How some elected officials in California are weaponizing public information | Opinion
.jpg "State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond is escorted out of the Chino Valley school board meeting Thursday, July 20, 2023, by security officers. Board President Sonja Shaw said he went over the one-minute time limit for speakers. The incident illustrated a disturbing trend in California where elected leaders use public information as a weapon against their adversaries. In this case, Thurmond was objecting to a decision by the Chino Valley school board to notify parents if a student wishes to be known by a name or pronoun other than those listed on the student’s birth certificate.")
Transparency in government is generally considered a good thing. But there is a growing trend in California for governments to weaponize it, to release personal information for various agendas that at the moment are trending on both sides of the political spectrum.
Real sunshine can be harmful in large doses. So is government information that is used to scorch people on the wrong side of political leaders. Three recent examples:
At Southern California’s Chino Valley Unified School District, its board voted 4-1 to notify parents if a student, filling out a form or talking to a teacher, wants to be known by “a name or pronoun other than those listed on the student’s birth certificate” or other records. In other words, if a kid is transgender, that is news to be spread to everybody.
Tony Thurmond, the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, recently spoke to the Chino board to oppose the parental notification policy and respect the privacy of its students. Thurmond was basically ejected from this public meeting. When security is necessary to safely escort a state official from a government meeting, something is terribly amiss.
In Alameda County, District Attorney Pamela Price released in two court documents the home address of a rival prosecutor, Amilcor “Butch” Ford. Exposing someone who has put hundreds and hundreds of local residents behind bars was a reckless move that outraged the labor union representing the prosecutors.
The political backdrop for all of this and much more is a complicated and ongoing court conflict between Ford and Price, who also happens to be facing a bitter recall election.
Finally, there is a recent incident right here in Sacramento. An information rights group asked Sheriff Jim Cooper to stop voluntarily sharing license plate information with other states, particularly those in states with abortion restrictions that could potentially use the information to track the private movements of patients.
As a state assemblyman, Cooper had supported a bill that restricted such sharing of information. As sheriff, he apparently changed his mind. On Twitter, Cooper later said that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is “protecting child molesters, fentanyl traffickers, rapists and murderers.”
That is a pretty curious criticism of an organization that has been around for 33 years and is active around the planet on various digital conflicts that can potentially compromise personal privacy. And it does not explain an apparent change of thinking in his conversion from a legislator back into a law enforcement officer.
The Constitution does not mention the word “privacy,” although it does promote some ways to protect it, particularly in the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promotion of equal protection.
If any student in the Chino Valley Unified School District happens to publicly identify as transgender, it is hard to make the case that the district is protecting this student equally by its notification policy.
This school board provided the state schools superintendent only a minute to speak. Thurmond tried to make the most of it.
“We can debate all the laws and all of the policies and practices, I ask you to consider this,” he said. “That nearly half of all students who identify as LGBTQ-plus are considering suicide. I ask you to consider this. That the policy that you consider tonight might not only fall outside of the laws that respect privacy and safety for our students, but may put students at risk.”
Board President Sonja Shaw responded. “Here is the problem. We are here because of people like you. You are in Sacramento proposing things that pervert children.” She rejected Thurmond’s request to respond and temporarily suspended the meeting as the boardroom descended into a chaos of shouting and screaming.
What a lesson for any student who happened to be watching.
For all of us, it is the healthy kind of sunshine, when the public begins to understand when its leaders are misusing information to potentially harm members of the public, that is the best cure of all.
This story was originally published August 7, 2023 at 5:00 AM.