Jennifer L.

Peebles
Texas Watchdog
5535 Memorial Drive
Suite F, No. 601
Houston, TX 77007

June 23, 2009

Office of the Texas Attorney General

Open Records Division
P.O. Box 12548
Austin, Texas 78711-2548

Re: AG ID#351739, Texas Public Information Act request dated May 26, 2009 from
Jennifer Peebles for information pertaining to the Houston Airport System and the
Houston Airport System Development Corporation.

Dear General Abbott:

I am writing you today to ask that you require the Houston Airport System (HAS) to
make public all the records to which I have requested access under the Texas Public
Information Act.

I. List of employees of the Houston Airport System and their 2008 pay data

A. The airport system objects to the release of airport employee names, not their
pay data.

I am a journalist for an online newspaper in Houston. In an interview I conducted last

week (a printout of my story is enclosed as EXHIBIT A), Houston Assistant City
Attorney Evelyn Njuguna said that the city does not object to the release of the salary
information I had requested. It does, however, object to the release of the names of the
airport workers that would accompany the requested salary data:

The airport system’s concern isn’t so much releasing the salary numbers, Njuguna
said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “It’s not the amount that they make, it’s
more so the names of the people,” she said. “Because TSA has said giving out
information about employees who work in the airport or who have access to
secured locations could” put airports at risk.
 The airport and the city would be willing to release a list of numbers of how much
the workers are paid, she said — but Texas Watchdog countered that a list of
dollar amounts without names attached to them would be of little use to the public.

B. The airport system has already published the names and job titles of at least 98 of
its workers on the airport system's own Web site.

The Houston city attorney wants the attorney general's office to believe that the Houston
airports and their travelers could be vulnerable to a terrorist attack if the city were to
release the names of the people who work at the airports.

If that's true, then the Houston Airport System is -- at this very moment -- aiding and
abetting terrorists.

That's because the Airport System has made the names and job descriptions of at least 98
Airport System employees -- from the man in the front office to maintenance workers for
the airports' buildings and automobile fleets -- publicly available on the Houston Airport
System's own Web site.

A random sampling of the people whom the airport system mentions by name in its own
promotional materials on its Web site:

 Manual Martinez and Charlie Herrera, who are airport system physical plant
maintenance employees;
 Roshonda Passmore, an HAS airport security officer;
 T.J. Jennings, who helps maintain the motor vehicle fleet for HAS;
 Willie Bingaman, director of cargo operations for HAS;
 Dawn Hoffman, airport operations supervisor for Hobby Airport;
 and Brian Rinehart, manager of Ellington Airport for HAS.

In all, the number of employee names I found on the airport system's Web site totalled
98. I am including a complete list of those names with this letter as EXHIBIT B,
complete with Web addresses, so that the attorney general's office may verify my claim. I
am enclosing with this letter printouts of 10 of the Web pages in question as they appear
as of this moment, on June 22, 2009. These are marked EXHIBIT C.

Just to be clear: I didn't obtain these airport system employees' names by hacking into
some password-protected area of the airport's Web site. I didn't bribe anyone with special
security clearance to retrieve these names. No, these airport employees' names and job
descriptions -- and in some cases, even their photographs -- are all sitting right there on
the airport system's public Web site in the Houston Airport System's monthly newsletters,
which are written and compiled by the airport system's own communications and public
relations staffers. These public-relations-type materials were produced by the Airport
System, with public funds, for the benefit of the public.
Also, the names, photographs and short biographies of nearly a dozen of the Airport
System's very top officials are on a special page of their own on the Airport System's
Web site. Indeed, the name and photograph of the man who was the head of the Houston
Airport System in 2008, Richard M. Vacar, appears so many times on the airports' Web
site that I lost count.

In short, the Houston Airport System wants the public -- indeed the world, and anyone,
anywhere with Internet access -- to be able to access the names of these employees who
have access to the restricted areas of Houston's airports. It willingly published this
information and made it available to you, me and Osama bin Laden himself (assuming he
has Internet access).

The city of Houston and the Houston Airport System cannot on one hand publicize the
names and job descriptions of 98 of its own employees and then, on the other hand, claim
that releasing employees' names would somehow make the airport system vulnerable.
This defies common sense. If the airport's argument is to be believed, then the leadership
of the Houston Airport System is compromising their own airports' security.

