 Welcome welcome to town meeting television. I'm here today with Marina Brown and we're going to talk about vtleaks.org but a little bit. Marina's not, this is not the first time you've been in the studio. No. Been here before and you want to just tell us what your history is with what's brought you here? I stood for office three times at Liberty Union and I was at this studio at least once for each of those campaigns though it all bleeds together. I believe I was in the audience in 87 or 88 but when Herb Lewin ran for president but I don't rightly remember it's just a blurry past. Yeah and you ran for Lieutenant Governor and Auditor? Lieutenant Governor and then Auditor twice. Yeah and so you're likely in the archives here somewhere in that past Liberty Union party of course it's the party that Bernie Sanders started in and stands for just like a quick rundown. Well correction it was not started by Liberty by Bernie Sanders. He first ran. Yes he was one of the people early members. It's Vermont's socialist party. It was it's an anti-war party. It's the sister party to the peace and freedom party in California. It's been to a great extent Liberty Union is what opened up the ballot access in Vermont to third parties and to some extent even the Democratic Party. Interesting I didn't realize it was a Vermont only party. That's correct it's Vermont only though you could say that the peace and freedom party was almost the same party but it's not it's that's California. Yeah and what brings you I mean what inspired you to get involved in that? What's your? Well in 87 88 I was on Church Street getting signatures to get Herb Lewin on the ballot and I came back to Vermont in 2011 and shambled down Western Avenue and Brattleboro and talked to Peter Diamonds down again and he looped me into doing to be involved again. And this is because you believe in? Yes I'm a socialist. Socialist? I'm sort of at the edge of socialist and anarchist but that's where I stand. So you believe in a better world? I believe in a world where the resources should be shared equitably not controlled for the profits of the few and there's many ideologies that will that agree with that. Yeah great thanks it's just a little bit about who you are I mean you reached out to us recently to ask for the CCTV board meeting minutes to add to vtleaks.org and I was kind of curious about that so I asked you to come in and do a show and maybe we'll bring up I don't have the TV on here but we're gonna bring up the website so we can take a look at it. Tell us what is vtleaks.org. Well when I came to Vermont I was a little bit shocked by the lack of transparency and what vtleaks was designed to do was to push for more transparency in Vermont. There's lots of cutouts in the public records law and many little towns are not even transparent to the extent that the law requires them to be and that's what vtleaks was about. I had set up infrastructure to allow for people to anonymously submit leaks after having that up for a few years and no one using it is now it's just public records requests and I requested your board minutes because I was curious how does how does CCTV work? I mean I've been there but I don't know how it works so I asked you for the minutes to post and that's what we do. The latest leaks were latest public records requests I did were two three school districts regarding COVID policies and how are people getting fired because they got sick? I didn't know because I was hearing stories of teachers and people working at the school being very sick all the time with respiratory stuff COVID or not and it's like wait a second this doesn't sound right so I submitted public records requests to St. John'sbury school the Orleans school district the north and south one and Canaan as of yet only the St. John'sbury school district has fully complied to my request I expect in all fairness to North Country Supervisor Union I expect that their documents are in my mailbox when I get back home so I won't go after them but Lake County Supervisor Union and Canaan they have not responded to me so they will be getting certified letters and if they don't respond to the certified letters then well I may have to find a lawyer. Well we have we have an idea of a robust government infrastructure that is built to take care of people I mean sort of a liberal notion that we have this infrastructure and so you know certainly I will admit like when I get a request and I'm like well why why would this need to be? Well it wasn't posted and so I asked for it and now now you kind of committed that you're gonna be posting it to your website from there on and it'll be great. Yeah so that like I call that I call these folks like civic heroes folks that are working at the margins of political of like political infrastructures do you do you see yourself as sort of a civic hero in developing this website? I see myself as an annoyance and I'm gonna fail at my goal but I was hoping to be the most prolific public records requester in Vermont but I'm not gonna make that this year. Who do you think is? Who's got you? Well I won't mention names but there's a person in in Burlington who hits the police departments and who is renowned for them I think he has he has me beat I asked him to be on the VT Leakes team but he's not interested. He does it independently. He does it