In conversations with this KQED reporter, government officials have fumed about Anonymoose's exploits. They waste time and taxpayer dollars, some officials say, miring them in paperwork. Some officials say the documents Anonymoose requests should actually be shielded from public view.
But it’s tough to argue with the results: The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, a City Hall body of citizens created to protect the public's interest in open government, has voted in favor of Anonymoose over government agencies more than 20 times — oftentimes against the city's own attorneys. (Full disclosure: Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez is a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists, which appoints some members to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.)
As they retire, Anonymoose reflected on an eventful few years, and how new government gumshoes might emerge to continue holding public officials accountable.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Let's start with the question I know you won't answer, but I have to ask you anyway. Who are you?
Anonymoose: I won't answer any question about who I am, even if it's seemingly accurate, because I want to stand on that principle. But I'm happy to talk about why I insist on being anonymous.
What can you say about your background or motivation? What was your path to intersecting with government?
I had very rarely interacted with government. It's not something I really do actively outside of Sunshine. And my initial work regarding Sunshine had nothing to do with politics or corruption. The anonymity was purely a matter of principle, as the law prohibits the government from treating requesters differently based on who they are or why they make a request. And I'm very fond of standing up for my rights for their own sake.
So the public officials that I started this work with — Mayor Breed and City Attorney Dennis Herrera — I had no particular interaction with them that was either positive or negative. I actually held the City Attorney's Office in pretty high regard, especially their work on gay marriage.
Walk us through your first records request.
The first request that I remember is for the mayor's calendar. And their response was very paltry, it looked like almost a skeleton of information. And I was not aware of what is known as the calendar law at the time. The Proposition G calendar law requires the mayor and city officials to keep a very good bit of information in their calendar.
So they gave me this special calendar that they had just for Prop. D purposes. And I argued that it would be absurd that the mayor, with so many employees and so much influence and power, only kept a calendar with this little information.
And I was exactly right. They didn't actually admit this to us during the hearing, in the initial questioning, but we later discovered that the mayor's office does keep a second — at the time secret — much more detailed calendar. And it was eventually ruled that that calendar [has to be] just as public as the one she created just for public release. There's a basic principle that every single public record — any document or any other form of record-keeping in the possession of the government about the collective public business — is, by default, public.
Why did you care about Mayor Breed’s calendar?
I didn't actually care about who Mayor Breed was meeting with. I had a very technical purpose for my request, about something known as electronic metadata. In an email, metadata includes the “from” and the “to” email address, internal time stamps and formatting — and, very importantly, who changed embedded attachments, and how and when. In a text message, it includes who sent and received that text message and when they did so.
The way the San Francisco Sunshine Law is written is that no information can be withheld (by a public official), unless part of that information is explicitly exempt or non-disclosed under a specific law. So the information that I was waiting for originally, both the mayor and the City Attorney's Office argued that essentially all of it was blanket exempt. But they couldn't point to an exact law. And it hadn't been tested in court at that time.
I think the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, which is kind of the citizen commission in San Francisco which gets to rule on these matters — what information does the public get to see versus what they don't get to see? — actually did something pretty rare. They held a series of meetings allowing arguments and research about why this information should or should not be disclosed. And at the end of the day, they ruled that yes, electronic metadata must be disclosed.
And that led to the public unveiling of your efforts around Mayor Breed and her text messages to Chief Scott about an unhoused person?
I was not aware of the potentially politically explosive nature of what was in those records. I was there vindicating my right to get exact taxonomy, beginning with metadata, including who is the sender and receiver. You know, an attachment of text messages. That was my purpose in doing that.
And then a Twitter user who themselves is a prolific Sunshine requester republished those records, and that kind of went viral. That's what first put my work in the public spotlight.
Following a racist text message scandal, the police are under a mandate to index all their text messages through a server that cannot be deleted. So you were able to demonstrate that there were these explosive text messages in Chief Scott's possession between him and Mayor Breed — but the mayor deleted her own copies of the text messages and said the records didn’t exist. And she can do this?
I think if you were to look at what are the biggest flaws in the Sunshine Ordinance right now, this would be one of the top two flaws.
And so what I had known at the time, and what I've also proven through multiple other requests, is that Mayor Breed’s office widely destroys their own public records, and they believe they're on firm legal ground to do so, and they will publicly claim so. It is not a secret.
Winning cases at the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force against San Francisco government wasn't just about gaining records, right?
