FOI Advocate Blog

From Washington Post:

WASHINGTON — A Tennessee newspaper and the federal government said they have agreed in principle to settle the paper’s lawsuit seeking documents about civil rights-era photographer Ernest Withers’ work as an informant for the FBI.

In a court filing late Wednesday night, The Commercial Appeal of Memphis and the FBI said they were in the process of finalizing and executing a settlement agreement. To allow time to do so, they asked the court to suspend deadlines in the case until March 8. No details of the settlement were included in the filing.

[...]

In 2010, The Commercial Appeal’s publisher, Memphis Publishing Co., and one of its reporters, Marc Perrusquia, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI. Last year, under a court order, the FBI released 348 pages that were heavily redacted in places. In a court filing, the paper called the release insufficient.

From Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC):

Syracuse, NY, October 23 — The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) challenging a ruling by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that its master repository of investigations and operations information is off-limits to the public.

 

TRAC's request specifically included complete records about "the dates and results" of every internal inspection made about the workings of the hundreds of detention facilities that the government maintains all over the country. The thousands of individuals held in these facilities — some for many months — have not been charged with a crime but are held as a result of alleged administrative violations of the immigration law.

 

TRAC is represented in this action — filed in Washington on Monday — by the Public Citizen Litigation Group.

 

The material sought by TRAC — in a proceeding that began at the administrative level in January 2010 — is stored in the Enforcement Integrated Database (EID), a system that is owned and operated by ICE. The EID records and maintains information related to the investigations and operations of ICE as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and that agency's Office of Field Operations.

 

TRAC, a part of Syracuse University, has been using the FOIA for more than two decades in a largely successful effort to obtain comprehensive data about how the government enforces the law, collects taxes and litigates cases — including specific information about the sentences imposed by individual federal judges (see http://trac.syr.edu).

 

From Truthout:

On October 6, Truthout filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) over the FBI's failure to release documents we have sought pertaining to Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

 

The complaint was filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia. In addition to Truthout, Washington, DC-based attorney Jeffrey Light is also named as a plaintiff.

 

The FBI has received numerous FOIA requests for Occupy Wall Street-related documents since the inception of the movement in September 2011. Thus far, it appears the bureau has only released about a dozen pages of documents, and those were sent to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California in response to the organization's own lawsuit against the FBI.

From CREW:

On Wednesday, CREW filed suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia against the Department of Defense ("DOD"). CREW’s lawsuit, brought under the FOIA, was based on DOD's refusal to release any documents in its database of ethics opinions concerning post-employment ethics letters written by DOD ethics officers for senior DOD acquisition officials.

 

The letters are required by law; pursuant to Section 847 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, certain high level DOD acquisition officials accepting post-employment compensation from DOD contractors must first seek an opinion from their ethics official. DOD is further required to maintain these ethics letters in a centralized database. As of the summer of 2010, DOD had not completed the creation of the database according to DOD’s own inspector general.

From Des Moines Register:

The state of Iowa will pay $30,500 in legal fees accumulated by a newspaper in a lawsuit over access to records from the University of Iowa.

 

In a case that went all the way to the state Supreme Court, the university won the right to withhold certain records requested by the Iowa City Press-Citizen in 2007. But the courts ruled that other documents sought in the suit were public records and ordered their release.

 

Because the case resulted in some records being released, the university did not challenge the district court’s order that the state pay the newspaper’s attorney fees.