In one of his last acts as president, Barack Obama commuted the sentence of a high-profile government whistleblower and pardoned another.
Obama's actions last week marked a change of heart after his administration prosecuted more government whistleblowers than any other. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning and Gen. James Cartwright had leaked secret documents because they believed the public had the right to know about them.
It's rare for anyone to get prosecuted for revealing government secrets in Minnesota, but plenty of investigations over the years have sent the message that leakers do so at their own risk.
They risk a misdemeanor if they violate the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act, which serves as both the state's public records and privacy law. Since 2007, eight people have been convicted of violating the law, court records show.
Those convictions include public employees who snooped into databases for their own purposes, such as the court employee in Scott County who looked up a license plate number in 2014 for a prison inmate.
Then there's the strange case of former Dakota County employee Thomas Berry. In August 2015, he noticed something interesting on an internal report of police incidents in county parks: two Republican lawmakers cited for "making out" in a parked car. Berry e-mailed the report to his personal account so he could share it with his wife, he later told investigators.
When the make-out story hit the news, Dakota County officials ordered an investigation. Berry denied sharing it with the media. Even though virtually all of the information in the internal report would soon be public data, the Ramsey County sheriff's deputies investigating the case told Berry that the release of the lawmakers' dates of birth was the primary concern, according to an audio recording of their interview obtained by a data practices request.
Dates of birth for many lawmakers past and present are posted on the Legislature's website.
