Why the city’s hacked website is unfit to be ‘official newspaper’ of Wichita | Opinion
I’ve got to hand it to the city of Wichita.
It takes some kind of nerve to try to argue that your computer system is secure enough to be the only repository for public legal notices while you’re still struggling with a ransomware hack that crashed your website, your online billing system and even the board at the airport telling you which gate your flight is leaving from.
But here we are.
On Tuesday the council will vote on whether to name its own website as the city’s “official newspaper” for the purposes of publishing legal notices.
This, despite a state law that clearly defines what a newspaper is and isn’t. The city’s relying on a legal opinion by well-known attorney general and notorious newspaper hater Kris Kobach, who thinks he’s discovered a loophole allowing cities to opt out of the state law because the rules are slightly different for large cities and small ones.
I don’t purport to be a lawyer, so maybe Kobach’s right about the law. I couldn’t tell you.
But what I can tell you is even if a city government can circumvent the Legislature (which is not exactly press-friendly) and its minimal standard for governmental transparency, it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to do.
Tuesday’s vote isn’t about The Eagle, it’s a test of the integrity of the people you elected to office.
I don’t much care if the city’s legal notices are published in The Eagle or not. But as a citizen of Wichita, I absolutely demand they be published and stored somewhere other than the city’s website or the city’s library, where they can be stolen by hackers or altered by city officials themselves.
Deliberate confusion
There’s a lot of confusion going around the city about what legal notices are and aren’t.
Most of that’s deliberate and coming from council member Dalton Glasscock, who appeared at the April 2 council meeting in front a backdrop he made of giant posters showing a legal notice and a city promotional ad from its website.
Glasscock’s smart enough to know those are two different objects with two different purposes, and it’s disingenuous of him to pretend otherwise.
For the record, legal notices serve two purposes:
First, to inform the public in real time about actions taken or under consideration by the local government.
Second, to create a permanent, indelible and unalterable record of the government’s actions. You can’t change a printed newspaper once it’s published.
As the recent City Hall hack shows us, computer records can be stolen, and if they can be stolen they can be altered. It’s even easier for a bad actor within the government who has the keys to the machine.
And the city’s proposal would preserve the records for five years, as opposed to a newspaper, which preserves them essentially forever.
Five years is way too short. For example, 20 years ago, city officials steered a contract to a favored company by altering bid documents on digging out a sand pit to make a “world class” lake park in north Wichita. It’s why “Crystal Prairie Lake Park” remains to this day a concept on a drawing board when it could have been finished years ago.
The officials responsible for that fiasco are long gone — retired, moved on to different cities, new jobs, new careers, or deceased. Ditto for the other reporters who covered City Hall back then.
Call me Ishmael, for I alone have lived to tell thee all.
Chase Billingham, a Wichita State University sociologist and City Hall watchdog, did a long Facebook post about this on Thursday, inviting me to post it as a guest column if I didn’t have time to write about it myself.
I’m not going to, but I am going to quote this part: “This is a concerted ideological move that is designed to punish the journalists who have been the most effective at uncovering the scandals, gaffes, and missteps of the city government over the past several decades.”
Against the backdrop of the worst computer takeover in City Hall history, it’s getting very hard not to think that.
This matter was supposed to be voted on two weeks ago, after being heard by the council’s district advisory boards. It was delayed because all DAB meetings in May had to be canceled, due to city’s computer crisis.
If there’s one thing the city of Wichita really is “world class” at, it’s irony.
