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The Senate Judiciary Committee Friday unanimously approved a “very overdue” bill that would require law enforcement officials to get a warrant before accessing e-mail messages, updating a dated privacy law. The proposed amendments are historic and will create a consistent method for handling government access to online communications, said Sophia Cope, director of government affairs at the Newspaper Association of America. But the measure likely won’t go to the Senate this year, forcing the process to start over again next year, she said.

The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday expressed frustration that the state's open meetings law contains no definition for what constitutes a public meeting, forcing the court to define the statute's limits each time a new challenge arises. In oral arguments in McCutchen v. Fort Smith, the central issue in the case is whether an administrator's action of scheduling a series of individual meetings with members of the city's board of directors to discuss a memo he prepared constituted a meeting under the state's Freedom of Information Act.

Government attorneys confirmed on Tuesday that federal courts have the right under the federal Freedom of Information Act to review agency decisions to classify documents when invoking the law's national security exemption.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal of a case involving the open recording of police officers in Illinois while on the job.

Paula Broadwell isn’t the only person whose Gmail messages were read by government officials – Google received almost 8,000 e-mail access requests from U.S. state and federal governments in the past six months, according to the latest Google Transparency Report. Google fully or partially granted 90 percent of the requests made by federal, state and local U.S. governments, according to the report. The requests by stateside governments account for more than a third of requests worldwide.

An amendment to Kansas court rules now lets journalists use laptops and cell phones to report from the courtroom. Reporters still need permission from the presiding judge, but the recent amendment to Rule 1001 clarifies that such devices may be used by journalists. Before the amendment was added, there was no mention of laptops or smartphones in the rule, and judges assumed such devices were not permitted, according to court spokesman Ron Keefover.

A federal judge in Harrisburg, Pa., ruled Tuesday that a protocol limiting the ability of witnesses to see and hear all phases of an execution violates the First Amendment-based right of public access to judicial proceedings. The court in Philadelphia Inquirer v. Wetzel ruled that because historically witnesses have been permitted full access to executions and such access would not jeopardize the safety of lethal injection administrators, all phases of execution procedures must be accessible to the public.