Las Vegas Police Request Removal of Document from Public Intelligence
25 April 2010 No Comment
During the month of April 2010, we have received the same message twice from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department concerning a Law Enforcement Sensitive brief entitled “Silver Shield: Nevada’s Approach to Critical Infrastructure Protection” from November 2007. The briefing discusses various aspects of Suspicious Activity Reporting, Fusion Center integration, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to patrol portions of the city for aerial photography during incident response.
Subject: FW: Silvershield Nevada document availible on-line
From: silvershield <silvershield@LVMPD.COM>
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2010 15:46:31 -0700
To: “legal@publicintelligence.net” <legal@publicintelligence.net>
CC: “pwasheba@uerlv.com” <pwasheba@uerlv.com>, “scownay@uerlv.com” <scownay@uerlv.com>, Mike McClary <M1798M@LVMPD.COM>, Greg McCurdy <G2568M@LVMPD.COM>, Dennis Domansky <D3930D@LVMPD.COM>, Brett Primas <B3900P@LVMPD.COM>, Thomas Monahan <T2936M@LVMPD.COM>, Phil Roland <p3991r@LVMPD.COM>, “jmorrison@uerlv.com” <jmorrison@uerlv.com>, “ronc@uerlv.com” <ronc@uerlv.com>, “rskidmore@uerlv.com” <rskidmore@uerlv.com>, David Kelly <D7413K@LVMPD.COM>
It has come to our attention that you are currently hosting an official and proprietary Silver Shield document on your website. This is an official request to remove the following document from your site:
“Silver Shield Nevada’s Approach to Critical Infrastructure Protection – Dated November 26th, 2007″
Here is the direct link to the document on your server:
http://publicintelligence.net/silver-shield-nevada%E2%80%99s-approach-to-critical-infrastructure-protection/ Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Despite the claims made in the requests, the document is not proprietary information. The brief is authored and presented by Ernest Chambers Jr., Program Manager/Technical Lead for the Silver Shield program, who is apparently a member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The message was also forwarded to a number of individuals at the following company:
Urban Environmental Research, LLC
1120 North Town Center Drive
Suite 100
Las Vegas, Nevada 89144
p. / f. 702.254.0036
Among these individuals are Paul Washeba CEO; Rachel Skidmore, Project Manager; John Morrison, Project Manager; and Ron Cameron, Senior Project Manager.
Urban Environmental Research, LLC is a risk management and consulting company which evidently helps run the Silver Shield program. This is most likely where the unusual claim of “proprietary information” comes from. The records of Nevada’s Silver Shield program should not be proprietary or confidential, even if the program exists as a joint venture between public and private entities, as the public records disclosure laws in Nevada explicitly ensure that public records “may be used to supply the general public with copies, abstracts or memoranda of the records or may be used in any other way to the advantage of the governmental entity or of the general public”. Even if the document were proprietary, which it is not, the disclosure of the record would not be capable of being blocked by copyright, as per section 3 of NRS 239.010 which states that a “governmental entity may not reject a book or record which is copyrighted solely because it is copyrighted”. To further emphasize this point, several quotations from Nevada public records law are cited below. Mind you, this is only the local legal framework and an entire larger framework exists to protect the rights of freedom of speech and the press in terms of the fair use of copyrighted works, particularly when they contain information in the public interest, such as the surveillance of U.S. cities by unmanned aerial vehicles.
http://publicintelligence.net/las-vegas-police-request-removal-of-document-from-public-intelligence/