independently. Does he post those? Mostly the stuff that he does is at muckrake.org which is another it's muck rock muckrake is infrastructure for people to do leaks. I probably should use it but I'm used to doing my requests independently on my own. Now VT Leakes is reminiscing on Wiki Leaks. That's the inspiration. So talk a little bit for folks who don't know what Wiki Leaks was a hackers cooperative that I would say it went wrong in the last few years but it what it would do is it would take accept leaks from public from the hackers groups from whistleblowers and supposedly anonymize it so that people could read stuff. I mean Chelsea Manning released the Cablegate to Wiki Leaks. The successor organization to Wiki Leaks is called DDO Secrets which is run by a fantastic team of many of the people that were thrown to the wayside by Wiki Leaks. I don't know if people really know. The founder of Wiki Leaks seems to, Julian Assange seems to have taken some of a right-wing turn in the last few years and the way he ran Wiki Leaks alienated a lot of people. Now also being outside the government sort of outside the infrastructure like the recognized known infrastructure. Do you have accountability structures? Do you have? We had intended on doing that but as I wasn't able to gather many people it's been just me until about a month ago. We've worked with Robert Appel. He's helped but he didn't join the organization. We have some local activists who probably don't want to be named who've decided to join and hopefully I can step away from this project at some point and let them do it. And do you have, so if we look at it, Jordan I don't know if we can bring that up on the TV out here and sort of get a sense of what's on vtleaks.org and where do you get, without again naming names, where do you get sources? Well click on the documents obtained that's the interesting part of the website really. In the beginning we were posting every bit of money that went in but as right now the only interesting part would be me paying the domain registration every one to three years. So here we have Anderson Farm. Andersonville Farm was a very interesting public records request because the Vermont State Police ignored me and they stonewalled me at every turn. The first documents they sent me were almost entirely blacked out and the Andersonville Farm incident was out near between Glover and Craftsbury and it involved Nazi graffiti on a barn and there was racist graffiti put on the road in front of people's houses that actually wasn't covered in the police reports but because this was targeted racist harassment I wanted to know about that and the police would not release information until I got Robert Appell to I think he actually wrote them a letter I'm not sure if it was a CC or something like that but it took a long time to get the reports and even the final report I got was highly redacted and I don't know why. I'm assuming they think it was minors that did the racist graffiti but I don't really think it's a great idea to to protect? I don't think if young people are involved with racist activities I think there's a line where we don't protect them. I've worked with a number of anti-fascist collectives and when they protect young people because they might change their minds but when people get to a certain level I don't think they should be protected like there was an incident I think it was a group called the base and they were organized by a 14-year-old out of Finland I believe and a friend of mine exposed them and they did expose their identities because the base is such a violent group. So it seems like part of the motivation is a sort of general protection of those who are in a vulnerable position. Yeah I mean I there's one there was an incident of a gay bashing I think it happened at Underhill or Jericho that's also on the site and that was one of the times that I was happily surprised by the state police because they could not release the give me the full unredacted report quickly enough I mean they didn't even redact the victim of the gay bashing's name and I had to spend the time redacting the victim's name because I'm not gonna release the name of a gay bashing victim but I was happy to release the name of this aspect very happy. Yeah so I mean what do you think the resistance is? Why? I don't know what I've noticed is that the racist events that happened before Trump was elected out in the Northeast Kingdom I had terrible problems getting reports police reports regarding those they're very resistant I don't know I have my suspicions but whether it was minors whether possibly somebody the police knew was involved but I don't know I'm not going to. I mean when you reached out to me I'm I'm like yes excellent because one I you know I appreciate the ability to examine our practices and I think you know that I said oh I gotta go back and check and make sure I don't have editable links to information that shouldn't be in the minutes right so there's there's making sure that our practices going forward and and our are consistent with open meeting law as we should be and certainly want to have you know we're open and you know want folks to be able to understand what's going on here. There is that the suspicion of again I said like you know something that's not that's extra governmental that's outside the systems of