AND GOVERNMENT’S CLAIMS TO “PRIVACY” IN WITHHOLDING INFORMATION FROM THE PUBLIC
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jan. 28, 2016) — Former attorney and presidential candidate Montgomery Blair Sibley, who is now teaching at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), will be offering an online course on the subject of “privacy law” as it relates to the government’s non-release of various types of records.
Sibley is the manager of Privacy Compliance Consulting and hold’s a Master’s Degree in Cyber Security Policy. The course will prepare the student for the Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) credential.
A former attorney, in 1986 Sibley “litigated the first impression cases on the conflicts between the Electronic Communication Privacy Act and the Bank Secrecy Act and the scope of bank account holder’s privacy rights versus the government’s right to bank records under those Acts.” His biography continues, “With over 30 years of national and international legal and business experience, Mr. Sibley is grounded in law coupled with current certified knowledge of the 21st Century issues of Cybersecurity and Information Privacy regulation.”
The course begins on February 17 and runs through the subsequent five Wednesday evenings. Each segment will begin at 6:30 p.m. ET and conclude at 9:30 p.m.
A course syllabus contains such topics as “Privacy before, during and after employment,” “Government and Court Access to Private-sector Information,” and “Structure of U.S. Law,” among many others.
Several specific cases with which Sibley has been involved to be covered within the class’s scope include “The Elizabeth Duke Fugitive case,” “The Barack Obama Identity Document litigation cases,” and “Privacy Issues in the D.C. Madam Escort Case.”
In an interview on Thursday morning, Sibley told The Post & Email, “There’s a privacy certification, much as there are certifications for other computer skills. I’m certified as a privacy professional, and the course will prepare other people to prepare to take the examination. In the course, which is an online distance course, I’ll be covering the essentials of what privacy professionals face in the modern world. During each of the segments, I”m going to pick a topic related to various litigation I’ve been involved in which implicates privacy issues and spend 30 or 40 minutes on those issues.
“In the ‘DC Madam‘ case, I have a motion pending in federal court to release the records. I’m the only one who still has all those records, and they’ve never been released because I’ve been under order not to release them. I think they are significant for the presidential election. I can’t say any more than that because I’m not allowed to discuss what is in those records.
“Today is the last day for the clerk to file my pleading. There’s some significant material there,” Sibley told us.
“DC Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found deceased on May 1, 2008 following her conviction on “prostitution racketeering” and “money laundering.” In April of the following year, Sibley published a book about the case titled “Why Just Her: The Judicial Lynching of the D.C. Madam.”
Sibley then added, “Another segment of this will be what happened with the Barack Obama litigation that I and others engaged in, and were his claims to privacy valid and were they heard? I filed subpoenas on Columbia, Harvard Law and Occidental. There’s some backstory there that never really got out, so we’ll be able to detail all that.”
He continued, “Then there’s the Elizabeth Duke case which you probably remember, so we’ll go through that. I have a small agenda here, which is that I’m going to invite various journalists to come in during those half-hour segments if they want access to the documents, etc., because I still hope to shine a flashlight into those very dark recesses about what’s been going on.
“There will be a whole three-hour segment devoted to the government’s right to claim privacy over records; national security interests and law enforcement interests are raised.”
Sibley acknowledged that there are laws dictating that certain information not be released which can be and have been litigated. In regard to his litigation for the release of Obama’s records from the three universities he reportedly attended, Sibley said, “Barack Obama’s attorneys raised these privacy laws; Columbia University and Harvard Law raised them; and the courts did what they did. That’s what I’ll be addressing.”
“I’m 59 years old; I see no reason not to pull out all the stops and let people know what I know,” Sibley told us. “I have 850 clients on the DC Madam Escort Service that no one has ever seen. The subpoena was issued and returned to me and then it was quashed. So I have the records, even though I wasn’t allowed to use them. I’ve been sitting on them because I was ordered not to release them. But I think they’re relevant to the upcoming election and they ought to be released. That’s the motion I have pending in federal court which they refused to file.”
Of his former profession as an attorney, Sibley said that his law license was “suspended on the verge of the DC Madam trial.” “I had issued subpoenas for the White House and others, and that suspension has run its course. I can practice law if I want. I have no inclination to join that profession because I think it’s completely corrupt,” Sibley said.
“The DC Madam case covered a period of time from 1996 to 2006. There were various people in Washington then who are in now or want to be in now. So the public has a right to know. We’ll actually be litigating that issue during the case, so I’ll be updating it as the courts rule,” he stated.
Sibley has been teaching the course for 18 months, but of the upcoming class, he told us, “I’ve expanded the scope to include some more contemporary issues instead of just the regular material.”