The NFOIC open government blog is a compendium of original concepts and analysis as well as ideas, edited excerpts and materials from a variety of sources. When the information comes from another source, we will attribute it and provide a link. The blog relies on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited; we will correct errors and inaccuracies when we become aware of them.
If you're looking for Advocate posts from before July, 2011, visit http://foiadvocate.blogspot.com/.
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From The West Virginia Record:
CHARLESTON -- A freelance reporter is suing West Virginia State University for failing to satisfy repeated Freedom of Information Act requests.
Hazo W. Carter Jr., the president of West Virginia State University, was also named as a defendant in the suit.
From The National Security Archive:
The State Department today released a February 2006 internal memo from the Department's then-counselor opposing Justice Department authorization for "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA. All copies of the memo (Document 1), which reflect strong internal disagreement within the George W. Bush administration over the constitutionality of such techniques, were thought to have been destroyed. But the State Department located a copy and declassified it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive.
The author of the memo, Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, described the context of the memo in congressional testimony on May 13, 2009, and in an article he had previously published on foreignpolicy.com site on April 21, 2009.
From Bloomberg:
As I started each of my three books — about Lazard Freres, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) — I submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the appropriate government agencies (the Securities Exchange Commission, the State Department and the Federal Reserve) to obtain whatever documents, memos and e-mails they had about these companies and their senior executives.
[...]
Sadly, getting this information in anything like a timely basis — say, before my books were finished and published — has been nearly impossible.
From truthout.org:
For the past eight years, the CIA has used an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that "protects intelligence sources and methods" to justify the withholding of certain records from requesters.
But a federal lawsuit filed against the agency charges that the CIA does not have the authority to deny records under what is known as a (b)(3) exemption unless the agency consulted with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and received specific authorization in each instance it had denied records under that rule, which it apparently has not done.
A few open government and FOIA news items selected from many of interest that we might or might not have drawn attention to earlier. Be sure to check out Sunshine Week 2012 News while you're at it.
Government confirms it has secret interpretation of Patriot Act Spy Powers
The government has just officially confirmed what we've long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act's Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over "any tangible things." Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.
Visit ACLU for the rest.
Requests for public records from Wis. Gov. Walker's office increase three-fold
MADISON, Wis. — The firestorm of debate ignited by Gov. Scott Walker's changes to collective bargaining rules last year also triggered an explosion of requests for public information from his office. The office received 214 written requests during 2011, some three times more than the previous governor saw just a few years earlier, Gannett Wisconsin Media found while checking public records activity as part of a Sunshine Week open-government initiative.
Visit The Republic for the rest.
Results vary in local public records audit
Without access to public records, revealing the day-to-day happenings in government — from the mundane to the corrupt — would citizens be informed? Government really does control people’s lives, said Rowland Thompson, executive director of Allied Daily Newspapers of Washington. It controls who puts money in and who takes money out.
Visit Daily Record for the rest.
FOIA request flushes out details of settlement
Details of the settlement reached in a former New Milford police official’s $10 million federal lawsuit against the town, Mayor Patricia Murphy and the town’s police chief have been obtained by The Housatonic Times in response to a freedom of information request.
Visit Litchfield County Times for the rest.
Obama FOIA efforts earn mixed grades
Many federal agencies have failed to track basic information in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, according to a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee study released Thursday. A separate, rosier study from nonprofit OMBWatch noted FOIA progress compared to previous years.
Visit Government Executive for the rest.
Arizona Republic and 12 News fight to access public records
The Arizona Republic and 12 News in 2011 successfully went to court more than 10 times to open public records for inspection. Journalists fight every day to open records and meeting to the public, but these cases stand out as significant legal victories.
Visit TucsonCitizen.com for the rest.
Agencies to launch portal for online FOIA requests
WASHINGTON — Filing a request for public information under the Freedom of Information Act can be easy — if you know where to send it. If you don't, you may end up sending your request to multiple agencies, hoping you picked the right one ... By October, the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Commerce and the National Archives and Records Administration hope to launch an electronic FOIA portal that would give the public one place to file a FOIA request.
Visit Democrat and Chronicle for the rest.
From Washington Post:
Eleven of 17 Cabinet-level agencies fail to fully comply with federal law requiring complete inventories of public records requests, and most large agencies earn a subpar grade for records management, according to a new congressional report.
