So I will call to order the Board of Directors of Community Television of Santa Cruz County regular meeting of June 22nd 2020. I'll note the time is 5 o'clock 5 p.m. but our secretary can they call the roll. Dermayziars. Here. Director Hall. Here. Director Rand. Eating fruit salad. Director Mannheim. Here. Director O'Driscoll. Here. Director Launay. Here. Director Shaw. Director Kedger. Here. Thank you Secretary Laurent. So that's item one item two oral communications. Do we have any members of the public on the call who would like to comment? Seeing none. We can move on to item three consideration of late additions. The agenda additions deletions. Anything we need to add or drop from the agenda. Okay. Seeing none. We can move on to the consent agenda, which is items four, five and six. Four is to approve the minutes of the board meeting of April 27th. Five is to approve the minutes of our special meeting of May 4th. And six is to approve the recommendation of the finance committee. To accept the May 2020 financial reports. I think that's it for that. Yeah. I have one. I'll make a motion to approve, but I'd like you to correct. The line is last name in item seven and eight of the April 27th. Me day. Okay. I will fix it. Other than that, I make a motion to approve the consent agenda. And I'll second it and I have a comment too. Yes. Director Hall, would you like to comment on. Item six and just a comment. If you'll go, if you're looking at, if you go to 41 20 facility and equipment use. That's our lease revenue from the studio on the coworking space on Soquel. And it's been dropping. Since the shutdown, but we think we've reached the bottom of the dropping and we're off. By a reasonable amount from what we had expected, but it isn't as low as we thought it would go. So that's pretty good. And according to Becca, they were probably going to be going up a little bit because I think a certain period of time and she can go over that all in her report. But I just wanted to point out that one thing. So you're aware of it. And I'll just, I made my second and I'll just go with that. All right. Thank you, director Hall. Any further questions or comments on the consent agenda? All right. Seeing none. Would the secretary call the roll call vote, please. Chairman is yours. Aye. Director Hall. Yes. Director Rand. Yes. Director Mannheim. Yeah. Director Lorette. Yes. Director. Yes. Director. Yes. Director. Yes. All right. So that passes unanimously. So we can move right along to our regular agenda item seven. I wasn't sure if I should drop this on the agenda. So I figured I'd leave it on. Is the report from the ad hoc facilities committee. I know we have a closed session item. That's related to this as item 14. Is there anything that the committee would like to report in open session? Who's the chair of that committee? Is it, is it you, the committee or the board? I don't know. I'm sorry. Director. I guess back and I are both. I'm sorry. I was busy trying to get some information out to Barbara. I didn't hear that. Go, go ahead. And I'll chime in if you need. Well, as you know, the committee has met several times. And we have some information to report. this in close session to discuss her part of the deal. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. So are there any questions from board members? Okay. Seeing none, why don't we move on to item number eight, which is to review and extend the emergency signing policy. I just included the policy that was provided by our executive director. I thought that when we approved it, we had amended it to say that any officer of the board could docusign rather than just the chair. Right. Is there any discussion on this item? Move approval. All right. We have a motion. I'd like to move approval with the clarification that it is for any member of the any officer of the of the organization. Okay. Thank you. Do we have a second? Second. All right. We have a second from director O'Driscoll. And I believe the period that we were approving the extension is for two months. It's not, I didn't say that on there. What is it? I think it's September. September board meeting. I didn't say that. Yeah, I just I just said review and extend. So with the maker of the motion like to specify, I mean, our secretary who was our Brown Act expert for an emergency, I believe you told me in a communication that for an emergency resolution, they have to be reviewed every two months. That is what our city attorney told us. It has to be reviewed every three. It doesn't have to be approved. Doesn't have to be anything. It just has to be reviewed every two months by the board. Okay. Is this is this still an emergency resolution? I'm my understanding is still emergency resolution because the the what's the name of that committee, the governance committee, the governance committee hasn't met to review it and recommend a permanent policy change. Well, that being the case, I will amend my amended to say through the August board meeting to the August board meeting, whatever date that would be. Is it one? We don't have one in August? No. We don't have one in July. We do have one in July. Hmm. How about I amend this to we just to continue for one month and then in July we can go two months if we have to get to the end of September. Is that what you were? Is that what we're going to do at this point? That sounds good to me. Anybody else have clear to chime in on that? That would get us to September, right? Well, right now all we're all we're able to do is get us to the July meeting. And then this will be on the agenda in July and at that point we can go out two months. Okay. Sounds good. We could amend it for two months and then in July amend it for two months. Right. Maybe we should just make it two months. Just in case. But in July if we do it for two months it will still just be to the end of September. Just in case a meteor comes down and we can't meet in July. I did just schedule a vacation for a week in July, the week of July 15th or so. But I think our meeting is after that. But if I get eaten by a bear up in Lassen, now I guess Matilda will have to chair the next meeting. You won't be able to sign anything. All the officers can by this now. Okay. So to clarify the motion it's to approve with the amendment that any director can to occupying. And it is for one month. Let me just if we just let me just step in for a second. Thank you. I correct that when we did the original policy two months ago it said any officer of the organization. Is that correct?  We don't need to amend the policy that we currently have. All we need to do is extend it for a month or two months. And I'm going to extend it for one month since we have to meet in July and we don't need an August. Okay. Is that amenable to the second? That's my motion. Yes. Okay. So we have a motion and a second. Secretary Laurent, please call the roll call vote. Director O'Driscoll. Yes. Director Laurent. Yes. Director Launayette. Yes. Chair Maziaris. Yes. Director Mannheim. Yes. Director Gudger. Yes. And I want to point out that you'll have a five day gap in July because one month from the day is five days before the next board meeting. Okay. Two months. I take it back. Through the July meeting. That's yeah. Through the July meeting. Director Rand. Yes. Director Hall. Yes. Great. Thank you. So that passes unanimously. All right. So we can move on now to item number nine which was an update on the CARES Act Economic Injury Disaster Loan or EIDL loan from the US Small Business Administration. I believe our Finance Committee chair, Director Hall, prepared a staff report or a report for the agenda. Is there anything you'd care to elaborate on that report? Yes. I actually wanted to thank Becca because this has been kind of a work in progress. Federal rules have changed. The availability of the loan has changed. And through kind of intuitive sleuthing, Becca was able to find a method to get our application in. It was rejected once and then out of the blue it was accepted. So it was it was quite an interesting adventure in the CARES Act and post COVID-19 federal assistance. But along in the short of it is the CTV received approval of $150,000 loan. I put down all the terms. We found out about it at the day of the Finance Committee meeting. So we really haven't had a chance to talk about it. But in our previous meetings we talked about the concept at least at this point to accept whatever assistance we need. And then at that point that we find it all out we can go through and see what we want. Right now we have the Payroll Protection Act loan which is helping us with the payroll to the amount of $33,000. That's been amended by Congress. So there's been some changes there that we'll be talking about at our next Finance Committee meeting. And we'll talk about this at the next meeting in terms of how we repay it, what our thoughts are make a recommendation to the board at that time. But I thought it was important to let you know that we received it. And to thank Becket because we were pretty much moving nowhere and then she had the curiosity to check on something. And lo and behold, after a number of steps and conversations we did. And I want to thank the board. You gave her approval to do this. So we acted as soon as we received this notice. So long and short is we're fortunate and we'll be talking about it more. And Becket, do you want to answer any questions real quickly? Sure, if there are questions. Looks like Director Rand has her hand. I don't have a question and I don't want to be a donor. But I am not very much in favor of actual loans that we have to pay back.  But I am not very much in favor of loans. So I just want to have that noted when when you're meeting. So Yeah, I was reading about this loan and it sounded like that you get a $10,000 bonus instantly that you don't have to pay back when you get this long 2000. It's only two. I read 10 no 10. You get 10. Okay. So by accepting the loan, we get more than the first year's interest back in the $10,000. And then if we were to pay it back, there's no payments allowed or required in the first year.  Well, I would like you to check if indeed it's 10,000 because whatever I've read for the radio station, you know, we've been looking into that. It said 2000. And actually, we already got 2000. And, and now we have to decide if we're going to accept a loan or not. And the 2000 you can keep. So I'm not sure where you're at the 10,000 time. It's in the documentation that was provided. Matilda, I'm in the So maybe maybe it's new then, but would it be a different amount depending on the amount of loan? No, actually, what it is, it depends on how many employees you have. So that's maybe why you got 10,000. Probably 10 employees. Nine. Okay, well, so yeah, it's depending on on the number of employees. Okay, is there any further questions? Discussion? Director Hall? One thing, just so you know, this actually hasn't been finalized. Becca, have you where you are in terms of filing all the last paperwork on this? I have I've given them all the last paperwork and we can accept it if we want to. Okay, well, you already have a resolution to apply and accept. And I think we'll take Matilda's comments and finance committee to heart because we debated the same question you did. And so it isn't. But right now, we were fortunate to get through the maze. And we'll see now that we're into the maze what we do and what we want to do with it. But it is for loans from the government. Pretty generous. It is. And so even if you don't accept it, you still can keep the $10,000. Yeah, that's what I understand. So, you know, I, I assume I mean, what happened is case with is that we got the $2,000. We never got any paperwork, but we got some emails, but we got the $2,000. And so we still have to decide if we're going to accept it or not. I think there was a time limit on accepting it. Isn't that correct? 