City Fights Blogger On Display of Public Information

rokkaku writes "When the gadfly blogger Claremont Insider went searching for information about employee compensation on the city of Claremont web site, they never expected to find scans of pay stubs for all the employees. Nor did they expect the city attorney to demand that they remove copies of those pay stubs from their web site. They found it especially odd since, according to California law, the compensation of public employees is public information."

compensation != paystubs

[Surt]

The compensation is public. Pay stubs are not compensation. Pay stubs contain fun stuff that may lead to the compromise of the financial security of the individual. Requesting the takedown of the pay stubs was more than reasonable.

Re:They're just ignorant.

[winkydink]

Actually, the California ruling came about as the result of the Contra Costa Times suing the City of Oakland.

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_6732431 [mercurynews.com]

Don't Give In

[Nom du Keyboard]

Don't give in just because the city attorney says he wants it all back. He is not the law. Only a court can decide what's legal and what isn't. Taking legal advice from a city attorney, or the policeman who just arrested you, is some of the worst advice you will get.

Re:Pay stub != compensation

[DavidShor]

Nice straw man, did you bother to actually look at what he scanned? There was no information about any of the things you mentioned(Except marital status, you could tell whether a girl was married by the Ms or Mrs.). All it had was a dollar amount of benefits given, Salary, and name.

See http://claremontca.blogspot.com/2007/09/labor-day_07.html [blogspot.com]

Re:Public Information

[Claremont Buzz]

You presume a number of incorrect things. First, there was no "snooping around" involved. The information was posted on a public, online City of Claremont archive designed to reduce the need for the public to make written requests for city documents. The site had been up for several years. We accessed the information while researching an essay on public employee compensation. We simply typed a search for the Claremont City Manager, Jeff Parker, together with the word "performance." We were looking for his latest performance evaluation, which was discussed in public at a city council meeting earlier this year. Up popped a .pdf with pay stubs for all city employees.

Second, there was no personal information for ID thieves to use on any of the paystubs. No Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal phone numbers or home addresses. Only the employee's name and payroll information. All of this information is public information in California - other states may have different laws, but this is the state of affairs in California.

The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, a local newspaper that has been covering the story, has a copy of the same .pdf file the blog used. The paper published an article on this topic today:

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_6888125 [dailybulletin.com]

Re:Bizarre legal argument

[Anonymous Coward]

>>"It doesn't make any sense," said Terry Francke, general counsel of
>Californians Aware. "First of all, I doubt that it's a fact that the city
>copyrights the pay stubs. I don't know why it would."
>
> They wouldn't. Why not? Because it's no longer necessary to register
> something for the author to claim copyright. That does not mean that it's
> not copyrighted.

You'd be right in most cases - individuals and organizations are granted copyright by default. But the general rule with respect to *government* is, "if the government creates a copyrightable work, that work is immediately placed into the public domain by default." Why? Well, since governments are - in theory - merely the embodiment of the public itself, hence anything they create naturally belongs to the public.

In other words, if you or I create it, it is copyrighted by default and a positive action must be made in order to put it into the public domain. If, however, the government (including its employees in the course of their duties - the equivalent of "works for hire" if they were employed in private industry) creates it, **it is in the public domain by default** unless a positive action has been made to place it under copyright.

So, long story short, you're dead wrong. If the government made it (in this case, a City Government) and didn't specifically file for copyright, it's almost a lock that it's NOT copyrighted.

IANAL. TINLA.

Re:Except...

[Claremont Buzz]

Well, you are right that there is more to the story than the subject line. However, you are incorrect in assuming that we at the blog aggregated the information. That was the form it was in on the city website - 283 paystub images bundled together in 1 .pdf file.

Also, we did not post every one of the 283 images. We posted two, one for the Claremont City Manager, and one for the director of Human Services.

Additionally, the laws governing these matters are particular to each state. Wisconsin is not California. Like it or not, in California, as a result of an 8/27/07 California Supreme Court decision, the information on the paystubs is public. That's why we did not think anything of it when we saw the images. We simply thought Claremont was providing that information on their website as they did with everything else - agendas, minutes, and city staff reports going back fifty years.

A local newspaper, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, has been covering the issue and submitted the matter to several California public records experts, none of whom found anything exceptional in the images, other than the bank routing numbers, which were not discernable in our images. Here is a link to the Bulletin article:

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_6888125 [dailybulletin.com]

Re:Except...

[jthill]

"public information" != "information that must necessarily be accessible instantly, on-demand

Sure: the government isn't obligated to go to any great length to make it convenient for the public to get public data, and they can even charge for what efforts they do make.

So?

That's not even remotely similar to the government forbidding a member of the public from exposing public information which he regards as scandalous to public scrutiny, which is what happened here.

Would you want anyone to see images of your entire pay stubs[...]?

Even the most slack-witted scan, which I just performed with about ten seconds' effort, reveals this:

The city did not contact this blog, nor have we been told what information in the documents is confidential - there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information

Re:Pay stub != compensation

[Dun Malg]

The posting I read (before posting) said:

Until all this can be sorted out, we're posting the text of our Labor Day post minus the images in question. We maintain the city claims of confidentiality for the information posted on their website are baseless.

It does not mention if the text posted is the entirety of what was readable in the scans prior to their removal.

Nice attempt at weaseling, but if you RTFA it mentions what information they contained:

"there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information"

I am a City employee and...

[Koldark]

I would NOT want my pay stub on the internet. Yes, what I make is public, but there is a process in which said information is given. It must be requested and then they are given only the information that is requested.

Re:Pay stub != compensation

[Claremont Buzz]

These are public employees. They do not have 401(k)s. They receive a public pension that pays 2.5% of their salary for each year they are employed. They are eligible at 55. This is paid into the California Public Employees Retirement System. You might try reading the information before chiming in.

Like it or not, the information was public. These are not employees of private corporations, they are public employees whose employers are the people paying the money that supports their paychecks and benefits.

Also, it is not our opinion that the information contained no personal identifiers. That was the opinion of several California public records specialist:

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_6888125 [dailybulletin.com]

And Google's reaction - changing first from a claim of confidentiality to saying that the images were copyrighted by the city of Claremont seem to indicate that Google, after looking into the matter, realized there was no confidentiality violation.

Re:Pay stub != compensation

[Jim Hall]

Nice straw man, did you bother to actually look at what he scanned? There was no information about any of the things you mentioned(Except marital status, you could tell whether a girl was married by the Ms or Mrs.). All it had was a dollar amount of benefits given, Salary, and name.

From the article:

The city did not contact this blog, nor have we been told what information in the documents is confidential - there were no Social Security numbers, no dates of birth, no personal identifiers. The documents only contained name and pay information. What praytell was the top secret information that must be hidden from the public? Salary? Bonuses? But all of that is public information in the state of California.

I'd be able to answer this question for you if I knew more about what "pay information" was on the stub. I work for a public university, and our salary is public information. However, our deductions are not. You have a right to know how much I earn (state taxpayers essentially pay my salary) but you don't have a right to see what I may be taking out as child support, medical, investment, transportation, garnishment, etc. That's included on a typical pay stub where I work, and by law is considered private information. I'm sure it's the same in California.

So while my university doesn't make employee pay stubs available to the public, we do have other reports showing base salary that anyone can view.