Self-deleting message apps confound Pa.'s public access law, Senate panel hears
When government officials do the public's business using apps that automatically erase their messages, transparency and accountability take a hit, open records advocates told Pennsylvania lawmakers Monday.
They called on members of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee to consider legislation to address the use of platforms like Signal and SnapChat, to ensure they can't be used as an end run around the state's public access laws.
Pennsylvania's Sunshine Law requires the deliberation of public business to take place in public with ample notice. Even a simple majority of a school board or borough council discussing business triggers the law's requirements.
Since its debut in 2008, state courts have interpreted the Right-to-Know Law, which provides access to public records, to accommodate evolution in the way public officials use technology. Emails and other messages, even on officials' personal accounts and devices, can be public records under the law.
'The courts have said it doesn't matter where you're conducting agency business,' Liz Wagenseller, executive director of the Office of Open Records. 'It could be a Facebook message. It could be a LinkedIn message. It could be a YouTube video. If you're conducting agency business, it may be subject to the Right-to-Know Law.'
But the first consideration when the Office of Open Records hears an appeal by a member of the public is whether the record they're seeking exists.
'The Right-to-Know Law is silent on whether or not a record should exist. There are no penalties or admonishments if there's a record that was inappropriately deleted before the right to know request was made,' Wagenseller said, noting that officials could face penalties if they act in bad faith to conceal a record.
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And while the state Historical Commission publishes guidelines on how long municipalities, counties and other government agencies should preserve records, they're not always closely followed, Frank Mazza, director of government relations for the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said. The manuals are hundreds of pages long, he said.
'If you're a public official, as you probably all well know, you have a million other things rolling through your mind and understanding what your responsibilities are on page 92 of the record retention policy related to county airports isn't always at the front of mind,' Mazza said. He added that his group provides training and encourages officials to seek advice when in doubt.
Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said journalists have increasingly encountered situations where officials used apps such as Signal – known as ephemeral messaging in legal circles – to make decisions.
'That's obviously a violation of the law, but just as importantly, it erodes the public trust,' Melewsky said.
In written testimony to the court, Melewsky cited cases in Bucks County and Pittsburgh where public officials used Signal. Claims that they violated the Sunshine Act and Right-to-Know Law followed.
'Oftentimes the best evidence of whether the law was violated or complied with is going to be the actual record, and if it's gone, there's no way to prove what happened,' she said.
Committee Chairman Jarett Coleman (R-Lehigh) noted the Broad + Liberty reported earlier this month that an attorney for the Shapiro administration said in court that emails from a cabinet secretary who resigned amid scandal had been deleted before retention policies said they could be.
Pennsylvania isn't alone in grappling with the conflict between ephemeral messaging and public access. In Missouri, a court found in 2022 former Gov. Eric Greitens and his staff had not violated the law by using a 'self-destructing messaging' app prior to his administration adopting a policy to ban the use of such apps.
Joshua Bonn, a Harrisburg lawyer specializing in government transparency, said Pennsylvania laws afford public officials some discretion on whether messages can be deleted or need to be preserved. He used the example of a township manager texting about an issue on a road as a 'transitory message' that an employee may determine doesn't need to be preserved.
'The history is that there have, time and time again, been reports of public officials who have deleted messages that are later determined to be public records,' Bonn said. 'If you want to preserve public records, there needs to be some sort of direction from the legislature regarding how much time electronic messages need to be retained.'
Sen. Vincent Hughes (R-Philadelphia) said the issue seems to be present across all levels of government.
'How do we, how do we manage all this?' he asked 'This is a lot.'
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Melewsky suggested the panel could look to other states for guidance on how to tackle the issue.
Coleman said the committee would consider whether the Sunshine and Right-to-Know laws need to be clarified or broadened to ensure they apply consistently across all levels of government, whether more training is needed for public officials and whether the existing investigative and enforcement provisions of the law are sufficient.