30 days. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So one point that he made was that it, the interest is very low. And since we don't know what might happen, we just really can't tell every day the COVID thing changes. It seems that we have more and more cases. We could be once again, slowed down or shut down. And this is a very inexpensive insurance policy to make sure we have enough operating to continue should that happen again. And maybe it won't. And we can just send all the money back or use it and pay very little interest. Yeah, or use it and pay very little interest is really small. It doesn't cost much to have this loan. Yeah, it's our annual interest on it is $4,125. So it's really if we're getting $10,000 bonus, it pays for the first two years. And if we put the money in a bank where we made money on the money, that would bring the interest even further. Yeah, bring it down a little now. And I'll add it was noted in the finance committee meeting that our operating reserves are somewhat modest, right? So this would correct. This would probably add a third to our operating reserves roughly. Correct. Okay, so any further comments or questions from No, I just wanted everybody to know what was going on. And I decided to write it down. So there's something people could look at and think about ahead of time. Right. Can I comment? Please. I would like to thank Joe, because he answered my phone calls every time I called him. This is a very weird application. And it seemed dicey. And sometimes I thought it was a scam. But it turned out to be okay. And Joe gave me the encouragement to go forward and answered my questions and made it possible. So I wouldn't have done it without him. It was a real key to it. I was actually under a building doing something. Okay, thank you for the notes from the underground. I, you know, I was just noticing in the attachment from the National Council of nonprofits. It does describe the $10,000 incident of dance. Which implies it's part of the loan. It's not a gap. Yeah, I was going to argue, argue about it. But I think I think you're right there. But we haven't gotten anything at this point. So we'll see. Right. But so, I mean, it's an advance, but the advance, you don't have to pay back. Right, under loan forgiveness, it says $10,000 advance were given, even if borrowers denied EIDL loans. Got it. Okay. What we actually applied for was the advance, but then they gave us the loan. It is. That's why I didn't want to get into all those details because it's just, it was just a very circuitous process. I guess a nice way to put it. Okay, well, hopefully everything will work out agreeably and we'll have that little bit of financial insurance. Okay, so no action is required on that item, but I will thank both Becca and Joe, Director Hall, for your work on on that. And though you don't require it, we've already given you approval, like it sounds like we give our blessing with some reservation from Director or Vice Chair Rand to go ahead and complete that paperwork so we can get those funds. Alright, so unless there's any further comments, let us move on to item number 10, which is the oral report of our Executive Director, Becca, please. Oh, well, I'm sorry. Just a moment. I was doing something else before the me all kinds of things happened right before we met. Okay, I'll also note that that Ms. Barbara Springer has joined us. Thank you very much for joining us and welcome. And it's good to see you. Alright, I'm, I'm ready if you're ready. Alright, please proceed. Okay. So this month, we're talking about May. And so we, we received the funds for the PPP on May 4th, and they are in the bank and we are using them. And under the co-working under under financial, the co-working center has done, we adjusted our projections for it. As soon as we closed on March 17, I think it was or March 18, no, I guess it was March 19th to a comment to, to anyway, to account for the, the slower business that we'd be able to do because of that. And our projection was $7,500 a month. It used to be 10,000. Now we're at 7,500. And this, and in May, we earned 79. And we're on track this month to do the same thing. So we're, we're holding steady, which is a good thing. Um, we did 16 regular meetings this month under paid services. We did 16 meetings for the, for the city governments and one special meeting. And that is, this is an unusual time. So this is, that was just before they started working on the budget in June. They did a lot of budget meetings and it looks like they're, they're not going to really finish all their meetings as they usually do before July when they take a break. And so in August, they'll be doing a lot of meetings. So you'll see more meetings than regular in August. But right now for May, we did 16. And we did three webinars. Well, we did more than three. I think we did six webinars, two for each, each of the three commissions that we're working with, the San Laurenti Valley Water District, the Santa Cruz County Regional Transit Commission and the Metro Transit. They're all doing their meetings by webinar now. Under a coronavirus update, we have been working on safety measures and we have completed a number of them. We have removed, moved a lot of furniture and re-arranged a lot of furniture so that all the seats are six feet apart. We have added masks, required signs everywhere. And the county provided a very fun screaming hand. Watch your hands signs. So we're putting those in the bathrooms as well. We tested out in May, we got two Plexiglas desk shields are sort of like clear panels that sit on top of the desk. They go up 48 inches and they have little sides.  And we tested out to those two worked well, the people in the co-working center in the cafe area liked them. So we ordered one for every desk and a couple additional for inside the offices because a lot of our people are, we have a number, we have a couple doctors and a health consultant and they all interview people. And so we thought they might need that kind of protection as well. So those are just, we just have those in the office. So if someone is going to do a face-to-face meeting, we can provide that protection. Safety measures in progress include the rest of the Plexiglas shields for all the desks and I actually have the final tune in my car now. So I'll just give you a secret update. They've arrived and we've identified and ordered some special UVC lights for cleaning the offices, storage rooms, the studio and control rooms. So there's a special protocol for using them. They are, they can't be left around for people to use themselves, but Ian will use them to clean offices when no one's in them and to clean the studio at night before after someone uses it. And they will clean, we have two that will clean an entire room and some smaller ones that will clean some of our smaller spaces like the audio booth and the RSVP and that sort of thing. And we've also, we identified and ordered some portable HEPA filters that are silent and they are in the cafe area. They have both a carbon and a HEPA filter and we've got hand sanitizers. We ordered them in May. We've actually installed them now and we've increased our janitorial visits have increased to five times a week now. So they, it's pretty, it's pretty clean. The, and that is, that is our report for June. We really, for May, we really just did a lot of procurement and it took a while to find these things, to identify them, to find a place that had them in stock and to ship them. Everything's taking longer than usual. So, but, but we did it. I'm going to give you a little June update because a lot happened in June that I think is, is COVID related. And you might like to know it, even though it's not officially, it didn't, didn't happen in May, but I think you should know it now. Our co-working center revenue for June was 798 on the day that I wrote this, but it is, it is now seven nine something. I can't remember the exact number, but we're on target. We passed our, our, our projection, but I believe we'll get closer to the seven, closer to eight by the end of the month. We've redent, we've rented two additional offices, which is great. And we have had a lot of people calling us, asking us if they can come to work there. Right now we're only working with people who we, we already, we work with all the time or people that want to rent something going forward from July, but we're getting a lot of people calling asking if they can drop in and that sort of thing. We're not doing that now because we're just not quite ready, but we will start on July 1st. We have applied for the EIDL and gotten the Okidoki and let's see, under safety, we have gotten disinfectant wipes and gloves for our tech guys. So when they come out, they go out in the field. We've actually installed those things in the chambers where they work. So that they have gloves and disinfectant wipes for not only their hands, but the equipment. And we've asked for, we have been able to get the MIRV 13 filters. That's the highest, the highest or the smallest filter system we can get for our air conditioning that can still push the air through the air conditioning, but MIRV 13 is pretty high. It, it, it meets the 0.3 micron, micron requirement. That's how big the COVID virus is. And we are also going to put, if we can, we're waiting for a quote on putting HVC lights in the HVAC system.  So as the air goes through the system, it would be killing the germs as it passes through our AC system. So we're still working on it. It's, I guess everyone wants it. So the, our HV, our HVAC guys having a hard time getting ahold of it. We've got our, our desk shields are installed, hand sanitizers, let's see. We did get, I wanted to, I had talked about at one point of replacing all the toilets or adding a kit to the toilets that would make them touchless flush, but they don't make those kits anymore and actually replacing the toilets would cost way too much money, more than we would ever want to do. So we didn't, I'm not doing that, but we are going to replace the faucets with what they call metered faucets.  So you don't have to sing a song. You know exactly how long to wash your hands.  