Tag Archives: Mosaic Theory

Business Improvement Districts, Fashion District BID

110 New Emails Between The City of LA And The East Hollywood BID Reveal Essentially Nothing About Anything, As Do The BID’s Bylaws — Also A Bunch Of Advertising Slash Branding Bullshit From The Fashion District Is Easy To Mock But Not So Informative After All

August 11, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Ah, friends, just another desultory announcement of yet another batch of public records obtained from our friends at the BIDs, the meaning of none of which is yet clear, but we don’t let that worry us here in MK-dot-Org-landia. Everything happens for a reason, as they say, and I’m sure all this junk is no exception and some day it will prove to comprise crucially important pieces in puzzles whose very existence is as yet undiscerned. But for now I’m just announcing its existence, and do with it what you will. Anyway, here’s what I got:

Emails between the East Hollywood BID and the City of LA — March 2017 through July 2017. There are 110 emails here, attachments are attached to the emails, it’s amazing how empty of content this batch is. About 84% of them consist of Nicole Shahenian trying to get people to use her new email at ehbid.org. I don’t know for sure but I’d bet money that she made this switch because of my CPRA requests. Also, Aram Taslagyan’s replacement as CD13 East Hollywood field deputy introduces himself herein, but I already forgot his name.

And turn the page for the rest of the junk and more random commentary!
Continue reading 110 New Emails Between The City of LA And The East Hollywood BID Reveal Essentially Nothing About Anything, As Do The BID’s Bylaws — Also A Bunch Of Advertising Slash Branding Bullshit From The Fashion District Is Easy To Mock But Not So Informative After All →

Skid Row Neighborhood Council

Newly Obtained ICS File Proves That Estela Lopez Organized That March 20 Conference Call Between Her, Rena Leddy, And Rockard Delgadillo About Nuking The Skid Row Neighborhood Council And That It Was Organized No Later Than March 18

July 8, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Background: You can read my previous stories on the Skid Row Neighborhood Council formation effort and also see Jason McGahan’s article in the Weekly and Gale Holland’s article in the Times for more mainstream perspectives.

About ten days ago I wrote about a March 20, 2017 conference call between Rena Leddy, Estela Lopez, and potentially illegal lobbyist and former City Attorney Rockard Delgadillo, the point of which was to discuss how they were going to destroy the Skid Row Neighborhood Council. At that time the only evidence I had about the meeting was an entry from Rena Leddy’s calendar, which she’d printed out and redacted with a black marker. This, of course, destroys what’s often the most interesting aspect of an electronic record, which is to say the metadata.

Now, the California Public Records Act has an exceedingly useful requirement with respect to electronic records. It’s found at §6253.9(a)(1), which states:

Unless otherwise prohibited by law, any agency that has information that constitutes an identifiable public record not exempt from disclosure pursuant to this chapter that is in an electronic format shall make that information available in an electronic format when requested by any person and, when applicable, shall comply with the following … The agency shall make the information available in any electronic format in which it holds the information.

Modern calendar applications almost universally use the ICS file format for their entries. So on June 28 I sent Rena Leddy an email asking her for the raw ICS file. She sent it to me yesterday, and now I’m making it available to you either as files or, as always, there’s a transcription after the break:

Anti-SRNC conference call ICS — Here it is in its native format. Depending on your computer’s configuration, clicking on this may add it to your own calendar
Anti-SRNC conference call ICS saved as TXT — This has exactly the same information but with a TXT file extension so that it won’t interact with your computer in unexpected ways

There are two crucial pieces of information revealed by the metadata. First of all, Estela Lopez created the event. That is, she organized the call with Rockard Delgadillo and subsequently invited Rena Leddy to join. At a minimum this fact will be useful in framing future CPRA requests.

Second, the event was created on March 18, 2017 at noon PST.¹ Previously we’d only been able to pin down the beginning of Rockard Delgadillo’s involvement in anti-SRNC lobbying to 11 a.m. on March 20. This is a 47 hour improvement in the timeline I’m constructing. Turn the page for analysis and a transcription of the ICS file.
Continue reading Newly Obtained ICS File Proves That Estela Lopez Organized That March 20 Conference Call Between Her, Rena Leddy, And Rockard Delgadillo About Nuking The Skid Row Neighborhood Council And That It Was Organized No Later Than March 18 →

Announcements, Business Improvement Districts, Downtown Center BID, Fashion District BID

Sunday Morning Document Dump: Emails From Fashion District, Figueroa Corridor, North Hollywood, Downtown Center, Also Fashion District Transactions February Through April

May 14, 2017 Mike Leave a comment

Greetings, friends! If you’ve been wondering what you were going to do this morning after finishing off the Times crossword² here are a bunch of new public records for your reading pleasure. There’s no single document here that’s mind-blowingly important, but, as I have mentioned many and many a time, we all are strong believers around here in the Mosaic Theory of Intelligence Gathering, and these are just more puzzle pieces, some of them quite important qua puzzle pieces!³

Assorted Fashion District Emails 2017 — These are emails to/from people at the Fashion District BID and various other correspondents. There are no real blockbusters here compared to, e.g., last month’s momentous release of Skid Row Neighborhood Council emails, but there is some interesting stuff. Perhaps most interesting is this set, which includes a bunch of conspiratorial nonsense from the Central City Association as well as a detailed report-out from the BID’s Board retreat in March. This latter document will certainly turn out to be essential in at least one project I’m pursuing in relation to lobbying by BIDs, a sadly and almost surely illegally unregulated activity.
Fashion District Transactions February through April 2017 — More transaction reports. These are essential in ways that are hard to predict in advance. The big surprise here is that the Fashion District has recently spent $1647⁴ consulting with downtown legal beagles Bradley & Gmelich, the same law firm that the criminal conspiracy known as the South Park BID seems recently to have hired to (mis)handle its CPRA affairs and practices.⁵

And turn the page for more emails: North Hollywood BID, Figueroa Corridor BID, and our old friends, the Downtown Center BID!
Continue reading Sunday Morning Document Dump: Emails From Fashion District, Figueroa Corridor, North Hollywood, Downtown Center, Also Fashion District Transactions February Through April →

Business Improvement Districts

Some 2014 Emails Between Universal Pro and Media District Now Available

July 3, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Covert photo of Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition food service at Sycamore and Romaine, evidently taken from a Universal Pro covert mobile intelligence base — Covert 2014 photo of Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition food service at Sycamore and Romaine, evidently taken from a Universal Pro top seekrit mobile intelligence base

I am pleased to announce the availability of a highly random selection of emails from 2014 between the Media District BID and their security provider, Universal Protection Service. The emails, which don’t seem to be organized either chronologically or topically, can be found in three PDFs here, and also through the menus in the navigation bar above (leading to here). Right now not much of this material seems that interesting, although it does reveal the previously-only-suspected fact that the HMD BID spends actual money having UPS spy on the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition. On the other hand, I just finished reading Barry Siegel’s fine book Claim of privilege : a mysterious plane crash, a landmark Supreme Court case and the rise of state secrets, in which government lawyers patiently spend half a century explaining, lying when they must, to various courts that even routine, superficially innocuous-seeming facts can actually be top-seekrit (even if they’ve already been published to the world) because knowledgeable people can piece them into a “mosaic” which reveals EVERYTHING!!! I’m not at that point yet with these emails but when I get there you all will be the first to know.