Sunlight Weekly Roundup: Indiana Narrows Public's Ability to Review Government Emails

The Sunlight Weekly Roundup item on Indiana from late November 2011 was tracking a state-level pattern that had become measurable in 2010 and 2011: legislative narrowing of the categories of government records subject to public-records inspection, particularly emails. Indiana's Access to Public Records Act has been on the books since 1983, but as state agencies migrated routine internal communications onto email systems in the 2000s, more and more governance was happening in records that hadn't been contemplated when the original statute was drafted.

The 2011 changes — and similar moves in other states tracked by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Freedom of Information Coalition, and Sunlight itself — typically expanded definitions of internal-deliberative or attorney-client privileged communications to cover larger swaths of email correspondence, and added procedural barriers to email-record requests. Each state-level change was usually small in isolation but the aggregate effect on FOI access was substantial.

Sunlight's roundup format was useful precisely because the state-level pattern was hard to see from any one state's coverage. The Indiana item, the parallel items in Ohio and Wisconsin, and the recurring Texas Public Information Act litigation were all moving in the same direction in 2011–2012, and the Sunlight Weekly Roundup was one of the few places that surfaced the cumulative trajectory.