So you don't, you have to touch them once, but you, once your hands are clean, you don't have to touch them again. And we have hand blowers already. So you can dry your hands under the hot air and, and leave the room. We are still under, under CTV safety. We are still, I'm still having everybody work from home as much as possible. I still think that's safe. They've been doing a good job. I don't think we've suffered any kind of productivity by having people work at home. So I'm going to continue with that. Let's see. We have hand sanitizers in the control rooms now. We are, we have placed all our social distancing messaging in the back hallways and near the restrooms. There's a path of travel marked through the building. So people go only one direction. And I, I think that's it. So that's where we are. I just wanted to give you that extra safety thing because I don't think you need to, you don't want to wait till July to find out what we're doing. So that's where we are on safety. And that's my report for May. Great, thank you so much. Do any board members have any questions regarding that report? Director Hall. How are you going to let people know you're open? Are you going to send out an email blast or just I'm just kind of curious what the steps will be next. Yeah, yeah, we will. We want to make a little video and probably be an animated thing of all the things that we've done to make it safe. And so we'll, we'll be doing something. We'll start working on that now and then we'll send it out. We have a way to, we can email everybody who is a member. Instantly. So we'll do that. But we also have a web page and a blog. So we'll get the word out that way as well. And any customer that's ever come in, we'll communicate with them as well. So we'll, and we'll probably, we're going to, I'm working on, I'm meeting the graphic artists sort of by Zoom tomorrow night to finish up the sign specs because we had a really hard time getting the size of where the sign would go because it's up so high we can't reach it. And we've hired a couple of people to do it. And finally we got somebody who could actually do it, although they did have to go away and get a bigger ladder. But we've got the dimensions now and that's all the artists needed. So we should be able to have a new signage up. And I think that will draw, now our building is great, bright green, cannot miss our building anymore. And with the big sign, I think that will help as well. And we'll put something on our channels too. And one other question. What about the volunteers? Are we going to reach out to them in terms of maybe it's under your report, Matilda. So if I'm jumping ahead. Heath is a director or is a HVAC or HVAC, the VAC chair now. They're actually, we're inviting them back on the 15th of July. I don't, I really want to make sure we have all the lights in house, but the big lights we'd use to do the studio and they won't be in until they won't be shipped until July 7th. So I don't want to invite them back until I can truly provide them a safe environment. And so once we have that in place, they can come back. And you say the big lights mean the big disinfecting lights.  But until then, I don't really feel that like we want to have, I just feel like we don't want to invite people into a place that may not be perfectly clean. OK, I just was curious where we were there. I had the same question, Director Holland, and in terms of legality, in terms of the stages of the governor's orders, you know, we are legal to. Yeah, they're a lot of introduction now. So yeah, we are. But we are, we're being extra careful. We really, we're discouraging it, but I think people want to come back anyway. So we're and you'll hear from Keith Keith, they really made a lot of rules for themselves to be safe. Excellent. Director Mannheim. Just a question, you know, you've mentioned that a number of people are expressing interest. Have you thought at all about the limits of how many individuals could circulate? I mean, if if if people start coming in to use the open spaces, limiting the number of people who can come through and what that would be. Yeah, I took out 15 chairs. So there's only only a safe number can be in there. You can't be in there. I mean, you'll run out of furniture at some point. So that's how we're limiting it. And all the furniture is six feet apart. And there's only desks. There's not, there's not those communal tables. And we even took out all this. We have one, one, one chair on the side of the room with the table because we can get it far and up away from people. But the rest of the furniture, we took out one of the couches in the lobby too. So only one person can sit there. So we've removed, we've removed seating that we don't want people to hold. And so now, yeah, many less, many fewer people can come in at a time. Anything else, Dr. Mannheim? No. Did I see your hand up, Vice Chair Rand? Oh, you're muted. You're muted. I told it. I'm waiting for Keith's reports. OK, yeah, I thought I saw your hand, but maybe you were just adjusting your glasses. Great. Any other further questions or comments from the board on our oral report of our executive director? Seeing none, let's move on to item 11, which is the oral report of the Volunteer Advisory Committee chair. Great. So we met by Google Meet and they produce the members of the back committee were really thrilled to get together. We've been missing each other, so it was quite fun. And we came up with a list of things, which we run by Becca and I'll just mention a few of them. She mentioned the UBC Light. We have one other requirement. We're only going to allow one program on a weekend because we don't have staff to come in and use the light in between shows during on the weekend. So, for instance, there's a Friday night show. There can't be a Sunday show or vice versa. Everything else you pretty much know about. We're only going to have one guest and no audience allowed. If it's a music show, only one to two musicians, no bands. And we've asked Becca for a thermometer. The studio supervisors want to take everyone's temperature as they arrive. And the studio supervisors are going to get together to make a checklist to make sure we're all on the same page. We're going to be required to clean the kitchen before and after and any food must be on the table outside. There's no food in the facility for public access. And I think that pretty much covers everything. Anything else, Matilda? Yeah, there was one other thing. We brainstormed with Becca after we met with the volunteers that we would have the graphics computer probably inside the studio so that the graphics person and the director would not be sitting next to each other. It was a really nice conversation with all the volunteers. They were very serious and safety oriented. They were very pleased with all the things that Becca and Keith and I have been talking about. So, it was a really good community builder. I think we're going to make a good start again. Once indeed, we have everything in place. All right. Thank you. Wonderful news. I'm glad to hear that production will be ramping up again. Any questions or comments from other members of the board? Okay. Seeing none. Thank you very much, Keith. All report of the board chair is item 12. I'm going to just say I have nothing to report. I won't even thank anybody. Just thank you all. So, let's move right on to item 13. Board members, staff requests for items appear on the next meeting agenda. I guess we are going to bring back the check signing policy. All right. Anything in addition to that? Hearing none. Let's move on to I would just say I would just say, of course, we're going to talk about how it went with reopening of the studio. You know, I think that's a given. But we're already talking about how all the safety measures are working out. I think, you know, a report. But, you know, both in Becca's and Keith's report, I'm sure they will show up. But I think board members will want to hear about how things have been developed. Oh, right. Reopening. OK, so a report on reopening for of community TV for volunteers. I'd be happy to add that. Yes, Joe. Was that Joe? Well, for both parties, the co-working and the volunteers. OK, they're on a frame building. Sure. All right. I'm happy to add that. Anything else? Board members or staff would like to see on the next agenda? All right. Seeing none, we can move on to our closed session. Besides our invited guest, I don't see any members of the public here. Do we want to stop the recording here to go off record? I don't. We need to make an adjournment to make a motion. Yeah. To the closed session. Right. So just as a what's it called? Procedural. Procedural question. Yeah. Do we want to stop the recording? When we go into closed session? Yeah. Yes. OK. So I'll entertain a motion to turn to closed session. We have a motion from Vice Chair Rand. To the closed session. Back in. OK, I have a motion from Vice Chair Rand, the second from Director Mannheim. I need to call the roll. I just need to call the roll. You're muted, Larry. Director O'Driscoll. Yes. Director DeLonghiay. Yes. Chair Magier. Yes. Director Mannheim. Yes. Director Gudger. Yes. Director Rand. Yes. Director Hall. Yes. All right. So we are now in closed session. Any members of the public who are here who weren't invited? Scram. And Dr. Can you. If you do close sessions, we always do separate meetings for closed session for this exact purpose in case that way you can have a secondary meeting invite where the public doesn't have it. Good idea. Yeah, I can also I could send us into a breakout room where nobody can go but us. But I don't I don't think I mean, you would see if somebody else was in there. We have 10 people here. I hope so. We don't have any other people. So should we just stop the recording? How do we stop the recording? Can you start it again later or will it overlap? I can pause it and we can question. Is there any way to know if somebody is called in on the phone number? Yeah, I would see him. OK. Yeah, they would there be a big telephone thing over here. So if there was anybody on here that shouldn't be, I can see everybody who's here. And yeah, it's just so I see the recording light is now blinking. I mean, it's paused. No, it is on. You I'm I just am waiting for you to tell me to pause. Oh, please pause the recording. There we go. We're recording. Welcome. We are back. The the board of Community Television is back from its closed session. Would you like Keith to report out what we discussed? We didn't take any action. So there's nothing to report out other than we discuss the item on the agenda. OK. Anything else? Are there any announcements? Then I'll make a motion to adjourn this meeting. I'll second. OK. All right. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Don't need a roll call for adjournment. No, we don't. Unanimous. Have a good dinner. Have a good evening and good meetings. And we'll see each other again next Monday. OK. Thank you all. Thursday.


