State Secrets: Who Was in that Helicopter?

by: the_promised_land

Sun Jun 12, 2011 at 08:41:21 PM EDT

But a lot was blacked out. In every single one they black out the names of the other passengers and how many passengers were traveling.

Legal? Or some kind of weird cover-up? More below the jump...

You need a specific reason to exempt a record from disclosure. From what's been reported, I am guessing that this is what the Christie administration is claiming:

security measures and surveillance techniques which, if disclosed, would create a risk to the safety of persons, property, electronic data or software;

So here's the line of argument you'd have to follow to say that you can't disclose who Christie was flying with. It's a risk to (that person? Christie?) for their names to be disclosed? Or it would create a risk to the helicopter (property?) to know that certain others were flying with Christie?

Huh?

I'm not an expert on security. But this seems sketchy.

One key question - did prior Governors when they disclosed their helicopter records (and this whole mess has made it clear - they did) omit who they flew with? Google hasn't provided me with any answers.

I hope the Journal is following up. And that they have a good lawyer.