Whistleblower provisions are extremely important to government ethics, but poorly worded ethics provisions can undermine even the best whistleblower provisions, especially in unscrupulous hands. One such ethics provision is the confidential information provision.

According to an article in the News-Tribune, the governor of Missouri recently signed an ethics bill (SB 844) that made many changes in the state's ethics and campaign finance programs, and failed to make others, such as a campaign contribution limit, which the legislature had eliminated in 2006. Missouri's ethics commission has jurisdiction over local government officials.

I'd like to focus on three interesting and questionable changes.

A situation in the city of Alameda, CA once again points out that government officials dealing with the possibly unethical conduct of other government officials is not a good thing.

According to an article today in the San Francisco Chronicle, the city of Alameda asked the city's outside counsel to investigate whether a council member had disclosed confidential information to a developer and others against the interests of the city, and had effectively held a council meeting via e-mail in contravention of the state's open meetings law. And yesterday the counsel's report was made public by the city council, and the matter was turned over to the D.A.'s office.

While I was away on vacation, the new, quasi-independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) was in the news a lot.

Going Outside of Congress
First, it did something that made it appear more than the paper tiger I called it a year ago. According to a New York Times editorial last week, when the OCE's investigation of contributions to House Appropriations Committee members (especially from those associated with PMA) and their effect on defense contracts was dismissed by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, the OCE sent its report to the Justice Department.

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts inspired by reading Susan Neiman’s book Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008). Neiman’s discussion of Daniel Ellsberg, the government official who let us know about the Pentagon Papers, shows the effect that access to confidential information has on government officials. It’s very similar to the effect of power.

Let me take a logical approach to the topic of government ethics proceeding confidentiality before I look at what has been happening in Utah this last week.