The report, set for release Thursday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is meant to draw attention to government transparency issues during this year’s Sunshine Week, an annual event designed to raise awareness about access to public records.
From New York Times Caucus blog:
An Internet site that promotes openness by the federal government has beaten Representative Darrell E. Issa to the punch, publishing copies of tens of thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests assembled for Mr. Issa last year as part of an investigation he is conducting into the federal government’s responsiveness to such inquiries.
Mr. Issa, a California Republican who serves as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had asked 180 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and Amtrak, for five years’ worth of logs detailing who requested government documents, what documents they wanted and when responses were provided, if at all.
Here are several interesting items of note in the last couple days regarding costs associated with fulfilling public records requests—and the fighting thereof.
Granted, if not these then at least some agencies likely have used or will use costs—actual or estimated, reasonable or outlandish—as a way of deflecting criticism when requested records are not searched for adequately or are ultimately not located, and that is unacceptable.
Still, in our times, with budgets being slashed at all levels of government, it is incumbent upon us to give careful consideration as to just how we as a citizenry intend on paying for this little thing called open government while not allowing our public officials to use the cost of adhering to the law as an excuse to break it.
While we're on the subject, be sure to check out last week's National Security Archive post regarding the CIA's "covert operation against Declassification Review" and sign the petition from our friends at OpenTheGovernment.org to "restore accountability to the CIA's secrecy system."
More from around the states, below:
The California Assembly spent nearly $200,000 in legal fees fighting against disclosure of member-by-member budgets that allocate tens of millions in public funds, records show. Assembly administrator Jon Waldie said the sum does not include hundreds of hours, perhaps more than a thousand hours, consumed by Capitol employees in gathering records ultimately ordered released by a Sacramento court.
Finding out how the public uses Hawaii's open records law isn't easy. And it's not cheap either. And that's despite a state requirement that agencies send a report to the Hawaii Office of Information Practices every year about public records requests. Turns out virtually none of them are doing it.
Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN) says it may be time to reset the state’s policy for handling requests for public documents. Haslam’s administration is examining how each department handles requests for public records, saying the state needs to standardize how it responds and charges for the labor and time to provide records.
Naperville City Council members say they support residents’ rights to access government information, but some believe smart grid opponents have gone too far. ... The total estimated staff time spent on replying to the requests and related legal issues is 1,475 hours through last Thursday. The city’s total cost so far is $73,750 at an estimated rate of $50 per hour.
From The Washington Post's State of NoVa:
The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors once again made its message clear at a board meeting Wednesday: It wants the ongoing legal matter between freelance journalist Beverly Bradford and the Loudoun County Board of Equalization to come to an end.
After emerging from a closed session, the supervisors unanimously voted to direct the county administrator and outside counsel to settle the court case, which was sparked by a confrontation between Bradford, a freelance reporter for AOL Patch, and Board of Equalization Chairman J. Scott Littner at a tax appeal hearing last summer.
From ACLU's Blog of Rights:
Today we filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to demand that the government release basic — and accurate — information about the government’s targeted killing program.
Our government’s deliberate and premeditated killing of American terrorism suspects raises profound questions that ought to be the subject of public debate. Unfortunately the Obama administration has released very little information about the practice — its official position is that the targeted killing program is a state secret — and some of the information it has released has been misleading.
From Courthouse News Service:
WASHINGTON (CN) - A nonprofit government watchdog claims the FBI refuses to release information on "the government's identification and surveillance of individuals who have demonstrated support for or interest in WikiLeaks."
The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Department of Justice's Criminal Division and National Security Division, and the FBI, in a FOIA complaint in Federal Court.
From The Washington Post's State of NoVa:
The legal bills will continue to add up in the costly courtroom battle between a local freelance journalist and the Loudoun County Board of Equalization, a case that began with a confrontation at a tax appeal hearing last summer and continued Monday with the testimony of Board of Equalization Chairman J. Scott Littner in Loudoun County District Court.
The details surrounding the encounter between Littner and freelance reporter Beverly Bradford at the June 28 meeting remain in dispute. What isn’t debatable is the fact that a single photograph that Bradford took during the meeting has spiraled into a multifaceted dispute costing Loudoun upward of $80,000 in legal fees — and sparked a power struggle between the Board of Equalization and the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, which has refused to foot the bill for a case it wanted resolved out of court.
