Montgomery County Council members are planning to push for a state law change that would allow local governments to refuse requests from people seeking email lists and phone numbers maintained by counties, cities or elected officials.
Council members were united Tuesday in their belief that the Maryland Public Information Act’s requirement that the county release email addresses to people who request them could inhibit those who want to communicate with local governments from doing so because they fear their contact information will be released.
“The fact of the matter is there’s a real problem and we need to stand up for the residents who want to get information from us,” council member Nancy Floreen said during a council meeting about the county’s state legislative priorities.
The issue came to the forefront earlier this year after the county received several requests for lists of email addresses maintained by council members and of subscribers to the county’s Paperless Airplane email newsletter. The more than 219,000 email addresses contained in those lists were provided to individuals including a Bethesda resident seeking to provide voters with information and Republican County Executive candidate Robin Ficker, who plans to use them to promote his campaign.
Kathleen Boucher, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer, noted Tuesday the county also received a request for the phone numbers of people who signed up to receive call and text alerts through the county’s emergency alert system. She said a county attorney declined to provide those numbers and cited language in the public information act that allows a jurisdiction to deny an information request related to public safety. However, she added the county attorney did not believe the denial was based on “clear cut” legal grounds.
Boucher said county officials are concerned that continuing to release email address lists as well as potentially having to release phone numbers may put residents at risk for hacking or other cybersecurity issues as well as expose them to unwanted inquiries by spammers and telemarketers.
Boucher proposed that council members try to unite other jurisdictions in the state to push for changing the public information law to prevent mass releases of emails and phone numbers.
“The risks are quite significant,” council member George Leventhal said. “It makes me anxious to ponder what could happen.”
Council member Tom Hucker said the issue is “creating essentially an attack on our democracy.” He suggested the council meet with the county’s state House and Senate delegation to brief them on the seriousness of the issue.
“I really feel we need to do everything to get their attention,” Hucker said.
Boucher said the issue came up during the 2013 General Assembly when Carroll County sought to change the public information act after being required to release a list of email addresses maintained by the Carroll County Board of Commissioners. She said the bill failed in committee and lacked support from other jurisdictions in the state.
After people began requesting Montgomery County’s lists of email addresses, the county made an administrative change to prevent the lists from being posted publicly online. Under county law, responses to public information requests are posted on the county’s dataMontgomery website. With the administrative change, the county no longer posts the digital list of the email addresses that has been released, but instead simply posts a text document noting that the lists were provided.
Council member Hans Riemer said Tuesday the administrative change makes it slightly more difficult for marketers or others to easily obtain the lists.