Aside from defying common sense, it also violates Texas law.

State law prohibits selective disclosure of public records. If a government body releases
the information to one person, it must release that information to others who request it.

In Open Records Decision No. 400, penned in 1982, then-Texas Attorney General Jim
Mattox said that the city of Dallas had to grant a Dallas resident access to requested
information because the city had previously made that information public to other people:

We conclude that when [the city of Dallas] permitted members of the public to examine
this report, [it] waived any claim that [it] might have had [to withhold the information]
... Once such voluntary disclosure has occurred, as it has in this instance, the information
in question "shall then be available to any person."

The Houston Airport System has already released the identities of its employees on its
own Web site. In doing so, it has waived its right to claim that this information can be
kept confidential. The horse is already out of the barn, so to speak.

In a similar vein, Mattox wrote in attorney general's opinion JM-590, written in 1986,
that no one who requests records has any more right to access than any other requestor. In
other words, everyone who requests records is equal in the eyes of the law. Under this
principle, the Houston Airport System cannot turn down my request for access to records
when it is making these same records public to everyone else in the entire world who has
Internet access. Doing so would put me in a special class, by myself, with less rights to
access to that information than anyone else.

B. The Houston Airport System has failed to prevent its employees from voluntarily
disclosing the requested information via the Internet.
If release of the identities of HAS employees really would make the airports unsafe, then
Doug Frankhouser is compromising airport security. So is Albert Asberry. And Ivory
Davis.

They're all Houston Airport System employees -- Frankhouser is head of HAS' security,
data and wireless systems; Asberry is an operations coordinator; and Davis is an
electrical supervisor. And they all have voluntarily identified themselves, and described
their jobs for HAS, on the Internet via the free social-networking service LinkedIn.com.

Aside from the 98 HAS employees whose identities I culled from HAS's own Web site, I
found a total of 42 other HAS employees who are voluntarily broadcasting their identities
to the world on LinkedIn.

Using nothing more than a Google search, I was able to find these 42 other people who
identified themselves by name as current HAS employees, and all but one of them listed a
job title or job description. A complete list of these employees, and their job titles, is
enclosed as EXHIBIT D. Printouts of some of these Web pages are enclosed as EXHIBIT
E.

This is simply another way in which the Houston Airport System has already allowed the
requested information to be released to the public via the Internet.

If the release and publication of the names and job descriptions of HAS employees would
really compromise airport security, as the Houston city attorney's office argues, then why
has the Houston Airport System not prohibited its employees from disclosing their
identities and job descriptions via the Internet and social-networking sites such as
LinkedIn?

While we all enjoy First Amendment rights that guarantee us freedom of speech, courts
around the country have held that employers have some legal rights -- not an absolute
right, but some rights -- to limit certain employee activities outside the workplace. One
example: As a journalist who is expected to remain objective, my boss has the right to
forbid me from putting campaign signs in my yard supporting political candidates. And
the Internet is littered with stories of people who were fired from their jobs because of
indiscreet postings on MySpace, Facebook, personal blogs and the like.

If the Houston Airport System really wanted to prevent HAS employees from identifying
themselves on the Internet, it could have forbidden such activity on security grounds.
Clearly, it has not done so.

Therefore, as I said earlier, the Houston Airport System has already allowed the
information I requested to become public via the Internet. Thus, it should be released to
me as I requested under the Texas Public Information Act.

To summarize: The Houston Airport System has approximately 1,600 employees,

according to its most recent comprehensive annual financial report. Using the Internet, I
was able to compile a list of 140 employees' names -- and job titles or descriptions for all
but one of them -- using information published by the airport system itself or by the
employees themselves. That group -- 140 of 1,600 -- constitutes nearly 9 percent of the
total workforce of the Houston Airport System whose IDs are already on the Internet.
The information I requested is already out there in the public eye. I ask the attorney
general's office to require the airport system to release the records I requested.

C. The Houston Airport System has not shown why this matter must be handled by
the federal Transportation Security Administration; therefore, the Texas Attorney
General must decide whether the requested information is public under the Texas
Public Information Act.

