Agencies lag in filing FOIA reports
Posted: Feb. 27, 2013 | Tags: FOIA
In baseball, if you bat .333, you're an All-Star. But we’re pretty sure that doesn’t apply to most other endeavors.
Take, for example, the requirement that federal agencies file annual reports detailing how they handled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The reports, for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, were due by Feb. 1. They're supposed to be available on a central Web page hosted by the Justice Department, which oversees all FOIA procedures for the federal government.
Yet here we are, on Feb. 27, nearly a month after the deadline, and only five cabinet ...
Gun permits stoke debates over privacy, open government
Posted: Feb. 26, 2013 | Tags: open government
Shortly after the tragic massacre of school children in Newtown, Conn., in December, the Westchester, N.Y., Journal News got access to a list of all gun permit owners in Westchester and Rockland counties and made it available on its website.
The publication of the list, which was a public record, provoked an outcry from permit holders who said their privacy had been violated.
Within a few weeks, the New York legislature and governor agreed to a bill making the records off limits to the public for four months. The bill also includes a provision giving permit holders the power ...
Sunshine Week: A commitment to open government
Posted: March 8, 2012 | Tags: Sunshine Week
Next week is Sunshine Week, designed to bring attention to the merits and benefits of having an open government. The main sponsors of the week are the American Society of News Editors and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In some ways, it is bittersweet to have such a celebration. On the one hand, it is a great opportunity to expose people to the notion that a free flow of information from the government is vital to a functioning democracy. On the other hand, it seems too bad that we have to remind public officials and ordinary citizens ...
Suit seeks to force agencies to give FOIA time estimates
Posted: Feb. 21, 2012 | Tags: FOIA, Freedom of Information, New York Times, truth-out.org, Wikileaks
The folks at truth-out.org have filed suit against the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Department and several other federal agencies to force them to give the organization estimated dates for completing Freedom of Information Act requests.
The suit is based on the 2007 amendments to FOIA that required agencies to provide, among other things, “an estimated date on which the agency will complete action” on FOIA requests. Despite the clear statement in the law, some agencies don’t tell requesters when to expect results.
In a blog post explaining the suit, Jason Leopold reports that the FBI has refused ...
EPA, Commerce take lead in developing "FOIA Portal"
Posted: Feb. 16, 2012 | Tags: FOIA, Freedom of Information, Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, open government
A buzz is growing in the federal Freedom of Information community about a new $1.3 million “FOIA Portal” under development and slated for launch this fall. Thursday we got a chance to look under the hood a bit, as part of a group organized by the Office of Government of Information Services.
The system’s design and development is being led by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commerce Department, and so far those are the only two agencies that have committed to implementing it. OGIS, housed in the National Archives, also is a partner in the portal project ...
Seven cabinet departments late filing FOIA reports
Posted: Feb. 13, 2012 | Tags: FOIA, Freedom of Information, Justice Department
Well, it’s time to see how federal agencies are doing in terms of filing their annual Freedom of Information Act reports. The reports, covering activity for the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30, are supposed to be finished by Feb. 1.
Agencies apparently treat that deadline as seriously as they treat other FOIA deadlines, which is to say, not very. By yesterday afternoon, only eight of 15 Cabinet-level agencies had posted their reports online.
The reports show such things as how many requests the agency received, how many it processed, how the backlog changed, how many requests were ...
Some people apparently didn't get the FOIA memo
Posted: Oct. 6, 2011 | Tags: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Federal Times, FOIA, The FOIA Project, Freedom of Information, Intelligence Oversight Board
Maybe it’s time for the Obama administration to resend its Freedom of Information policy and guidance to federal agencies, based on some of the FOIA-related items that have crossed the desk in recent days. It sure seems like a lot of FOIA folks missed the message.
Category 1: We don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Andrew Medici, a reporter for Federal Times, writes about his experience with FOIA at the Department of Homeland Security. Remember, this is a reporter who works for a publication that covers the federal government, one that’s not exactly known for being ...
HUD grants FOIA request but now wants the documents back
Posted: June 22, 2011 | Tags: Department of Housing and Urban Development, Freedom of Information, We ARE Marina del Rey
One of President Obama’s first acts after taking office was to issue a remarkably strong affirmation of the Freedom of Information Act.
“The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears,” the president said. “All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher ...
The Supreme Court giveth, the Justice Department taketh away
Posted: May 12, 2011 | Tags: Exemption 2, Exemption 3, Exemption 4, Exemption 6, Exemption 7, FOIA, Freedom of Information, Justice Department, Supreme Court
In March the Supreme Court rather bluntly told federal agencies and lower courts that they had been misinterpreting an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for 30 years. Actually, the court could have said, in so many words, that folks should learn to read before they start saying what a law means.
The case involved a Washington man’s request for information about the blast radius of explosives stored on an island in Puget Sound. The Navy denied the request on grounds that the information could be withheld because of Exemption 2, which was designed, originally, to protect records ...
19 months and counting: The saga of an Energy Department FOIA request
Posted: April 21, 2011 | Tags: Energy Department, FOIA, Freedom of Information, Office of Government Information Services, OGIS, USEC
When we launched Exemption 10, we announced plans to publish FOIA case studies from journalists and others outside the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Today, we have the first of those, written by Sam Tranum, a Washington-based reporter for Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, who is in a long-running battle with the Energy Department to get documents relating to a $2 billion federal loan guarantee request. Tranum covers uranium markets, nuclear energy and proliferation issues. Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, one of several subscription-only newsletters published by the Energy Intelligence Group, covers the nuclear business, energy politics and proliferation issues from offices in Washington and London ...