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X (Formerly Twitter), 19 June 2025, Accessed 20 June 2025. 19 June 2025, Accessed 20 June 2025. Fox Business. "Florida Officials Want to Turn a Piece of the Everglades into the State's Largest Immigration Facility." Fox Business, 17 June 2025, Accessed 20 June 2025. X (formerly Twitter), 23 June 2025, Accessed 1 July 2025. "Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, June 30, 2025." The White House, 30 June 2025, Accessed 1 July 2025. Payne, Kate. "Trump toured Florida's immigration detention center in the Everglades. Here's what to know." 1 July 2025, Accessed 1 July 2025. LiveNOW from FOX. "President Trump on Migrant Detention Center, 'Alligator Alcatraz.'" YouTube, 1 July 2025, Accessed 1 July 2025. "President Trump Participates in 'Alligator Alcatraz' Roundtable Discussion | LiveNOW from FOX." YouTube, 1 July 2025, Accessed 1 July 2025. Camilo Montoya-Galvez. 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A Republican-backed bill currently in Congress goes further still—it would ban visas for all Chinese nationals looking to study in the United States. The authors of the bill point to China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which requires citizens to support intelligence-gathering for their home country even when abroad. Although the GOP bill may not pass, its hard-line stance underlines the level of uncertainty students now face. In June, President Donald Trump appeared to give Chinese students in the U.S. a reprieve when he announced that they would remain welcome, pending a putative trade deal with China. But by making plain that the students were a token in his trade war, Trump only increased the uncertainty of their predicament. The Chinese students I spoke with were intently parsing official edicts in an effort to work out which course subjects were sensitive and which weren't. What I detected from my conversations with them was their sense of being caught in a guessing game. A formerly innocuous decision about whether to leave the U.S. for a trip now seemed like a high-stakes gamble. In the country that they had believed offered the freest and most resource-rich research environment, they were now carefully policing their own discourse. Back in China, students know the score, but they never expected to be contending with these worries in the United States. In its nationalist rhetoric and sweeping use of state-security justifications, the U.S. was starting to mirror aspects of the very system it has long denounced. 'The White House website looks like a Chinese government site now,' the newly tenured professor told me, referring to the oversize portraits of President Trump. [Read: The Trojan Horse will come for us too] When the social-sciences Ph.D. student first applied to study abroad, she regarded the U.S. as the world leader for research in her field. Among her peers, the opportunity to pursue postgraduate studies at an American university was the runaway first choice. She had graduated from China's elite Tsinghua University, known especially for its STEM programs, so America's close ties between research and business, with proximity to venture capital, were part of the draw. 'You want to see your work realized in real life,' she told me. That optimism has faded as she's seen the heightened U.S.-China tensions filtering down into life on an American campus. 'You always walk with your Chinese identity,' she said. 'It's hard to isolate yourself from ongoing chaos.' Even during the first Trump administration, some of her friends from China had sensed that the environment in the U.S. was growing more hostile. Those who were studying subjects with potential military applications, such as robotics and information systems, applied to European programs instead. But they faced difficulties there too: After initially receiving offers from universities in the European Union, they saw their visa prospects vanish into a bureaucratic thicket of vetting checks. European countries have also increased their scrutiny of Chinese students who conduct STEM research with potential military, as well as civilian, applications. A Chinese student at New York University told me that he'd considered joining a 'No Kings' rally this month but decided to stay away, fearing that he might endanger his visa. 'It's becoming the same as the situation in China,' he said. 'You can talk about foreign policy, but not domestic policy.' After his positive experience of a year at a U.S. high school, he'd had no hesitation about applying only to American universities—which ranked highly for the engineering degree he expected to graduate with. But he told me he might have applied elsewhere if he had known how quickly American government policy would turn against international students, and Chinese students in particular. Now he was living with the same visa-status anxiety facing friends of his—Chinese nationals or people raised in China—who were seeing their renewals denied or delayed with vague demands for additional paperwork. He wasn't privy to their full applications, but he believed that these obstacles were a result of their Chinese ties. The NYU student wasn't alone in sensing a shift. A master's student told me that during her reentry to the U.S. last year, she was pulled aside into what Chinese students colloquially call the 