Move on to our next panel now, which is the technical term. So there are certain areas of the technical term we have for these are a radical. Authenticity is one of them. We can discuss authenticity all day and never finish that discussion. Privacy is one of the most important issues that we have to deal with as we're looking at these legacy databases. You can require lawyers not to put in social security numbers, and you can find them, and you can shame them, and you can have all sorts of rules, and maybe going forward, you can fix those kinds of things. But even if you're simply fixing things going forward, you have these legacy databases, and in the lots of presidential system, you need the archive. And as Tim O'Reilly alluded, when I put the congressional record, I made a copy from the GPO's site, and I put it on the internet. And lo and behold, there were 500,000 social security numbers in the congressional record published by the United States Act. So these privacy issues are not just in court documents. They're not just some bankruptcy lawyer who doesn't care about his clients. This is a problem you're going to find at the local level, at the county level, at the state level, and in tons of federal types of databases. So I'm really pleased that we've got two of the leading experts in this field. Chris used to work at Epic was And Epic, one of the leading electronic privacy information center, has really carried the torch for privacy of the electronic age for ages. He is now on the faculty of the University of California. Peter Witt is a deputy attorney, an assistant US attorney, in the Department of Justice and has been a prolific speaker on privacy issues for quite a while, has quite a few scholarly papers on the issue. And so I'm going to turn it over to you folks. And we have about 50 minutes for this session. Yeah. Carl and I are holding down the, we're wearing a suit and tie just to show that suit and tie still exists. I got it. Before I start, I need to say the usual disclaimer that the views that you're going to hear are not the official position of the United States Department of Justice. I think that would be obvious anyway. You know, I teach a privacy law class, University of Washington, and have done so for some time. And partly because I taught that class several years ago, I was asked to write a paper about privacy and the problem of access to court records. About the time when court records were starting to go online in just 2002, 2003 period of time. And so I wrote the article and forgot about it. And then a couple of years later, Tom Bruce, who is the Legal Information Institute at Cornell, some of whom probably many of you know it, stumbled across the article, Peter Martin stumbled over it and thought that I ought to be encouraged to do more. And then folks at the Department of Justice found out that I was doing more and I did more. So I'll be taking a detail from Seattle to Washington to work in what is called the Office of Legal Counsel on these issues.  You're the only one. So you don't have to be good. I'll be there. I guess the point I want to make today is how difficult and complicated the problem is. OK, we want court records to be open. We want court records to be transparent. As we know, that's important for the political feedback loop. It's important for the legitimacy of the system, not only that it has to be perceived as fair, not just be fair for the system to work. It's important, by the way, that this stuff, which is the resolution of disputes, take place in a public forum. And the reason it's important that it take place in a public forum, because if it doesn't, people will tend to use self-help. But even before we had what we call a rational judicial system, where we work with rules and laws and the application of a lot of fact, even when we had rituals or deals as a means of resolving disputes, it had to be in public, because the point of a judicial system is that it's a nonviolent way of resolving disputes. The alternative is self-help. That's always the case, and that's why it has to be public. So this stuff has to be in public for a lot of really good reasons. At the same time, there's a lot of sensitive information that goes into the judicial system. And the sensitive information is critical for the truth-finding function of the judicial system. People believe, and participants in the judicial system are not simply parties. We're talking about jurors. We're talking about witnesses. We're talking about a lot of third parties whose information gets into the judicial system. And it's not simply individuals. We have businesses whose information gets into the judicial system in terms of trade secrets or confidential business information. And we have governments, believe it or not, that are sitting on a lot of sensitive information, mostly pertaining to businesses and individuals. In tax returns is a good example, but there's 101 other examples of governments sitting on a lot of sensitive information. A lot of that information will get into the judicial dispute resolution process. In addition, governments have their own special secrets, like the secret formula for making atomic bombs. And sometimes that gets into a judicial dispute resolution process. So what's really amazing about the system that we have is people are, generally speaking, voluntarily submitting that sensitive information to this judicial resolution process. And they're doing it without having to be thrown in jail and forced to turn it over. They're doing it voluntarily. So there's a level of comfort that people have that when they submit sensitive information to this system, it's not going to bite them in the butt. So the basic problem that we have is we want a transparent system that protects sensitive information. We want to have our cave. We want to eat it, too. Now, in order to understand, before you sort of look at the nightmare of electronic information, you need to take a second and look at the world of paper. The wonderful thing about paper is it's hard to work. It's practically obscure is the magic word. And in the paper days, you could periodically get a document sealed, about maybe less than 1% of documents in the paper-based system was sealed. The rest of the stuff might as well have been sealed because nobody could get hold of it without standing in a line at the courthouse.  And the clerk says, well, the judge has it in his chamber. He can't see it. This is, I mean, generationally, that's the way it was when I graduated from law school in the 80s. OK, so it goes online. And by the way, the problems now as we are about to jump into an online system, the problems have people have experienced these problems in the past. And there was a time when court records were on paper. Courts were basically oral institutions where people basically argued in the community. And what was argued, it was argued. And that was that. And as soon as people started putting stuff on paper in the court system back in the 13th century when they invented ragged paper and people became moderately more literate, the reaction of the judicial system was shut it down. Nobody had access to the paper. 800 years later, we've kind of worked out this balance. The reason why I want to use that as an example is I think 800 years from now will probably have the balance right. But in the meantime, we're just at the beginning of a fairly dramatic transformation in how this information is managed. OK, now I've spent a lot of time working in the federal judicial system, both as a lawyer, as well as working with the judicial conference, because they too, when they found out that I was like interested in this issue and you're triggered, suddenly you're helping them, whether you like it or not. An Article 3 judge calls you up and asks you to help you. You don't say no. But the thing about the federal system, before I start talking about the federal system, and this is definitely not the position of the Department of Justice. The federal system is kind of a boutique. You know, it's sort of, I mean, a good example is, I work in Seattle. We do less than 1,000 dispositions a year. I mean, you go over to King County, which is a smaller district, and we have half the state. They just have a single county. They're doing 50,000 cases a year. So this gives you an idea about just how representative this sample is. Also, the federal courts don't do divorces, where you really, and you don't do juvenile cases. I mean, we do one juvenile case in 2000. And so we're dealing with something that's a lot easier to manage than the states who are dealing with people who really are not at their best. And by the way, the other thing about the state system, I mean, Colorado is a good example. 85% of divorces in Colorado are prosa. So they don't even have lawyers. And a lot of the cases that go through the state system do not have lawyers. They certainly don't have lawyers that dress really well. And no site formation or clerk for judges. I mean, even when they do have lawyers, you're dealing with a different class. And you're dealing with people who aren't doing double backflips and have twists on the back of the law. All right, so federal system. The federal system had the benefit of being a guinea pig. It jumped into the deep end of the Soins Bowl before. Largely because nobody knew what they were doing. And so they went to the Pacer system. And it's called Pacer or ECF. It's a system where lawyers can file their own pleadings. They basically disappeared the people in the clerk's office who used to take care of that for you. But who also used to call you up when you file a pleading with social security numbers on it and say, Mr. Winn, did you intend to file this pleading with this big list of social security numbers of your patients who are the subject of your life, of your enforcement procedure? I said, no, I didn't. And you would be in the clerk's office the next day or that afternoon substituting. The clerk would let you substitute the paper. And boy, you would ever be nice to that clerk and come Thanksgiving or Christmas. They would always be getting something special because they had your back. Well, the Pacer system doesn't have your back. The electronic system is not forgiving. And this is a problem in both, in two senses. One is, well, one is we do a pretty, excuse my friends, we do a pretty shitty job of getting the information out to the public in a way that's useful. I mean, this is, most of what today has been talking about is just how frustrating it is to get access to the actual court decisions or the briefs of the parties, the stuff that is legitimately a matter of public concern. They do a really bad job because the Pacer system is not researchable. You have to have a credit card to get access and even if the opinions are free, you're going to be charged for the search. So there's a lot of dysfunctional aspects about the Pacer system. But the Pacer system, to some extent, is still kind of sort of practically obscure, kind of sort of. The other problem, of course, is that it does a really lousy job of identifying the sensitive information. And targeting it so it can be protected. All right? I mean, Carl is famous because he's really popular with the judges. Let me tell you. Because I think you've got 20% of the Pacer system on a sort of controversial process where a lot of stuff was downloaded from a public site. And then he searched. He did an audit. I haven't forbid that anyone would audit the system. But the audit showed that there are a lot of lawyers who basically were brain dead like me who were filing social security numbers and pleadings, even though there was a rule that said thou shalt not do that. And it hit the radar screen of the judges when it was on The New York Times. And three weeks ago, I basically gave a talk to the judges. The judicial conference had convened a bunch of committees to address the issue of are we doing this as well as we can. All right?  