The Houston city attorney's office claims that the attorney general should step out of the
way and allow the Under Secretary of Transportation for Security to decide whether the
airport system can withhold a salary list for Houston Airport System employees. The city
cites 49 USC Section 40119(b)(1), which gives the Under Secretary the authority to close
off otherwise-public information "obtained or developed in carrying out security or
research or development activities."

At no point in its letter does the city attorney's office ever explain how a list of
identifying all the janitors, typists and computer operators at an airport, and how much
they make a year, is somehow "obtained or developed in carrying out security or research
or development activities."

Government agencies must create payroll lists -- and the accompanying payroll
spreadsheets and databases -- as part of the basic functions of their existence. Workers
must be paid -- or else they'll go work somewhere else. Therefore, government agencies
must have some method of calculating how much each employee is owed, getting those
checks written to the right people, and maintaining basic accounting records to ensure the
proper taxes are levied on those workers.

Government agencies do not obtain or develop payroll lists in carrying out security
activities. They do not obtain or develop payroll lists in carrying out research activities.
They do not obtain or develop payroll lists in carrying out development activities. They
develop and maintain payroll lists as part of the everyday administrative activity of
performing their governmental functions.

I ask this question: When the state comptroller's office processes the paychecks for the
employees of the Texas attorney general's office, does it do so as a "security, research or
development" activity? No. It's just paying people what they're owed.

The city attorney's office goes on to cite a federal regulation, 49 CFR Section 1520.3(a),
which prohibits the release of "[a]ny information that the TSA has determined may reveal
a systemic vulnerability of the aviation system, or a vulnerability of aviation facilities, to
attack." This includes, but is not limited to "details of inspections, investigations, and
alleged violations and findings of violations."

Again, at no point does the city attorney's office ever explain how the release of names of
airport workers somehow "reveal[s] a systemic vulnerability of the aviation system, or a
vulnerability of aviation facilities to attack." (If it did reveal a systemic vulnerability, then
the Houston Airport System would be guilty of revealing that systemic vulnerability on
its own by publishing employee names, job titles and photographs on its own Web site.)

Consider this: The names and salary information for employees of the Los Angeles
airport system are public, have been released to the media there and are available for the
entire world to see via the Web site of the Los Angeles Daily News newspaper (an
attached printout of the Web site is EXHIBIT F). Ditto for employees of the Chicago
airports, O'Hare and Midway, whose names and salary information are available via the
Chicago Sun-Times (EXHIBIT G). Both Los Angeles International and O'Hare are
considerably larger -- in terms of passenger traffic -- than Houston's Bush
Intercontinental. Is the Houston city attorney's office suggesting that the management of
LAX and O'Hare have revealed systemic vulnerabilities to their facilities?

A great deal of government information, on the federal and state levels, has been made
confidential in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But nowhere in any law, state or
federal, have the American people given all government employees the authority to shout
"homeland security!" and keep confidential any information that could make them look
bad. We're not talking about the codes to the nation's nuclear arsenal here. We're talking
about the name of the guy who patches the potholes in the runways at Hobby Airport and
who probably makes $20,000 a year.

The city and the airport system have not shown one iota of evidence that the release of
airport workers' names would make the airports vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Therefore,
the issue of the release of the requested records is not one to be handled by the federal
Transportation Security Administration. It is entirely within the purview of the Texas
attorney general's office to decide whether the requested records should be made public.

II. List of employees of the Houston Airport System Development Corp. (HASDC)
and their 2008 pay data, and items described by the Houston city attorney as "third
party" information pertaining to HASDC

In its letter to the attorney general, the Houston city attorney's office says that the
Houston Airport System has no documents responsive to my request regarding payroll
information for the Houston Airport System Development Corp. (HASDC). It also has
informed the attorney for HASDC that he may object to the release of requested HAS
records pertaining to HASDC.

As for the list of HASDC employees and pay records, I will redirect that portion of my
request to the custodian of records for HASDC.

However, I ask that all other requested information be released to me. I object in the
strongest terms to the withholding of any of the requested HAS records merely because
they mention or somehow pertain to HASDC. If HASDC objects to the release of the
requested records, I wish to be notified and to be given the chance to rebut any arguments
it makes to the attorney general's office.

In closing, I ask the attorney general's office to require that all the requested information
be released to me.

If your office has any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. My e-mail is
jennifer@texaswatchdog.org and my cellphone is 615-406-8835. I appreciate your time
and consideration.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Peebles