Blog News Watch

Claremont, California finds itself embroiled in a dispute with a would be local expose blog, the Claremont Insider. (Personally, I’m always leery of anyone or any publication that labels itself an “insider” but perhaps I digress.)

Somehow, the Insider found copies of city employees’ pay stubs, according to this site on the city’s own web site. The Insider posted the stubs on its blog. The city, predictably, said “We think not,” sent the City Attorney to pay a call, and the Insider (predictably) balked. This is the version according to Slashdot; it should be noted that an attempt by the city to duplicate the web search that yielded the stubs in the first place, according to the blog, met with no success, as reported in the Daily Bulletin piece.

Slashdot attempts to portray this as a freedom of information/freedom of the press issue. Maybe it is. The Daily Bulletin quotes people involved (including Google and Blogger reps who pulled the post in question) as referring to Google’s terms of service and copyright interests in the paychecks.

Frankly, as a former public employee in South Carolina, it’s a privacy issue to me. Would you want your pay stub (which often carries personal information like social security numbers, addresses, and tax/health info via specific deductions for pre-tax programs) posted online? I wouldn’t. (It should be noted there’s no indication from these two pieces that there was private personal info involved but … dang, folks, it’s a paystub.)

The Slashdot argument that California law makes salary information public is meaningless, by the way; SC has a similar law, but what those laws mean is that the information itself is public. You can ask the city what a specific employee makes and the city has to disclose it. It does not mean you have a right to view that information as published on the paystub itself.

The Federal Election Commission has ruled in two recent opinions that independent bloggers - those unaffiliated with political action committees (PACs) and campaigns - are not subject to the restrictive campaign laws that apply to candidates and their organized supporters. ZDNet story here; Ars Technica report here.

John Bambenek (presumably the same who writes at parttimepundit.com) filed one of the complaints against well-known Democratic-loving DailyKos.  Ars Technica reports:

Bambenek seized on statements that the blog was out to “elect Democrats” and that it contributed at least the equivalent of $1,000 per year (in hosting fees and salaries) toward this goal. Thus, in his view, DailyKos was a political committee. “Can a political committee avoid campaign regulations by simply organizing in the form of a blog?” he asked. “Surely not.”

The FEC said, “We think not.”

It’s going to be an interesting campaign season, kids.