Texting In open meetings.

    This Texas blog is by the journalist and editor Vince Leibowitz who talks about the issue of texting and tweeting during Texas open meetings. This blog was published at the Capitol Annex. This may seem an unimportant topic but it actually affect and rases lots of issues. The author first states a source which is the Huston Chronicle raises the fact many people of the Texas legislature are using private devices when in public hearing event. Vince then uses example from an article on the mysanantonio.com website who talks about the issue on monitoring texts and tweets and the author thinks that doing so would be bad and that is would be a mess. At first I did not completely agree because I think they need to be issued a Texas issued device to work only with knowing that the messages will be monitored by the public later and another personal device for family related events. The author then gives more examples about how other cities such as in Arlington are giving full access to any email sent by a government official whether the account was personal or not. The email part seems to be fine but what about texting and tweeting then ?
Vince brings good examples about what issues are on monitoring texts on different devices that can either retain for years or the one that cannot do so. The author brings more examples saying that it would be hard to do so. I personally think the author did a too big focus on getting the messages off the phone itself when  the best easy and accurate way is to get it off the network and that way even if deleted off the phone it would still be recorded. Another comment is shown, it talks about working reporters had no idea whether the messages sent were business related or not. Once again the author brings example who can excuse them to do so, but the author saying that there are restrictions in current technology is false. It is actually easy to store from the network all the messages probably better then if they would be unorganized random piece of paper. The author brings an argument from a city council to confirm his statement that the “SMS” are not stored. In my opinions this is either an excuse or they want to make the public think that it is a valid reason. I wonder then how on some murdering cases they are able to trace where was the phone what and when was the last call and all the messaging that goes with it. On finding solutions to that I do agree on the opinion of banning such activity especially at the open meeting itself at least. The old fashioned paper way would be more appropriate. The author closing is quite interesting by stating that nor of these will likely to pass, I do understand that this is a new issue since cell phone is not the way people use to do business not too long ago, so do we have to accept this new device or ban it  ? Here is the question.