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The FOI ADVOCATEVisit the new FOI ADVOCATE Blog, the official blog of NFOIC, in which we bring news of freedom of information developments. Join us there for FOI advocacy discussions. Welcome to the FOI ADVOCATE. Below, you'll find links to the latest FOI ADVOCATEs, the e-newsletter from NFOIC. To subscribe to The ADVOCATE LISTSERV:
The FOI ADVOCATE for September 7, 2007Highlights include: CJOG REPORT DETAILS FOIA WOES: A new analysis from the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government documents the steady erosion of federal FOIA. The report notes "current government handling of FOIA requests is deteriorating" across the government agencies. Some highlights:
Additionally, the report notes that the DOJ is "consistently granted the lowest percentage of [FOIA] appeals of any agency Ñ only 4% in 2006." The DOJ's "rate of grant-making is down 70%" than that of President Clinton. The FOI ADVOCATE for July 17, 2007Highlights include: SECRECY PLAGUES SCRUTINY OF MOUNTAINTOP MINING: Two weeks ago, environmental activists Cindy Rank and Vivian Stockman took a drive through the Logan County hills with Paul Vining, the president of Magnum Coal. From the top of a ridge, Rank and Stockman looked down through the trees, mountain laurel and flame azalea. The stream that runs through Fitzwater Hollow was already buried, they saw. Workers from Magnum subsidiary Apogee Coal Co. had dumped a six-foot-thick layer of rocks into the valley. The damage was done. The FOI ADVOCATE for May 25, 2007Highlights include: OPEN PROMOTES EFFECTIVENESS: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-VT, chairman of the committee, and Sen. John Cornyn, R-TX, a member of the panel, introduced the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007 ("OPEN Government Act") earlier this year. The bill contains key reforms to update and strengthen the FOIA. The FOI ADVOCATE for March 31, 2007Highlights include: NEW NSA STUDY ON WEB ACCESS: Federal agencies helped create the Internet, but most do not use it to inform the public about what they do, a study to be released today shows. In 1996, Congress intended to keep government ahead of the curve by amending the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to require that agencies put more public information on their Web sites. Posting important and most-requested records online, the theory went, would burn through a raft of hard-copy FOIA requests, save money and eliminate waiting time. The FOI ADVOCATE for February 9, 2007Highlights include: BIG NEWS FROM SUNSHINE WEEK 2007: Journalists Ben Bradlee, Tom Brokaw and Judy Woodruff are the honorary chairs of Sunshine Week 2007, March 11-17. Bradlee is former executive editor and now vice president at large of The Washington Post. Brokaw is former anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News and now a contributing reporter and producer for NBC News documentaries. Woodruff is special correspondent for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and anchor of Conversations with Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg Television. The FOI ADVOCATE for January 9, 2007Highlights include: LET US COUNT THE WAYS: Just how many different ways has the Bush Administration tried to hide once-public information sources from the public record? Help us count the ways. On Friday, Justin discovered that the Department of Defense has suddenly classified the numbers of attacks in Iraq for September through November of this year -- after providing the figures for every month since the war began. Why classify the information now? If there's a good explanation, we don't know it, and the Pentagon isn't returning our calls. The FOI ADVOCATE for November 20, 2006Highlights include: CHENEY SECRECY STAREDOWN CONTINUES: A new executive privilege battle is looming in Washington as a federal appeals court considers whether to intervene in an election-eve dispute over records of visitors to Vice President Cheney's home at the Naval Observatory, as well as his offices in the White House complex. Last month, a federal judge in Washington, Ricardo Urbina, ordered the Secret Service to disclose two years of visitor logs to the Washington Post immediately or explain in detail why the records are exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. The FOI ADVOCATE for October 23, 2006Highlights include: A KEY GUANTANAMO RULING: The Department of Defense must release documents containing the identities of detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who were transferred or released or who suffered mistreatment by their handlers or other detainees, a judge ruled Wednesday. In ruling in a case brought by The Associated Press, U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said the government cannot keep the names secret on the grounds that it protects the privacy of detainees. The FOI ADVOCATE for September 6, 2006Highlights include: SECRECY GROWS EVER MORE EXPENSIVE: The U.S. government spent more than $9.2 billion last year keeping things secret. That represents a 13 percent rise over the previous year, and the soaring expense fell disproportionately on the private sector, where the costs to government contractors and other companies of meeting government-mandated security standards nearly doubled. The figures are contained in the 2005 annual cost estimate from the Information Security Oversight Office, the government agency that oversees the national security classification system. The FOI ADVOCATE for July 31, 2006Highlights include: FOIA AT 40: Citizens, groups and corporations are putting in fewer requests for information from the federal government, but it's taking longer to get answers and they get turned down more often. The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found in a study of 13 Cabinet departments and nine agencies that the number of unprocessed requests rose from 104,225 at the end of fiscal 2004 to 148,603 at the end of fiscal 2005. Meanwhile, the number of requests processed between 2004 and 2005 dropped from 522,817 to 477,937. As a result, unprocessed requests rose from 20 percent of the total processed to 31 percent. The FOI ADVOCATE for June 4, 2006Highlights include: ROBERTS' AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FILE RAISES EYEBROWS: Last summer, during the pre-confirmation body-cavity search of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a Roberts-related file at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library went missing. The file was marked "affirmative action" and presumably contained something on that topic written by Roberts, who is known to be extremely hostile to affirmative action when he worked in the Reagan White House counsel's office. Although the file disappeared after a White House employee and two assistants vetted the Roberts-related files, National Archives officials assured reporters that no one had been permitted to bring bags into the room with the documents and no one was left alone with the documents. (We know the visitors were a White House employee and two assistants because that's how they're described in a separate document from the inspector general's office.) That turns out not to be true. The FOI ADVOCATE for March 11, 2006Highlights include: JUSTICE TO RELEASE WIRETAP MEMOS: Facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Justice has conceded that it could by March 3 begin releasing the internal memos relied on by the White House in justifying and authorizing the controversial "warrantless" wiretap program conducted by the National Security Agency. The consolidated lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the National Security Archive, demands the Justice Department to provide "immediate disclosure of the internal legal justifications for the surveillance program." The FOI ADVOCATE for February 11, 2006Highlights include: SOME GOOD FOI NEWS: In a rare relaxation of mounting restrictions on disclosure of government information, the Labor Department has agreed to reverse its policy of withholding notes taken by mine safety inspectors from prompt release under the Freedom of Information Act. The FOI ADVOCATE for December 22, 2005Highlights include: VP NEEDS AAA DISCOUNT: Open-government advocates say that Vice President Cheney is to executive branch secrecy what darkness is to the night. In 2001, Cheney famously refused to disclose the names of oil company executives and others who attended meetings of a White House energy task force that he headed, which helped draft a national energy policy. |
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