Uncommon Valor

Old friend Xavier Alvarez (pictured, right) is back in the news. Alvarez, the former Three Valleys Municipal Water District boardmember from Pomona, courtesy of Assemblywoman Norma Torres, was convicted in May 2008 in federal court for having lied about being a Medal of Honor recipient. For violating the federal Stolen Valor Act, Alvarez was sentenced to five months home detention. The conviction was a misdemeanor.

The Denver Post reported Saturday that a federal judge in Colorado has ruled the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment. In the Colorado case, defendant Rick Strandlof was accused of falsely claiming that he was an Iraqi war vet and that he had received a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. Strandlof had been soliciting donations to a charity he had created under a false name.

Strandlof argued that the Stolen Valor Act was an abridgment of his right to free speech, and civil liberties activists filed briefs in support of Strandlof. The Post article quoted an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union:

Attorney Chris Beall, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the ACLU of Colorado, said the decision is remarkable.

"The First Amendment protects speech we don't like," he said. "We don't need the First Amendment for speech people like. The government cannot criminalize a statement simply because it is false, no matter how important the statement is."

Beall points out Strandlof wasn't charged with stealing money meant for the veterans group, adding that laws are already in place for those crimes.

"That's plain-old, regular-vanilla everyday fraud, and we do prosecute that every day," he said. "Congress does not need a special statute to prevent people from using false claims of valor in order to prevent fraud."

Here is Judge Robert Blackburn's ruling in the Strandlof case (Alvarez gets a mention):




According to the Post article, the precedent set in Judge Blackburn's ruling only applies to District of Colorado. Alvarez filed his own appeal in his Stolen Valor conviction, and that appeal is still pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

No matter what happens with Alvarez's appeal, his local felony convictions still stand for misappropriation of public funds, grand theft, and insurance fraud. Alvarez was convicted in September 2009 and received a sentence of five years in state prison.

Insider to Blogger: Huh?

Monday Afternoon

Our odyssey into the inner workings of Claremont City Hall and Google's Blogger began last Friday with our posting of city employee salaries and benefits, along with scanned images of the pay stubs for Claremont City Manager Jeff Parker and city Human Services Director Jeff Porter.

Over the weekend, the city complained loud and long with false allegations that the Insider had somehow stolen the information or had obtained it through a leak in city hall. In fact, the information was posted all along on the city's on-line archive (which has since been taken off-line).

The city attorney last Friday apparently contacted Google, which operates the Blogger site that hosts the Insider. City Attorney Sonia Carvalho never tried contacting us directly with the city's concerns about our post, so we do not know the specifics, other than some unsubstantiated allegations that the post contained confidential city employee information.

Friday's post stayed up all weekend, but on Monday afternoon, after the story had gotten legs, we received the following email from Blogger:

from Blogger Help

date Sep 10, 2007 3:06 PM
subject [#197705772] Blogger complaint received
mailed-by trakken.google.com

Hello,

We'd like to inform you that we've received a complaint that your blog claremontca.blogspot.com contains confidential information. Please note that our Terms of Service prohibit posting confidential items on your blog. Accordingly, we have had to remove the content in question.

Please refer to our Terms of Service for more details:
http://beta.blogger.com/terms.g

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

So, according to Blogger, the offending material was confidential in nature. Okay, but still no specific information on what was confidential. Clear as mud, as they say.


Monday Evening

On Monday evening, we responded to the Blogger note requesting the specifics of the complaint and advised Blogger that we contended that none of the information in the post was confidential. We pointed out the lack of personal identifiers in the post, and the fact that public employee salaries are public information in California. We also reminded Blogger that the source of the "confidential" information was the city of Claremont's own, very public on-line archive.

Here is our response to Blogger:

to Blogger Help
date Sep 10, 2007 7:35 PM
subject Re: [#197705772] Blogger complaint received

Blogger Support,

Could you be a little more specific about the "confidential" information you referred to. The content was obtained from the City of Claremont's online document archive, so it was public information, free for anyone to look up. Additionally, there were no Social Security numbers, dates of birth, bank account information, or other such personal data. There was salary and bonus information for public employees at the city of Claremont. However, in California, that is public information:

http://www.officer.com/web/online/Top-News-Stories/High-Court-Makes-California-Officer-Salaries-Public/1$37599

Please review the actual post and advise what specific items are confidential. Again, we do not believe anything posted can be considered confidential, especially since the source is the city of Claremont's own public records archive available to anyone with an Internet connection - or at least until they decided they didn't like our post, at which point they removed access to the site:

http://www.ci.claremont.ca.us/ps.fyi.cfm?ID=1805

Thank you for looking into this matter.

We went ahead and reposted the Friday piece, minus the pay stub images, which seemed to be the most concern to the city and waited for an explanation from Blogger.


Tuesday Noon

On Tuesday at high noon, we heard back from Blogger. Their note informed us that the problem wasn't confidentiality at all. The pay stubs were copyrighted by the city, so their images can not be reproduced without the city's okay.

But that's not been what the city has said in any of its public statements or on its own website. According to the the city, the problem has been the confidentiality issue. Yet, Blogger tells us it's a copyright issue.

Well, folks, which is it? Here's the Blogger response:

from Blogger Help
date Sep 11, 2007 12:02 PM
subject Re: [#197705772] Blogger complaint received
mailed-by trakken.google.com

Hello,

We have removed your post due to the images of the paycheck stub of the City of Claremont, which in actuality is their copyrighted material. If you would like to reload the post that we removed, feel free to do so as long as you leave out the images of the paycheck.

Thank you for your understanding in this regard.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Today's News

Will Bigham in today's Daily Bulletin had an article on the subject. Mayor Peter Yao continues with the false hints that the pay stub information somehow obtained through subterfuge:

...attempts by the city to duplicate the search yielded no pay stubs, said Mayor Peter Yao, fueling concerns that the documents may have been obtained by other means.

Hint to Mayor Yao: Go to your archive search engine and try typing: "Jeff Parker performance." It's not rocket science, Peter.

Meanwhile, City Attorney Sonia Carvalho and City Manager Parker have stolen the "hide-the-ball" page from the playbook of Parker's predecessor, Glenn Southard, the article reported:

In an interview Tuesday, Carvalho would not elaborate on her communication with Google and refused to release the city's e-mail correspondence with the company, citing attorney-client privilege.

Carvalho said the city was withholding the e-mail correspondence because city litigation against Google remains a possibility if the company fails in the future to respond if the blog re-posts copies of the pay stubs.

[In other words, Carvalho will withhold the information indefinitely.]

.....

Parker and Carvalho refused to discuss whether the city argued in its correspondence with Google that the city pay stubs were copyrighted documents.

As one occasional Insider reader of a legal mind would say, "I'm ready to rule."

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Down into the rabbit hole of secrecy goes Claremont while the local ACLU chapter and all those fair weather civil libertarians on the City Council, in the Claremont League of Women Voters, in the once progressive Pilgrim Place retirement community, and the in local Democratic Club twiddle their thumbs.