'little black room,' an immigration-interview room at the airport. This reflects a pattern of heightened scrutiny at the border that began under the Biden administration, but Chinese citizens are familiar with the 'little black room' because it's what security officers back home use if they suspect some kind of anti-government conduct. The U.S. immigration officer checking her passport said she could leave after the student declared she was studying graphic design. If her answer had been computer science, she believed from accounts she'd seen on social media, 'I'd definitely stay there for a few hours.' A Ph.D. student in a Republican state who has planned a research trip out of the country this summer told me that her adviser expressly warned her not to get involved in protests or post anything pro-Palestine online, and to watch her driving speed. She said these warnings began last year, as red states anticipated Trump's return to power. Fearing that she could be denied reentry, she was ready to cancel her trip entirely if official U.S. announcements became more hard-line. The master's student has exercised similar precautions. Knowing that social-media accounts are checked and have a bearing on visa issuance, she restricts herself to sharing internet memes that broadly hint at her frustration without specifically criticizing federal immigration policy. Memes live in a 'gray area,' she said. Being vague makes them 'safer.' [Read: No more student visas? No problem.] This moment is by no means the first time that the U.S. has viewed Chinese students with suspicion. In the 1950s, American officials placed the scientist Qian Xuesen under house arrest and eventually deported him. The U.S. authorities came to regret their action: Back in China, Qian became the father of its missile-and-space program. Relations began to thaw in the '70s after President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China. In 1979, China's leader Deng Xiaoping met with President Jimmy Carter and agreed to step up scientific exchanges. Implicit in the U.S. government's motivation was a belief that if Chinese students were exposed to the benefits of democracy, they would recognize what they were missing and create a political constituency for reforming China. This spirit of engagement persisted through China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. By then, the aspiration of studying abroad had been normalized for Chinese young people—as a personal choice. The wildly popular 1990s TV show A Beijinger in New York, which aired on the state broadcaster China Central Television, was a testament to that generation's curiosity about the outside world. This cultural trend continued into the early 2000s, when 'Harvard Girl' Liu Yiting became a national sensation as an American-educated success story. Her parents' best-selling book chronicling how they'd raised her was a model for millions of other Chinese families, all hoping to nurture their own Harvard Girl. The recently U.S.-tenured professor I spoke with came of age during China's relatively liberal era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, under the premierships of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, so he had earned his master's at a very different time in U.S. politics, during Barack Obama's presidency. His own research field is national security—and he acknowledged that the United States had legitimate concerns about Chinese government–sponsored actions, citing instances of intellectual-property theft. 'I just don't think the administration is dealing with this in a targeted way,' he told me. Refusing students a visa simply because of links to the CCP was too broad, he argued, given China's condition as a one-party state in which almost every institution has a formal party presence. He supported the vetting of students, based on solid evidence and with due process. In the student-deportation cases he was following, some were being removed because they had once been charged with a minor offense, even if the charge had subsequently been dismissed. 'It's shocking,' he said. 'Their status was revoked overnight.' He said, in most instances, the Chinese students' universities received no prior notice. 'My guess is the government has adopted some kind of screening system,' he said, but one that seemed to him crude and unreliable. 'There are a lot of false positives.' (I requested comment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, but received no response.) This student's home country, he added, was not making things easier for Chinese students abroad. 'The National Intelligence Law is not doing us a favor,' he said: The law includes penalties for obstructing intelligence work, which puts Chinese nationals abroad in a very awkward position. I asked what he'd do if the Chinese government asked him to share information; he said he'd call an American lawyer. On RedNote, a social-media app popular with Chinese students, posts continue to circulate about deportations over such minor infractions as speeding tickets. Some fear that if they travel abroad, they will be denied reentry to the United States. Chinese students are familiar with surveillance, scrutiny, and expansive definitions of national security. They just didn't expect all of that from the U.S. government, as well. Article originally published at The Atlantic