Some of them are white women who are over 60. Well, and I'm joking, but one of the things federal judges are comfortable doing is they're not the sort of person you're going to call up and lean on. That's bad, bad idea. So when you get an issue tea up before them, they will make a rational decision. They are used to making decisions. And they are pretty good at making reasonably fair, articulate decisions. You may or may not agree with it, but they're comfortable in that role. So they're in the process of trying to decide whether they can do this better or not. Now, there are various strategies that we can adopt when we try to design a better system. One is we can keep the system, keep the information out of the system to start. Don't put social security numbers in your pleadings. Redact them if you have to. There's a second strategy, which is, of course, that's just like the old paper system. There's a second strategy as well, which is sealing. Just lock it out entirely. File it, but nobody can have access to it but the parties. There's a third strategy. A third strategy is allow anybody to file what they want to in the system, but make everybody promise when they access the information to only use it for the purposes having to do with the administration of justice. The idea is, it's like the, I mean, Joel Reidenberg likes this idea, which is basically, yeah, it's given to the court for one purpose. But if somebody takes this information and uses it for a secondary purpose to embarrass somebody, I mean, if I want to low look at my neighbor's divorce records because I'm just curious, then I somehow violate their rights. That is a general idea that is, that I think we probably can have a productive conversation about it. Chris and I had Carl and a lot of people. I actually proposed that idea in an article that I wrote there in the back. It's free for anybody who wants to swipe one of those paper copies.  I mean, from a practical point of view, as well as from a legal point of view, there's a lot of issues. The fourth strategy is a sort of intermediate strategy that I proposed. It's actually been adopted by the judges, believe it or not, in the new federal rules of procedure, and that federal rules of procedure are criminal procedure, civil procedure, bankruptcy procedure, and appellate procedure. And all those four sets of federal rules have adopted this idea, which is for a clause, which is a much lower standard than for a compelling reason, which is the standard for sealing the document. For a clause just means you have to have a good reason. You can basically file something offline. And you can get a judge's order to let you do it. That is the standard way in which social security and administration, I'm sorry, social security and immigration cases are filed today. Particularly the administrative file, or these are appeals from the agency that is basically set graced over somebody who says they're so sick or they're hurt so bad they can't work, for instance, in the social security context, the whole file is health records. And so the court said these people don't have those kinds of resources to go through and redact every other page or every page. We're just not going to, we're just going to file it offline. And that's actually worked relatively well since, I mean, I don't know how long that will work well, but it's an option right now that you can just sort of have this intermediate level where you sort of reproduce practical obscurity by simply taking the document and filing it in a way where it's only accessible in an electronic form to the parties in the court.  But maybe the lawyers will try it and we'll see whether this operates as sort of a stopgap measure. I'm not sure. So these four, there are four strategies. There are, within those four strategies, there are three techniques, there are three tools in our toolbox. One are rules. And the judges and the lawyers are really good at making rules. And rules, you know, you sort of have this idea that thou shalt not file, so it's a security number. And that's the rule. You pass the rule and you put it in the civil rules and everyone's supposed to adhere to it. You can have better training. So the folks who are using the system are better trained to use it, so they don't, you know, triple, you know, like let's take those 60 year old white guys who are used to working in paper and let's make them, before they're gonna get a paste or account, have some training. Like let's license them, make them make a driver's license before we give them a license to drive a car. So that's the second technique. We can do a lot better training. The lawyers, we can do a lot better training with judges, most of whom don't file their own case, pleadings, they have their secretaries to them. The third area is technology. And technology, better technology can help, okay? And better understand you, the technology can help. Pacer system is an appalling technology right now. The ECFC, you know, the electronic filing system, is really a very, very, very cumbersome, not useful system. 10 years ago, it was the greatest thing some sliced bread, okay? There are technologies that can help identify sensitive information that can be better used. Is it just, I mean, I'm in San Francisco and like reaching the choir on that. So, but the judges who are on the judicial conference in the federal system, I mean, three weeks ago I had to lobby to get Ed Felton to come and talk to them. And it was like their jaws were dropping when Ed was talking, because he was making stuff so clear and so easy in terms of what the technology can and can't do. So these people are trying to do the right thing. They just don't understand the technology, okay? Lawyers generally are typically not technologically literate, at least not in my generation. The younger generation of lawyers tend to be.  So we have, we've got those three techniques. But what I'm actually arguing, and I've argued a lot, is that those techniques alone are not gonna be enough. To some extent, we have to have sort of a reconceptualization of what we're doing here. In the article I talk about this adversary system, because the judges are used to resolving things when people are in fights, right? The whole point of the process is to resolve fights. So laws and rules get worked out in the context of resolving fights. What if nobody's fighting? What if a lawyer's going to court and have an agreed order to seal a settlement, even though it's a mass tort that's a matter of legitimate public concern? Well, the judge is gonna sign that order, nine times out of 10. Seattle Times has gone through and done audits, which are now available because the stuff is online, of the number of times ceiling orders were entered in compliance with the rules of ceiling, which are fairly stringent. 97% of the time they didn't comply with the rules. Why? Because nobody was fighting. If nobody fights, the judge signs the order. You don't have to comply with the law. You're agreed. Law and theory resolve disputes. So the same thing happens at the privacy side. That's a violation of the public's right to access. The same thing happens when the lawyers aren't representing the person whose private information is at stake. Do you think they're gonna be focused on that? No, they aren't. In fact, when they did the audit, when the judicial conference went through and looked at what Carl had already done, in terms of the social security numbers, a majority of those cases involved people who weren't being, the socials were people who weren't being represented. Okay? That's obvious, right? If the system is there to resolve disputes, the people who aren't represented are gonna be left in the lurch, right? So what are we really dealing with here? We're dealing with what economists call externalities, pollution, right? And in the 19th century, we used nuisance doctrine to resolve pollution issues. We didn't, it worked just fine in the 18th century. In the 19th century, with industrialization, it stopped working so fine. In the 20th century, we set up administrative agencies to manage externalities caused by people who pollute, right?  It depends on a cost-benefit analysis and somebody's got to focus and now we have things called it, NEPA and you do environmental impact statements. And you basically, the bottom line is you put everybody in the room before you make a significant decision about how we manage information. And you put everybody in the room and get everybody to try to identify who's gonna get hurt when we do this. And you muddle through. That's what the states have been doing, by the way. They watch the federal system kind of jump into the swimming pool and start drowning. And they thought, well, maybe we should try to get all the stakeholders together in the room and let them talk. And Colorado just did that. One of the things they did when they put everybody in the room is they stopped using paper. I mean, they stopped using the model of a document on paper. And instead started inputting the information separately so it could be managed more easily. That's the state where 85% of the people don't have lawyers. Maybe because they decide they don't need them. So that's something that I think the federal government was sort of being watched by everybody. But the states who really do have a much, much, much more difficult set of problems to solve here are learning and they're talking to one another. And there is a dialogue going on. When you try to get the rules right and you try to get the technology right and you try to get the training programs right, it's contentious, okay? People fight. But that's okay. And at the end of the day, you get a better result when you get all that stuff on the table or the front end rather than the back end. There's sort of one last issue just to talk about how important it is to get it right. And it's just an example. The rules of evidence, like if I'm a prosecutor and we run a search warrant without, or we don't have a search warrant, we just run a search without a warrant of a guy's house and we find a ton of, say, cocaine in there. All right? No exceeding circumstances. We just suspected the guy was a drug dealer. He files a motion to suppress and it's gonna be granted. The jury is not supposed to know about the fact that we went into the guy's house, we found a ton of cocaine. It has to do with the notion of due process. It has to do with Fourth Amendment rights. It has to do with a lot of questions about who we are as people, right? We'd rather have a guilty person go free if it involves a government pushing somebody around in a way that violates their rights.  