I have only been "following" it loosely -- to the extent that I'm aware of it. Just clicked on a link to a story about it and found this tucked away in the report:
Speaker, 31, an Atlanta lawyer infected with a rare, often fatal form of tuberculosis, said he has a recording made before the couple flew to Europe that shows health officials told him he was not a risk to others.
In the ABC interview broadcast Friday, Speaker said his father asked health officials whether Speaker was a risk to anyone, and health officials said he was not. "My dad taped it," he said.
Fulton County health officials have said they told Speaker before his trip not to fly. (Watch Speaker say he hopes fellow airline passengers will forgive him Video)
Asked about the tape, Steve Katkowsky of the Fulton County Health Department told CNN, "If such a recording was made it was without the consent and without the knowledge of Fulton County Health Department officials."
I find this to be profoundly disturbing. Reading between the lines, what the Fulton County Health Department is saying is, "Okay, we either lied to him or we made a mistake, but he had no right to make a recording of what we told him in order to show us up as liars or dolts later on."
So what if the recording was made without the knowledge or consent of the County officials? They were acting in the course of their official duties, and anything they did or said should be a matter of public record. If permission to record had been asked, would they have said "No"? On what grounds could they possibly decline? I have worked in a couple of public agencies. As far as I know, anyone who walked through the doors had every right to tape record any meeting we might have had. Certainly, in a matter of one individual's health the County could not have allowed CNN in to tape a meeting with Speaker and/or his father, but to suggest that the father in some way did not have a right to tape
his own conversation with the County officials sounds an awful lot to me like an admission that they really prefer to be able to bury their bodies quietly.
More and more it seems that it would be prudent to walk around with a voice-actuated mini-recorder in your pocket.