By then, the phone had been purged of all text messages, IWD officials told the public information board. The board issued a finding that IWD had violated Iowa’s Open Records Law, but it then dismissed the Capital Dispatch’s complaint with no further action taken.

The data she collected that day, in May of last year, included the trajectory report of the 13 bullets Overland Park police officer Clayton Jenison had fired in January 2018, when he shot and killed Albers’ son, John, as the 17-year-old backed the family minivan out of the garage.

"This case is about ensuring core First Amendment principles, like the right to access public court filings, are applied in a way that meets our rapidly expanding digital reality," Allen Chaney, the ACLU of South Carolina's legal director, said in a statement.

When Libertarians for Transparent Government learned that a corrections officer had admitted to sexually abusing an inmate at the Cumberland County Jail, the nonprofit group filed an OPRA request with the county seeking the settlement agreement the county had reached with the officer. County officials claimed the settlement was exempt from disclosure under the state’s public records law because it was a personnel record. Instead of releasing the agreement, the county provided some information in a written statement and claimed that the officer was terminated.

Indigenous groups and other opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline in nearby North Dakota staged large protests during a six-month span starting in 2016 that resulted in the arrests of 761 people.

The Montana Department of Justice, which handled the state's defense in the public records case, argued the documents being sought qualified as “confidential criminal justice information,” which are exempt from disclosure under Montana's right-to-know laws.

As part of the city of Moab’s internal investigation into their police department’s encounter with Petito and Brian Laundrie, officers made Garrity statements. Ultimately, the investigation found that the officers made “unintentional mistakes” by not citing Petito for domestic violence.

Bradfield said the goal is to limit "vexatious requests" in order for government entities to run more smoothly and address more "legitimate" requests in a timely manner. He emphasized that the bill would not prevent someone from filing a public records request, and that requesters would have 36 free requests a year.

Generally, student records, both academic and disciplinary, are protected by a FERPA, which is a federal law limiting access to educational information. However, one FERPA exemption says that an institution can disclose disciplinary records when the student is the alleged perpetrator of a violent crime or a nonforcible sex offence.

This is a good bill that should become law, and it is encouraging to see lawmakers advancing such ideas — something that stands in contrast to other bills that seem a step in the opposite direction when it comes to transparency, accessibility and accountability.

2021 saw an increasing number of data protection bills and laws passed across numerous international jurisdictions. Notably, China, the UAE, Brazil, Russia and Switzerland, among others, passed new laws, amendments or implementing regulations paving the way for a new round of significant data privacy regimes. It is expected that international authorities will make full use of their new powers in order to apply and enforce their respective data protection legislation in the near future.

In the opinion, Judge Henry Hudson wrote, “It is well-settled that the press and public have a right of access to most, if not all, civil court records.” Hudson explained that excluding non-attorneys from having online access to civil filings is “not narrowly tailored to preserve a significant governmental interest and thus could violate the First Amendment.”

This spring 2021 legislative session has been extremely busy for the consumer privacy act. To date, state lawmakers have introduced bills in 24 states. Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington are considering multiple bills. One state (Virginia) has passed legislation whereas the bills in four states (Kentucky, North Dakota, Mississippi, and Utah) have failed.