penalties - they're civil violations
at best.
But where I'm really running into confusion is with your
apparent idea that the government should (or even can) control what members of
the public do with information they have in their possession.
The whole point of open government is so people can get
information about their government. What they do with it, and why they ask for
it, is not in the purview of open-government principles. In fact, it's counter
to the ideal. If the government is going to prevent someone from disseminating,
analyzing, or otherwise using the results of open-government requests, then how
exactly is government open? ("We'll tell you how many people we're abusing
in prison, but you can't tell anyone else?" That's the opposite of the
point.)
I can't believe you're intentionally advocating that the
government exercise prior restraint on use of public information. It strikes me
as against your goals, and your group's goals, as well as being mutually
exclusive.
What if, for example, a person or group were allowed to ask
for FOAA requests made by others, and the government says "We have to give
it to you, but you are forbidden from telling others. They all have to ask
individually for exactly the same thing." Your press release would
vaporize, as a violation of the law. What you're claiming to want to outlaw is
something you did in getting this information, something you do all the time,
something news organizations and members of the public do constantly, and is in
fact the reality of open government: Once information it out of government's
hands, its dissemination and use is no longer under government control.
If I try to imagine what you might actually mean, I wonder if
you are somehow trying to argue for protecting some types of personal
information when it's in the government's hands - but that's a very different
thing than suggesting someone who asks for information from the government
should be restricted in how they use it.
They exist so the public can ensure that government is doing
its job, not so aspiring piblic officials can build their email lists. I would
love to see the law changed so we can prosecute people who do what Poliquin
did. He gives open government a bad name.
-------- Original message --------
From: "Inglis, Jeff" <JInglis@phx.com>
Date: 03/26/2013 09:35 (GMT-05:00)
To: Chris Korzen <chris@mainesmajority.org>
Subject: Re: PRESS RELEASE: Former Treasurer Poliquin abused Freedom of Access
Act to obtain public list for personal use
He may well have violated terms of a private agreement with a
private company. That's not my beef - and it doesn't seem to be yours, either,
from the release.
You're claiming it's an "abuse" of open-government
laws for a requester to get information from the government and use it for
whatever the requester wants.
Problem is, there's no other purpose of open-government laws
- they exist so that people can ask questions of their government and get
answers, and then publicize those answers, for whatever purpose the requester
has.
Go ahead and shout about him breaking the rules of Constant
Contact. Nobody cares, and you know that - which is why you made the release
sound like he had misused open-government laws, when he used them exactly
properly. And so did you, in announcing to people that he did this. The issue
comes when you call both of those things - which are procedurally, legally, and
morally identical - "abuse."
He's going to lose his Constant Contact account over this.
I'll take my chances with the court of public opinion.
If it's "abuse" to make FOAA requests and use the
resulting information for whatever your private purposes are, you're as guilty
as Poliquin. Which, by the way, is not guilty of anything at all.
And your job? Pretending that abuse doesn't happen because
you're afraid of the consequences? The only reason why we know he did this is
that we were obtained his request through another FOAA request. The system
works. Go write that story.
Sucks that your job is weakening open government.
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff... I really don't care. This is my job.
Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris -
It's a VERY slippery and dangerous slope to try to start
dictating what can and can't be done with public records after they're released
to the public. Please don't weaken Maine's
existing open-government laws further by pursuing this.
Jeff
For Immediate Release
March 26, 2013
Contact:
Chris Korzen
Former
Treasurer Bruce Poliquin abused Freedom of Access Act to obtain public list for
personal use
Portland – In February 2013,
mass emails from a personal account of former state treasurer and U.S. Senate
candidate Bruce Poliquin began inexplicably turning up in some Mainers'
inboxes. A Maine's
Majority investigation has determined that Poliquin obtained the emails through
a Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) request, and subsequently used this public
information for his own personal gain.
In the early hours of December 9, 2012, Poliquin submitted an FOAA request to the Treasurer's office for “a copy
of all email and other addresses used in the Office of the State Treasurer's
Outreach Program.” In response, he received 10,742 email addresses. Five days
earlier, the legislature had confirmed Neria Douglass to succeed Poliquin,
effectively ending his tenure as treasurer.
Some two months later, Mr. Poliquin began sending bulk emails
to the owners of those addresses through a Constant Contact email marketing
system. The emails are political in nature (titled, for example, "How to Fix
Maine's Ongoing Budget Crisis”) and point recipients toward a brucepoliquin.net web
site.
“Although Mr. Poliquin legally obtained his former office's
email records, his personal use of this public information constitutes a
blatant abuse of the Freedom of Access Act,” said Maine's Majority executive director Chris
Korzen. “Poliquin is clearly trying to set himself up for a future election
bid, and he's now using state resources to build his communications
infrastructure. He should stop using this publicly-owned email list
immediately.”
Ironically, at least one influential Maine Republican appears
to agree. Earlier this month, Sportsman's Alliance of Maine director and former
state representative David Trahan told the Maine Heritage Policy Center's Maine Wire blog, “FOAA was
designed for citizens to keep government in line, not for political targeting.”
While Poliquin does not appear to have broken any laws, he
has likely violated Constant
Contact's Anti-Spam policy, which requires users to obtain informed
consent from recipients before sending bulk email.
###
