From the Spring Hope Enterprise (7/20/10): Fighting for open government is a never-ending, often frustrating, and usually complicated battle especially when it comes to electronic records. North Carolina media, especially newspapers, have fought hard and courageously on behalf of average citizens to ensure that government records that have been accessible to the public in traditional formats, such as paper documents, don't disappear behind a wall of secrecy just because they are now in digital databases.
Whenever the public loses access to records and the ability to see what their government is doing, democracy itself is imperiled. Bad government thrives in secrecy, whether it is embodied in closed meetings or closed records. That’s why it was unfortunate that the state legislature failed to make state personnel records more public in its new ethics bill. Legislators and other politicians forget that public employees work, well, for the public, and the public has a right — even a need — to know how honestly and competently public employees do their jobs.
So the fight for transparency continues. Unfortunately, this week the media has gone a step too far by arguing in a Wake County court that private text messages produced on state-owned Blackberries are public records for anyone to see. The media wants to see thousands of text messages — essentially electronic love letters — sent during working hours and at night between a secretary in the state Highway Patrol and a high-level veteran trooper.