Posts tagged 'Justice Department'
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 ...
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 ...