A jury can now Google the motion to suppress if we put it online. Juries, by the way, are Googling defendants prior criminal records because it's online. Let me tell you something. A jury that knows, this information is a prosecutor, I'll lose my bar card. If I point out to the jury, the guy has been convicted of a crime, particularly one very similar to one I'm prosecuting for. You know, I wait for him to get up on the stand and then I pop the champagne corks. Then I can use it to impeach you, but otherwise I can't, right? Everybody knows this rule, but the jury doesn't care because they can find out that the guy has been convicted of exactly the same crime that he's been prosecuted for, right? And they don't have to tell me. Now jurors have always been told, don't read the newspapers. And we all know that jurors read the newspapers. But the jurors know the case better than the newspaper reporter, so they laugh. But juries are not supposed to know about stuff that's true, like the fact that we did find a ton of cocaine in the guy's house. There's a due process issue here if we get it wrong. Courts, art, information, management, machines, that's what they do. They manage information to direct the power of the government. And issue these judgments, that either I'll ask you to go and take the person's property or take their liberty or take their life. Knowledge is power, information is power, and judges know that instinctively. And so it's important to get this balance right because it affects a lot of different things. Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, the late 18th century, early 19th century, argued strongly that the rules of evidence should be gotten rid of. This notion of the exclusionary rule was anathema to him because he figured, juror, the goal was to get the truth, right, not to be despairing his idea, this idea of rights he made fun of. But, you know, and we can go to a Benthamite Panopticon in the law. We can simply say, we're just gonna get the truth and we don't care. But there are deep, deep, issues about who we are as a people which are going to be implicated when we are no longer able to manage information, to keep sensitive information away from certain people like jurors, or to prevent anybody, I mean, to allow individuals to control sensitive information in a meaningful way and then go into the system to get those future results.  That's the trick. I mean, we have to have the information in public. We can do a much, much, much, much better job at getting the public. And we also have to protect the sensitive information. It's easier said than done, but we need to level through. So I'm normally the person at Berkeley who wears a suit and my colleagues are always complaining to me, asking me to wear jeans, but I now have a little baby and I can't afford to wear any more suits. I just was in the bathroom and I realized I had two stains on this shirt. The other day I was at some, it's a badge of honor. I went, I had some convenience for something and the woman behind the camera was laughing at me and I couldn't quite understand it. When I got home, I had a sock on me. So that's the reason why I'm dressing like a bum lately. I apologize to all of you for that, but I also wanted to thank Carl for including me in this wonderful program and for reaching out to me on some of these privacy issues that you have uncovered and trying to deal with quite conscientiously. I think you've been extraordinarily careful and thoughtful about some of the problems that you run into in trying to bring more transparency to these systems to make them more usable. Peter Winn's article is definitely worth checking out because I think you were summing this up at the end. He points out pretty clearly that where are the courts and where are the actors in the court want privacy, they get it, they can't. You focus on it, you get it. And a lot of what we are dealing with in the privacy world generally is the problem of externalities. People who are perhaps not even party to the suit for some reason their information is in it or people who are disempowered in the system, their information is in the system and people who are more powerful want to keep it public for reasons. Another kind of interesting point you made was the idea of will lawyers try these different rules? That's a really interesting point. One of my students just completed a survey of the rules in all 50 states of how to file a court case with a suit in it. And one of the reasons why we worked on this article was that we found that many of the lawyers who were doing privacy court cases did not know the option was available to them. And they might've read, I actually, some of them I talked to, they didn't realize it was Jane Roe of Roe vs. Wade. They didn't realize it was Jane Roe of Roe. And I think if you look at that case in a court on its own, substituted Roe, or the District of Texas, so it was practice. So it was not a movement of parties, as I understand it. It was the judge. It was the judge. And so will lawyers try it? Well, they gotta know that these remedies are available and because so many privacy suits happen in state court, we thought we'd write the state survey and that should be coming out this fall. So I wanted to throw out some thoughts about this issue generally. One thing to think about and considering the public records problem or the court records problem, there's many different types of government records that are subject to different rules. And even where there are very strong rules, there are still massive problems. One area to look at in particular is, let's say the Drivers' Privacy Protection Act. So federal law now limits how department of motor vehicles can limit personal, the release of personal information about individuals. It came about because, among other things, there was a woman stabbed to death by a stalker here in California whose location was determined by the investigator with access to the DMV. There, actually almost all the victims are women, women driving down the street and someone says, oh, she's pretty and writes down her license plate and can go buy her home address for like a dollar that was also available, an available practice back then. And then the anti-abortion activists would sit outside clinics, write down license plate numbers and figure out the home addresses of individuals. This all led, in particular, California senators to push for a very strong law limiting the disclosure of driver records. And one of the reasons why that law could come about is that advocates could show that a problem existed. They could go get audit logs, they could go find out that it was the private investigator who showed up at the DMV and checked out the personal information about the victim, et cetera. That could drive the documentation of the problem drove the legislative intervention. And one of the problems we have in public records is that there's no way to prove there's a problem. So we can speculate about stalking, we can speculate about identity theft. I actually doubt there's a lot of identity theft going on through public records, but for a different reason, but we ultimately cannot link the problem back to the architecture that we have in court records. But even where you do prove that there's a problem and you pass a statute, a lot of interesting things happen in that process. When you look at the Drivers' Privacy Protection Act, for instance, it protects your record at the DMV, but it does not protect records outside the DMV. So when you walk to the rental car company and you give them your driver's license, they are free to scan it. And in fact, a lot of them do. And then they send it to a cooperative database run by a company called Choice Point. And so they literally scan it and they lift your picture and all the data off of it. Now is that a violation of the Drivers' Privacy Protection Act? No. Courts look at that and say, that's not a rental vehicle record. Number one. Number two, you voluntarily did that. You voluntarily surrendered your license to that company. You see the same problem with swiping. If you go to a bar or you buy alcohol in most states, the company that you're buying alcohol from can swipe your license and keep all the data that is in the track.  Wouldn't it make sense to sell that data? Why wouldn't you sell that data? It's out the side of DPPA. There's a lot of people who pay you a lot of money for it. So one challenge is that even when you enter a kind of command and control type regulatory regime, people still find ways to get around collection of restraints. Another big challenge one has in this area is unmasking the type of the liberal ends that are presented as liberal arguments. So this is kind of a confusing way of saying that the people who are most interested in creating Big Brother in the US, and I'm not kidding about that. They think it's a normative good to have Big Brother system are gonna come in under the mantle of the First Amendment and transparent government to get access to personal information in government records. So the original purpose of a lot of these records is to oversee the government, but they will come in using that language in order to get personal information out of those out of those coffers. So you have kind of a circular lobbying where on one hand, the various companies that are very good at getting data out of the government, personal information out of the government, will say we don't implicate privacy by our practices because we only collect public records. And they go to the next office and they say, this was the screening numbers, they should be in the public record. So they enlarge the scope of the public record and then argue that the enlargement no longer covers anything that's private. And you can see this in a lot of different articulations of the strategy. One example is that in the model legislation proposed by data companies, they want to make it so that a company cannot be liable for ever disclosing the information in a public record. Now that sounds reasonable, okay? But it also means that the newspaper chooses to publish a birth announcement that includes your mother's maiden name and your date of birth. That is a public record. There cannot, if your bank later leases that information, there can be no right of action. It also means that if I wanted to do something pretty perverse, I could create a newspaper and just publish everyone's social security number. Right? Not sure if that rule all would have predicted that. And then it would, everyone's social security number would be in the public record, et cetera. Let me try to move on kind of quickly. In the background of all these challenges, there's a greater, there's a growing number of people who want to recategorize information that is not considered private right now, as private. So the home address, Peter and I were talking about home address yesterday. That's actually a piece of information that is becoming sensitive in a strange way. California law now allows many public officials to call up data brokers and say, don't sell my home address anymore.  