power that make people uncomfortable or like you know what's what's behind this and then there is like the resistance that makes you wonder is there some sort of collusion so I just wonder if you talk about if you've run into those two different kinds of I mean I haven't run into people being suspicious of someone external mostly it's oh great you've given us a whole lot of work to do and I try to be nice to people even organizations I don't I'm not fans of I'm not fans of the prison systems or not a big fan of the police but I try to be polite to the poor poor person whose job is to go through tons and tons of documents for my releases one thing I did want to mention of an interesting leak that I did not do is there's there's a group called the American I believe American Academy of Pediatricians which is a forgive me if I'm getting it wrong but it's a right-wing group that's it's counter to the mainstream American College of Pediatricians it's a right-wing group that focuses on anti gay anti trans pro family narrative and they had all their documents on an open Google Drive and everything was dumped there including their quick books including their membership lists oh so since some organization I requested earlier had to ask me to redact documents maybe you don't want to be falling in the same pitfall as as they did not that I would put CCTV in the same category but a lot and so when you see that is that a chance to you're like let's pull all that oh yeah I look at it and I was one of the interesting things about the ACPED leak is is that ADP payroll which has a policy against hate provides this SPLC designated hate group as a client I'm sure that ADP for folks who don't know SPLC is the southern poverty law center and they track hate groups and hate crimes and hate organizations around the country yes and ADP which is the one of the world's largest payroll companies was providing payroll services for an SPLC designated hate group right interesting so there's some so and tells a little bit there in terms of the goals that you're trying to speak a little bit more about what you're trying to do what I what I do is is if I see something that doesn't smell right I do a lot of I hit the police a lot about hate groups about hate crimes the Burlington Police Department has heard about me recently repeatedly about the Patriot Front who's annoying Nazi group who has a member in Enesburg Falls who recently got arrested for carrying a torch at Charlottesville I've requested them information about that the anti-trans hate group the lgb alliance that caused a good deal of consternation around pride and the outright truck pull I at least the folks the stickering folks yeah they're the they're the people who lettering up the phone post all over the place I did some public records request regard regarding the supposed assault on Fred Sargent and that if you want to hear the unredacted police or well very slightly redacted by the police police reports there on they you can go to vt. Or do you I mean and maybe this is getting in the technicalities of this but is this backed up to someplace like Internet archives it's backed up locally and I probably should hit go to Internet archive to do it when I get home I'll tell Internet archive to back it up yeah most of the website is actually backed up on GitHub but since I've been getting very large media I have not been able to back all that up on GitHub yeah so in the realm we've been having I mean you mentioned the anti-trans groups and the lgb group that was doing the stickering work there was recently a show here with some folks who came in from that organization and spoke and it it generated a big conversation here around free speech and you know what is this organization supporting when we give a voice to folks that are speaking hateful or untrue or hurtful you sort of in that realm of speech well I'll be honest that it was that controversy that generated the the request that I sent to you because I was saying how do you think Howard Howard to things work how do things work at CCDV I want to see the discussion about about platforming this type of a group I'm I sound like a broken record when I deal with free speech I stand very strongly for free speech however there are limits the international criminal tribunal on Rwanda prosecuted a radio station for fomenting the Rwandan genocide and the case of the radio Rwanda case even examined Ohio versus Brandon Brandon Burke versus Ohio Brandon Burke versus Ohio was when a Klansman was arrested for violent speech and the ICTR said in their discussion that even Brandon Burke is moot on what constitutes inciting imminent violence does it mean tomorrow Brandon Burke doesn't say doesn't mean if I put this out in in a month there's gonna be violence in a year in ten years Brandon Burke doesn't talk about that the Rwand radio Rwanda case has not been used as a precedent very much but it still stands in international law and I would propose that the anti trans speech that is being put out nowadays steps over that line in that you see the legal definition of genocide does not include gender identity however it should the Holocaust Museum says yes this movement against trans people is genocidal so I will take them at their word rather than the antiquated legal definitions of genocide I would propose that that most of the anti