September 21, 2007

Secret Taping in the Bredesen Administration

So, under the Bredesen administration, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation started secretly taping phone calls and face-to-face meetings with members of the public. WSMV broke the story. The City Paper has a very good commentary.

Republicans in the legislature need to file legislation prohibiting any state agency - other than bona fide law enforcement in the course of an official investigation - from secretly taping members of the public, and forcing TDEC to immediately notify all people who it secretly taped and allow them to hear the recordings. The legislation also should require TDEC to either give those recordings to the people taped or, if the people don't want the recordings or the people can not be located, the original recording and all copies should be destroyed. The law also should state that TDEC and the state are barred from using the secret TDEC recordings in any civil or criminal proceeding.

Also on the must-do list: investigating the rest of state government to find out if other agencies are also engaging in similar secret taping, and if this represents that actions of a rogue agency or reflects official policy of the wider administration. I, for one, would be quite surprised if TDEC is the only one. Somewhere in state files there is a purchase order indicating just how many of these phone call recording devices the state has purchased. If every state agency in Tennessee - and the Bredesen administration - aren't already being hit with a flurry of open-records document demands related to possible secret taping, the news media isn't doing its job.

It doesn't surprise me that an administration already caught shredding documents to protect employees accused of sexual harassment, and already caught selling state troopers promotions for campaign donations, would also be engaged in secretly taping members of the public. The fish rots from the head down.