You can shield your home address. And a lot of that is being driven, I think by a problem that Peter mentioned, the problem of self-help. We have kind of a growing factionalization in the US where more and more people are dealing with political problems by showing up at your house. And you can't kind of know if you're gonna be in the category of people who are gonna be visited. Just an example, at Berkeley, if you're an animal rights researcher, that's the new kind of category of person who has to think carefully about their home address because a researcher at Santa Cruz's house was burned down by an animal rights activist and another family was attacked in their home. So both on the left and the right, we're seeing this kind of, basically the use of public directories to show people's homes. And you can't kind of foresee if you're ever going to be in a category of person who's gonna be a victim of that type of activism. So with all this said, there are great examples of government data that can be used to look at what the government is doing instead of what its citizens are doing. One example is David Burnham's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Any of you have heard of that? It's known as TRAC. Okay, TRAC, wonderful service. It tracks what the government actually does. It's pretty incredible if you subscribe to their email list. You'll see that, sorry, but the Department of Justice will say that they're doing this or that. And David Burnham will say, you know, actually they're not really doing that. Or they might be saying that they're doing that, but they're doing it in such a way that it's not really accomplishing the end. Picky, picky, picky. I mean, the most recent one is identity theft. You know, identity theft prosecutions up when you dig under, it's really just prosecutions of undocumented workers, not financial fraudsters. So there are examples of where government data can be, this data can be leveraged to look at what the government is doing without kind of creating a panopticon of what individuals are doing. Many of the solutions in this area can create really strange outcomes. Peter mentioned some of them. There are some private privacy advocates who are suggesting let's just publish all social security numbers. And the problem we have in social security world is it's used as both the password and it identified by makes it's used as both. So if we publish them all, perhaps they'd stop doing that. Perhaps we could remove some of the harm from any burden disclosures of the SSN. That's, I mean, on the range of solutions you hear arguments like that. I explained some of the problems with kind of a command and control regulatory approach. Somewhere in the middle you might say, well let's limit the presence of unique identifiers in public records. That creates an interesting problem in itself because then you can't disambiguate citizens. And a related problem in this field is it's now becoming just as jurors can kind of do a background check on the fly of a potential defendant. Employers can do kind of a fly by night background check by using a search engine. And if you can't disambiguate one Peter Wynn from another, you might think that this Peter Wynn is the, whatever, someone who's been arrested or convicted of something. Maybe Peter Wynn filed a lawsuit against his employer three or four years ago. And so we have this interesting loophole in our background check law that allows employers to do self background checks in an unregulated fashion. But if you hire someone, you have to follow all sorts of rules. So we're in this strange position now where it's become very easy to do a self background check. But even if you have a name, strange as mind, or three Crystal Fnogels in the US, you could very easily see the disambiguation problem. Finally, let me just mention that one of the kind of strange outcomes of all this data out there is, is that I think governments could start to think that they are creating a strategic disadvantage for their own citizens by making it so transparent. So if you live in a state like Florida, which is posting, you know, mug shots of people who are merely arrested, you're basically creating a great database of people who are gonna have problems getting jobs forever. And they're gonna have problems getting jobs relative to people in other states. At University of California, our UCPD, our police department, they actually publish the full text of their activity law. Meaning that students that they arrest ends up on the internet. Even if I call in, let's say, noise violation on Peter, it will say noise violation regarding Peter Wynn complaint in Crystal Fnogels. Would you like to Google that and come see me sometime? A little self help. Yeah. And I would hope that institutions would realize that in the long run, in the short run, it might be pretty rewarding to punish these people this way, but in the long run, you see it's gonna suffer from such a policy. Well, the other, there's two things that are going on. I don't wanna interrupt, but there's, one of the things, when Carl identified violations of the rules in the federal system that you weren't supposed to file social security numbers, and you sent letters, I think, to each clerk or each chief judge in the individual districts where you found the violations. What was interesting is what happened at that point is the lawyers that had filed those complaints were immediately contacted by the clerks, and then they took steps to remedy the problem by correcting the pleadings and offending the pleadings for taking offline and so forth. So I don't think it's as simple as to say it's more public information will necessarily hurt privacy. Under certain circumstances, you can have a feedback loop when more public information will enhance privacy, okay? Because if the system, an adversary system is not identifying the violations of privacy for people who aren't really being represented, whether it's the public or individuals who don't have lawyers in the system, which is where problems, a lot of the problems show up, then having public auditable databases could potentially be part of the solution of the privacy problem as well, okay? So this is a complex, what you get is complex, counterintuitive information back when you set up an information feedback loop. Likewise, Chris is saying individual, we don't like the word panopticon, but the panopticon effect is precisely the effect that should take place with respect to government information because the citizens want people like me thinking that we're always being watched, so we'll behave, right? That's what Bentham said, in fact, Bentham's panopticon was initially, parliamentary proceedings in England were confidential, and Bentham single-handedly led the charge to get parliamentary debates where you could talk about them in public in the newspaper, okay? So information is a really complex animal. A good example is, okay, so who'saract.com is a website that isn't bulk data. It's a wiki site where people are basically just uploading information about cooperating co-dependence and undercover law enforcement officers, largely to encourage self-help in prisons or to prevent people who might be about to buy some dope from it or sell some dope to an undercover law officer. What happened is, when that website became a concern for the judges, they started taking plea agreements offline, so because a lot of the information about the cooperating co-dependence activities would come up in their sentencing process, the sentencing plea, it's a plea agreement and a factual resume, the factual resume would largely summarize the assistance that the defendant, who's gonna be sentenced, has provided that it'll allow the prosecution of these other individuals. Well, if that is up online in a convenient way, the guy's gonna get whacked in prison, okay? So what the response was to take that and just not file it, okay? So the really interesting thing about how the sentence was adjudicated was in the plea agreement, but you don't see the plea agreement in the public record anymore. You have to make a FOIA request to the U.S. Attorney's Office to get it, okay? Now, that is a terrible solution. I mean, this is really not DOJ, the policy, but the plea agreement is what we need to make sure the judges and the prosecutors are behaving themselves and are not getting sweet deals to the Alderman's son, right? That's what has to be, that's a critical judicial record that needs to be in the public domain, all right? So these simple things, I mean, what's gonna happen as more and more horror stories happen is they're gonna pull stuff offline so it will no longer be subject to public oversight and that's gonna be a tragedy. So we have to come up with a better information and in the structure, then either don't file it or let everything go online because there will be consequences that are gonna be negative. Chris also said rules don't solve problems. He's absolutely right. We have terrific rules. We got this rule that I thought was terrific anyway and nobody's using it because it's just not, it's not something that exists in the paper world so people aren't comfortable trying it out. So they don't, okay? The habits of a generation take two or three generations to change in terms of behavior and behavior is probably the biggest problem here. And then the issue that I think is from a legal point of view, probably the most interesting maybe it ultimately won't matter is the social of downstream controls. I argued that maybe the PACER website should have a site license that says you should only use this for legitimate purposes and you shouldn't use it to like whack people, right? And I thought, well, why don't we at least say that? I'll defend the constitutionality of that site license. But Carl really, and Dave Schultz and a couple of other people just beat the living stuffings out of me because the practical problems of doing that are just mind boggling. The idea of down, I mean, the idea of taking anybody who accesses information on a site, on a PACER system or any court system and saying, well, you'd have to adhere to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Maybe we could do that with both data users like Westlaw and Lexis, at least maybe with they, if we've corrected the social security numbers that inadvertently got filed and pleading and they've gone in and downloaded it all and it's up in their system, they probably should clean it up too. But I don't think that that alone is gonna, just having rules sort of creating downstream responsibility, even if it's restricted to data miners or both data users. I don't think that's, I think you defend it legally, but as a practical problem, I don't necessarily think it's gonna solve all the issues, but I think we just need to keep an open mind about various solutions. And by the way, there's this really interesting rule that you ought to try to get rid of. By the way, I'm fully in favor of the anti-wacking ULI, I think that's a great answer. Any questions? We've talked to each other for 30 seconds. Thank you, I just take another. We'll do a five minute wrap up and then after that we're simply gonna do closing comments and then we'll be done. We'll get you out of here at three o'clock.


Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this lecture we are going to talk about the spectra of stars, and what we are able to learn about stars from their spectra. So when we look at these, what we see is this is how stars are classified. How do we break stars into different groups? We use their spectra. And what we find is that stars show different spectral lines, not because they have different compositions. All their compositions are essentially the same, mostly hydrogen and helium, but it because they have different temperatures. So what lines are visible depend on the temperatures. And here we see a graph showing the spectral classes from hot stars on the left to cooler stars on the right. So the very hot stars have things like helium. They are able to excite the helium. A cool star doesn't have the energy to excite helium, so it doesn't show helium lines. Hydrogen is a good example. Hydrogen is the most common element in stars. However it is the A-type stars where hydrogen is most prominent. And those are stars about 10,000 Kelvin. If the stars are too hot, they ionize the hydrogen ripping off its electron and no long making it no longer visible in the spectrum. Cool stars are not hot enough to excite the hydrogen.   So only when you have just the right region do you see those specific lines. So just because a line is not present in the star does not mean that that element is not present in the star. Now, how do we go about classifying stars? Well, the process started back in the 1880s with Wilhelmina Fleming who classified stars based on the strength of the hydrogen line. So her strongest class was class A, then B, and so on. And then worked down through the alphabet. Now a decade or so later Annie Cannon went through and rearranged the classes. So here it was done just based on what we saw, just on the hydrogen lines. Annie Cannon then rearranged them to be based on temperature. So giving it a more physical meaning as to what they are. So now the main classifications are O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. So those are the primary classes. And that is the basis of the classification system that is used today. Now, there are also new classes that have been added. Some are in the table, some are not. But we have the class W, extremely hot stars, Wolf-Reye stars. Very hot stars would show emission lines. We have the carbon stars, class C and S, that are red giant stars that have an excess of carbon. Now, that does not mean they are made of carbon. It means they have a lot more carbon than normal typical stars. We have the class D of the white dwarf stars. And then we have the classes L, T, and Y, which are the brown dwarf stars down here. Much cooler than the M stars and dust begins to form in their atmosphere. So these are objects that are not hot enough to be able to fuse hydrogen into helium. They're kind of that in between a star and a planet. Now, here we see the mass of a brown dwarf star, about 0.075 solar masses, 79 Jupiters. These are objects that never become hot enough for nuclear reactions to begin. So Jupiter is not really a failed star. You would need 78 more Jupiters worth of mass to be able to make Jupiter into a star. So these are what we call failed stars, and they can fuse deuterium, which is a heavy form of hydrogen, but they cannot fuse hydrogen itself. Now, if we go to even lower masses, less than 0.012 solar masses or 13 Jupiter masses, then deuterium fusion is no longer possible, and the object is classified as a planet. So things 13 Jupiter masses or less would be a planet. Between 13 and 79 would be a brown dwarf, and 79 or greater Jupiter masses would then be a star. So how do we measure some of these properties of stars that we see? Well, sizes. How can we measure the size of the stars? Well, stars come in a wide variety of sizes. From tiny red dwarf stars, these red dwarf stars are much smaller than the sun, but we also have red giant, super giant, and hyper giant stars that are many times larger than the sun. And here we see some of those in images that we go from these very, very hot stars here, already many times larger than our sun, to things like Vy, Canis Majoris, and Stevenson 2-18. Which are vastly larger than the sun. We see for scale, 10 astronomical units here. That is about the distance to Saturn. So many of these stars, if you place these at the center of the solar system, would stretch out beyond Saturn. Now how do we go ahead and determine the size of a star? So we look at differences in the spectral lines. We can't see stars and see what are large stars and what are small stars just by looking at them. However, large stars are spread out and have a lower density in their atmospheres. And the spectral lines will appear narrow in that low density environment. So here we can have two stars of similar temperature, a white dwarf star, very tiny and dense, very broad spectral lines, and a blue giant star, or a much larger star, that has very, very narrow lines. So that can help us to really tell the classification of the two types of stars. Now when we look at these, we can look at, again, also the differences in ionization. So lower density in large stars means that the ions are less likely to recombine, which changes the spectrum that we see.  And those are luminosity classes, Roman numeral one through five. Now for this class, we tend to look at the dwarfs, which are the main sequence stars like our sun, the giant stars, generally often red giant stars, and the super giant stars. We will look far less at classes two and four. So we'll look at one, three, and five as the main classes we want to look at for this class. So abundances, what are stars made up of? Well, let's look at a couple of things. First of all, the presence of an absorption line shows that the element is present. We know that it is there if we see the absorption line. If we see iron lines, then iron is in that star. However, the converse is not true. An absence of absorption line does not mean the element is not present. Remember that the temperature and pressure of the atmosphere determine what elements can produce lines. So a very cool star will not show much in the way of helium lines, even though helium is still the second most abundant element in that star. All stars have essentially the same composition. 96% or more of the atoms will be hydrogen and helium. The remaining are the metals. Anything else to an astronomer, if it is not hydrogen or helium, is classified as a metal. So when we talk about a metallicity of a star, it's talking about what it has, what its composition is, in terms of heavier elements. Now, what else can we learn from the spectra? Well, we can learn something about the velocities. Let's start off by looking, though, at the proper motion of a star, which is the motion of a star across the sky. It's very slow, but is noticeable over long times. Here is the Big Dipper, an asterism in the constellation of Ursa Major, and the arrows show the directions of motions of the star on the sky. Now, will they look any different next week or next month or even next year? No, even 100 years from now, they'll barely have changed. But 50,000 years from now, those slow motions add up, and we would see that the Dipper would look a little more distorted from what we're used to looking at today. We can trace that back and see what the Dipper would have looked like 50,000 years before. So it's a very slow motion because the stars are so far away. Now, what we can measure is the radial velocities, and we can use that using the Doppler effect. Now, remember that the motion is relative. We cannot distinguish if it is Earth or the star that is moving, and most likely it's gonna be both. Remember, if it's moving away, it's a red shift. The lines are shifted toward longer wavelengths. Moving closer means a blue shift. Lines are shifted to shorter wavelengths. And we can use this and put these together to get the true velocity of a star. And that's what we'd call the space velocity. We can combine the radial velocity, the proper motion, and distance. So the radial velocity is easy to measure from the Doppler effect. The proper motion isn't too hard to measure, but it takes time. So this one takes more time to be able to measure because stars do not move very fast. That's the proper motion. And in order to convert that proper motion into a velocity, we need the distance. This gives us the true motion of the star through space. So again, radial velocity easy, transverse velocity more difficult because it requires distance. And we will look at determining distances in a future lecture. How about stellar rotation? We can also use the Doppler effect to learn about rotation. We will get a blue shift from the side of the star rotating toward us, a red shift from the side of the star rotating away from us, which will broaden the lines. The broader these lines, the faster the rotation. Now remember, we also got line broadening from the atmospheres depending on how dense they were. So low density gave us narrow lines. So we have to be able to put all of this together and make these measurements to figure out what part of it is attributed to each of these, to the rotation and to the size of the star. So that that allows us to determine not only velocities of stars, but the rotations of stars as well. So let's go ahead and finish up with our summary. And we looked about how stars are classified based on their temperatures using OBAFGKM. We've added new classes for unusual stars and the brown dwarf stars. And the spectrum of a star can tell us things about its size, velocity, composition and rotation. So that concludes this lecture on the spectra of stars. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So until then, have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.


Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, esteemed Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends. On behalf of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Communication Regulatory Agency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and my own behalf, it's my great honor and pleasure to address you today at this most prestigious event. I would like to use this opportunity to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to the government of the United Arab Emirates and the International Telecommunication Union for the excellent organization of this conference. At the beginning, allow me to emphasize one of the primary goals of developing countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina regarding the topic of the conference. It is to help citizens to have access to cutting-edge technologies and high-speed Internet, connecting schools, universities, communities, libraries, medical centers, research centers, etc. I commend the ITU for pursuing the same goal persistently and devotedly, thus enabling ICT to have positive impact on innovation, productivity, trade, employment, foreign investment, economic growth. Broadband infrastructure and application as a new paradigm has been recognized as a fundamental technology to realize all benefits that ICT may offer. Yet, there remains a need to further raise awareness and understanding of the importance of broadband networks, services, and applications for generating economic growth and for achieving social progress. To realize the full potential of broadband and ICT, it is necessary to achieve integrated and comprehensive multi-stakeholder approach based on the shared responsibility and partnership. The challenges are huge, but so are the opportunities. Engagement on these issues by all sectors of society is crucial. Complex societal changes demand new mindsets and the new kind of problem-solving integrated economics, science, technology, finance, and the public good. Esteemed audience, while confronting the challenges of sustainable development, broadband targets need to be set. The very first target would be to make broadband policy universal. Policy leadership provides a clear vision to identify opportunities, constraints, and actions around the supply and demand of broadband. The affordability of broadband access plays a critical role in a broadband diffusion and it can prove a key barrier to extending access to broadband in developing countries. However, getting people online represents further challenge. Furthermore, achieving gender equality in access to broadband needs to be considered as an important challenge. Policymakers can help stimulate demand in many developing countries with a clear plan of digitalization in public services, education, health, city services, etc., that can enable citizens to become familiar with and to use new technologies. I can say that Bosnia-Herzegovina follows this road. The penetration of internet in Bosnia-Herzegovina is nearly 60 percent and 99 percent from that is broadband access. Thank you very much for your attention.