trans speech that you will see like the stuff at CPAC the stuff that Matt Walsh did saying CPAC is the conservative political action committee and one of the people at this committee said we have to eradicate transgenderism he wrote he took a step back and said no we just mean transgenderism we don't mean transgender people but they're clearly working with governments like the Victor Orban in Hungary which has essentially a wage war on LGBT people not just trans people I'm curious about Mr. Falker how he can separate what's happening in Hungary and Poland to gay people as well as trans people when he aligns himself with these anti gender ideology people that will come for him in the in the future yeah yeah so that's interesting and it's it's thanks for sharing that because as our staff is talking about that and those aren't part of the board minutes because we don't keep track of our staff minutes in that same open meeting long way as our staff wrestles with that I think it will start to see that in some of our policy conversations going forward yeah take take the time it's very hard to find the ICT our decision and discussion but it's if you find it it's worth noting and I'll see if I can find it and I'll I'll post a copy to VT leaks and send you a link yeah we've long been you know the organization here has long held the idea that you know you counter bad speech with more speech and I think folks are wondering you know what are the limits on that if if speech infringes on freedoms of others or speech infringes on the well-being of others is that still free speech I mean it's America the United States is an outlier in its ideas of free speech please don't make me out to be a supporter of the right-wing government in Poland but I'll use Poland as an example Poland has had a long history of religious wars and religious intolerance causing death and destruction and there are limits on stepping on religion I don't really approve of that but I understand why Poland would say no we don't have public stuff that will lead to bloodshed likewise in in in France with Charlotte Charlie Hebdo it was terrible what happened to those magazine people but do you allow people to step on real on other people's religion to the extent that they're going to commit violence I think there needs to be a more nuanced discussion of of speech and I'm a big supporter of very open stuff but I do not want to see people getting hurt and when people are using speech not to honestly discuss this topic but to further harm against other people I think that's where you draw the line yep that's really helpful for us to think about it I'm look forward to sharing your words with staff as well back to vtleaks.org I'm not sure if there's anything more that you want to point out I mean look at the I don't have it in front of me so it's hard for me to do it I don't have a good memory oh there we go yeah the Mark Clark that was the gay bashing thing Patriot Front yeah so and then the Essex High School gender queer book challenge here's an example of where vtleaks gets pretty nasty if somebody could click on the book challenge part what I what I did is I heard about the debate about having you could click on the book challenge there where it says Essex High School you click on that window and then just click on yeah yes so the principle of the high school seemed very upset when I hit her with this public records request but when it was clear I was on the high school side about keeping books published she gave a whole lot of information what was interesting is that the two different parties had reported the school for having this teen sexuality gender queer book Maya Kobabe's book in the library one of them I don't even know if he's a an Essex resident but there was the one of them obviously was and when when I dug into it apparently the police had been notified so I hit the Essex police the police refused to give me the full information because I said they were protecting their source and but in one of the leaks there was conversation between the Essex police department and Sarah George's office and I hit Sarah George's office who gave me she probably gave me everything yeah she didn't give me the name of the person however there's something called metadata and in the metadata of the PDF that was created for to call the police on a book was the name of the person who did the leak I'm not going to release that name on CCTV however go to vt leaks org it's in the metadata and I've stripped the metadata for you likewise with leaks it's if people are trying to leak information and not have their identity released by leaking that it's very important to strip the metadata which are anti-LGBT complainant did not do so that's that's vt leaks getting nasty because I posted his name is the the metadata I stripped it it's there yeah so Marina thanks for coming in today appreciate you sharing with us what you're doing and what you're up to and hopefully we'll see you again and hear more from you in the future very those who are at home watching thank you for watching and remember you don't need to just watch TV you can come and join us and make your own TV so if you have something that you want to say or something you want to add to the conversation we welcome you to contact us at make TV dot or make TV at CCTV dot org thanks so much and we're out