One of my goals, as I realized that this work could be effective, was to create a solid set of [test] cases. From a personal passion perspective, what I loved most was really pushing the boundaries of legal interpretations. I am somebody who enjoys arguing. I am an engineer, and really closely analyzing the law, applying a logical step-by-step reasoning, and completing that precise conclusion, is the closest to programming I think you can do with society.
I'm not a lawyer, but this is the closest that I'll get to experience fighting for a constitutional right, which is something I've wanted to do since I was a kid.
So you got some documents around San Francisco’s corruption scandal, where a number of high-ranking officials in the city were indicted by the FBI on bribery and corruption charges. You had a number of records about Harlan Kelly, the former manager of the Public Utilities Commission, some months before he was indicted by the FBI. What were those records? And why did the city try to force you to destroy them?
I was doing a sweep of (the indicted officials’) calendars and emails and text messages, especially in light of the new charges. And so I had asked both the PUC agency and Harlan Kelly individually, as a public employee, to turn over his text messages with a number of other affiliated companies and individuals.
So Harlan Kelly produced dozens and dozens of pages of his text messages with Walter Wong [a construction company owner and influential Chinatown figure who was implicated as a co-conspirator of Nuru]. And as you reported at KQED, he had attempted basically to redact almost all of the messages by putting this black highlighter in Adobe Acrobat PDF on these text messages.
So he thought that he had actually removed all of these text messages from release to the requester, but in reality, he just put black boxes on them and all of it is still readable, say, by a screen reader or just by looking at a text file. You can see all of these text messages.
I immediately notified the Public Utilities Commission, “You just released it to everyone online.” And they attempted to claim to order me to destroy this record. They have no right to order anyone to destroy a record.
And I actually did voluntarily delete my copy of the record. But I knew already what was in there. And so I filed a complaint with both (the Sunshine Task Force) and then-City Attorney Dennis Herrera alerting them to these facts. And if the law had been followed, the entire public would have known about this earlier. The purpose (of the Sunshine Ordinance law) is to be able to find, as a normal person, or as a professional journalist, what public officials might be doing that is allegedly wrong.
To reiterate what was so shocking, you found text messages in which Walter Wong allegedly talked about giving free repairs to Harlan Kelly's home, texts that later were used by the FBI and federal officials in arguing that Wong was bribing Kelly to obtain city contracts. And you knew about it months before the FBI ever brought it to the public. Any member of the public should have been able to get these text messages without trouble, correct?
That's exactly right. But I think it goes to a failure of the enforcement mechanism of the law. And this is something that is a strand in my work.
Let's talk about what laws you would change in Sunshine if you could, based on your experience as being essentially the most prolific record requester in recent San Francisco history. Where did you see the law not being properly carried out?
The city attorney wrote that (city officials) are not required to retain the vast majority of emails and text messages. And you can see how for a muckraker, that is a huge problem, because the most controversial thing that the public might be interested in seeing, that might be potentially untoward and where politicians have been most candid, is likely in those less formal types of records.
The state law sets an automatic default for two years (for how long a government official must keep a record and not delete it). But there is a local law called Admin Code Chapter Eight, which is separate from the Sunshine Ordinance. And that law claims that very few things have to actually be retained at all, and nearly everything else can just be deleted whenever you want.
And the interpretation promulgated by the City Attorney's Office for a long time is (to follow) the rules in Chapter Eight. But my argument is that this violates a basic principle of statutory interpretation. My argument is that, as in court, Chapter Eight required retention of certain kinds of records, but the people later passed Proposition G in 1999, which made it strictly a requirement that the mayor and all parties have to preserve and maintain all of their documents — in correspondence, even.
When you have two laws like this, one of which is stricter, the stricter law applies. And the City Attorney's Office just disagrees with me.
Some would say that by remaining anonymous, you are dodging that same level of public scrutiny yourself. Why do you believe that it's OK to operate anonymously when your goal is to require more public scrutiny of officials?
I think there is a sharp dividing line between being a public official — having sovereign power over others — and private persons. Just as strongly as I believe in the constitutional right of public access by private persons to public records of public officials.
But now you're retiring from this game, right? What is motivating you to step away?
I think I have already done what I could with Sunshine. It was actually much more interesting to me at the very beginning, the nonpolitical part, because nerding out on the legal side of it is actually the most exciting to me. And it became somewhat repetitive.
I'm also very glad that in the last few years, journalists have made so many articles based on what they have discovered using the Sunshine Ordinance. And I have had a chance to play a small part of that.
So there are now a lot of people, including other anonymous people, who make a lot of requests to the city. And the more people you have in the public, the less necessary it is for any one person to do it. It's much better to have played a small part in hopefully inspiring others to make these requests and continue this work indefinitely.
