Susannah Nesmith

[Commentary] Police departments around the country increasingly are using sophisticated technology to surveil American citizens by monitoring cellphone data, in many cases carefully hiding those activities from the public and the press.

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with The Associated Press and USA Today, have all done important work recently to shine a light in the surveillance shadows. Local news outlets, including some here in Florida, have also done valuable reporting on the use of the technology, which offers investigative benefits but also raises constitutional concerns. It’s vital that a close look at these surveillance practices continues.

Local journalists in particular have an opportunity to serve their readers by building on the work that’s been done -- work that has raised serious questions about an area of high public interest, and already has had demonstrated impact.

But it’s vital, too, to understand the government secrecy that has surrounded these techniques --and how the relationships between local police and state and federal agencies, which sometimes supply the equipment, challenge public records laws. It’s going to take a multipronged media attack to get around that secrecy and learn more about what law enforcement agencies at all levels are doing.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission records are a potential treasure trove of near real-time political spending data -- though they are difficult to dig into.

They can only be searched by television station, and the reports the stations file are only kept as PDFs, so the numbers within them can’t be easily crunched. And for the moment, the FCC database only includes records from the top four stations in the top 50 markets; beginning in July, all broadcast stations will be required to upload their records to the FCC’s site.

The discrepancy between what was filed with the FEC and what was filed with the FCC doesn’t necessarily mean any law was broken. The filing requirements at the two agencies are different. In addition to being cumbersome, the FCC data isn’t always complete for federal races either, observers say.

But it’s always worth checking. And for small markets, this could be a treasure trove once all stations have to upload their reports. That’s where it would be easy for a smaller news outlet to cull through the FCC filings and find out what’s going on in their media market.

The Jacksonville-based Florida Times Union is a rare outlier these days, a mid-sized regional paper willing to fight big open-government battles even as most media organizations cut back on the resources they devote to forcing officials to do their work in public.

The paper has been aggressively enforcing the state’s expansive Sunshine Law, going to court in three recent cases to compel officials to open meetings and court proceedings and release records. At times, the paper has mounted these battles to get key information for a major article. In other cases, they took on a fight even when editors and reporters expected no story would result. They did it on principle.

“We’re teaching government officials they can’t throw the public out of public meetings and they can’t withhold public records,” said Frank Denton, the Times-Union’s editor. “If there is a perception out there that the media is weak because of what has happened in the newspaper industry, we’re letting them know that we’re still here, we’re still strong, and we’re still raising hell.”

This is a battle Denton’s been fighting for 40 years. In the column, he recalled how he had sworn out a criminal complaint against the entire board of trustees of a local public hospital for violating the open meetings law back when he was a cub reporter at The Anniston Star in Alabama.