Despite heavy competition, Clapper’s “No, sir” lie to Senator Ron Wyden’s question: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” sealed his receipt of the dubious achievement award, which cites the vastly excessive secrecy of the entire U.S. surveillance establishment.

Rose Mary Woods re-creates how she deleted parts of the tapes. SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons and Ford Library.

The award is named after Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s secretary who famously erased 18-1/2 key minutes of her boss’s secret White House tapes and as famously re-created how she did it.

Others joined Clapper in accolades as Clapper’s “fellow secrecy fetishists and enablers,” including NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander; FBI Director Robert Mueller; and National Security Division Lawyers.

Previous Rosemary winners include the Justice Department (back-to-back 2011 and 2012); FBI; Federal Chief Information Officers’ Council; the Department of Treasury; the Air Force and the CIA.

P.S. OTB wonders this every year: Why is it the “Rosemary” Award when it is named after Rose Mary (two words) Woods?

SOURCE: Center for Effective Government.

“The results are sobering,” the report said. “The low scores are not due to impossibly high expectations. In each of three performance areas, at least one agency earned an A, showing that excellence is possible. But the fact that no agency was able to demonstrate excellence across all three areas illustrates the difficulty agencies seem to be having in consistently combining all the elements of an effective disclosure policy.”

The agencies studied received 9 in every 10 FOIA request made, the report said. The analysis focused on three areas:

1. Processing requests for information. (Performance on this made up half the grade).
2. Establishing rules for information access.
3. Creating user-friendly websites.

The five agencies with national security responsibilities only received five scores (out of 20) higher than a D. (See below).

Among the comments for each agency:

• “Strong A grades for its FOIA website and updated disclosure policies propel the overall score for the Department of Justice (DOJ), earning a 95 percent and 92 percent, respectively. However, a 69 percent score in processing, the most heavily weighted section, keeps DOJ from achieving an overall A.”
• “State’s FOIA struggles are fundamental, requiring long-term culture change.”
• “DHS should maintain its focus on improving timeliness, including responding to simple requests within 20 days, and explore how to increase its rate of full grants to requesters.”
• “The Department of Defense (DOD) receives failing grades for all three categories. . . :The agency’s low processing score can be improved by bringing down the average days the agency takes to respond to appeals, bringing down its request backlog, and increasing the percentage of requests fully granted.”
• “The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) earned fairly low scores in all three sections of the scorecard. The VA’s 44 percent score in processing, though, is the area most in need of improvement. “

SOURCE: Center for Effective Government

Download PDF | Read the full report right here after the jump.

Download PDF

One national security related agency was added to the list for the first time — the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board — and it entered the charts in the top category, compliant with guidelines issued by the attorney general five years ago.

In its annual FOIA audit, the National Security Archive said only half of all agencies have made an updates since the end of 2007, when the OPEN Government Act was passed.

Below is the status of regulations at 14 agencies with national security responsibilities.

Data extracted from latest audit by the National Security Archive.

An internal document released last week to MuckRock showed 3,382 FOIA requests between June 6 and Sept, 14 of this year — nearly 12 times the 293 filed in that same period a year ago.

The requests have leveled off somewhat from earlier in the summer when the first media leaks appeared, although they continue to be much higher than normal. For perspective, for all of FY12 we received only 1809 requests,” the NSA said in its memo.

Here’s what Cause of Action said was the policy:

A “significant” request is defined by the policy document as one where, in the judgment of a FOIA office, “the subject matter of the released documents may generate media interest and/or may be of interest or potential interest to DoD senior leadership.” This can include requests regarding “the current administration (including request for information on Senator Obama) previous administrations, and current or previous DoD leadership.”

Below, the list of “95 undated FOIA requests filed with the Army, Navy, Air Force, NSA, Defense Logistics Agency, Secretary of Defense, United States Southern Command, National Guard Bureau and other offices that had “Department Level Interest,” as Leopold put it.

Searching its own e-mails the request of a reporter? Well, umm, sorry, can’t do that.

Politico has the details.

Four agencies have made updates since the March 2009 request from Attorney General Eric Holder that was preceded by a request from President Obama. (See chart below). 

But nine other national security related agencies have made no updates since before the administration’s new guidelines — one hasn’t made changes since1987 — despite not only the Obama-Holder mandate, but also three major changes in FOIA laws since 1996. 

Those are the same numbers that were reported by The National Security Archive in December; this week’s audit update includes changes made since the December news release. Only two additional federal agencies have made changes since December. 

President Obama in  an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009 ordered “presumption in favor of disclosure” and asked agencies to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.” The attorney general followed up with detailed guidelines two months later.

Only four agencies involved in national security have updated their Freedom of Information Act policies since the White House issued a directive for more aggressive compliance in 2009, according to data released yesterday from the latest FOIA audit by the National Security Archive. 

Nine others, including State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security,  haven’t updated their regulations since major FOIA-related legislation in 2007 — or, in some cases, 2002 or 1996. 

President Obama in  an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009 ordered “presumption in favor of disclosure” and asked agencies to “harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.”

This year’s Knight Open Government Survey by the archive found that 62 of 99 agencies have not updated since the attorney general issued a memo to agency heads following up on the president’s order. In its previous audit, 49 of 90 agencies surveyed had made at least some progress in meeting the administration’s requests.

Defense, Homeland Security and National Intelligence were listed in the previous audit  as having had taken at least one step to comply with the White House; OTB asked the National Security Archive to clarify why they are now listed as not having changed their policies.  ” ‘Updated regulations’ means entered new regulations into the Federal Register,” Nate Jones said via e-mail. A a positive rating in an earlier audit could be earned without necessarily updating the regulations, he said. 

Jones said DOD has told him its regulations are completed but “some kind of oversight” kept them from being published in the register. “They say they will soon,” Jones said.

“Outdated agency regulations really mean there’s an opportunity here for a second-term Obama to standardize best practices and bring all the agencies up to his day-one openness pledge,” Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said in a release about the 2012 audit findings.  

The archive contends, “The primary cause of this FOIA failure has been the inability of Congress and the White House to find a way to compel recalcitrant agencies to comply with FOIA.”