ProPublica today reports that the Transportation Safety Administration this week finally responded to one of its Freedom of Information requests — four years after it was filed. (The topic: passenger complaints, for 2008). Full Story.
Many Agencies Violate FOIA’s 20 Day Requirement
For FOIA test, POGO sent 100 FOIA requests “for work done by federally contracted consultants” to 30 agencies and departments. That was in the first week of February.
For 23 of the 100 requests, agencies haven’t responded at all (despite a 20 business day deadline) and three other agencies have only replied in part.
Of the 100, only 8 “conclusive” responses have been received. But for 5 of the 8, the agency said no documents were found.
As for agencies covered on national security beats, Department of Justice and Army were in the batch of non- or partial ressponders.
And the Department of Defense was among those who said they’d need an extension (this happened with 26 of the requests).
All told, the POGO has yielded results that appear worse than a 2011 study on FOIA.gov, which found a 70% average response rate to “simple” requests in 20 days among the top 10 most-FOIA-ed agencies.
An interesting national security beat note related to that study, according to POGO:
“The Department of Veterans Affairs, to which POGO sent 3 requests regarding 3 specific contracts, has both the highest rate of simple and the highest rate of complex requests processed within 20 days at 100 percent and 79 percent, respectively. On the other hand, the Department of State—where POGO sent 3 requests—has the lowest rates of response within 20 days for both simple and complex requests at 8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.”
Table below is from the POGO story, using FOIA.gov data.
(via Glenn McCoy Editorial Cartoon, March 15, 2012 on GoComics.com)
Maybe it’s just a rounding error?
The National Security Archive has done some truth-squadding on the Department of Justice’s proclaimed “94.5% release rate” for Freedom of Information Act requests.
Unredacted’s take: It’s really 56.7%. Herre’s the logic, from the NSA’s Unredacted site:
“But when it reported its ‘94.5 release rate,’ the DOJ did not include the FOIA requests that it denied based on reasons including: fees (pricing requesters out); referrals (passing the request off to another agency while the requester still waits); “no records” (very frequently the result of inadequate searchers by DOJ employees); and reqeusts ”improper for other reasons” (which ostensibly includes the “can neither confirm nor deny” glomar exemption).
When the full eleven reasons for denial are factored in, the Department of Justice’s “release rate” is a much more believable 56.7 percent.”
On Feb. 14, NSA announced DOJ was receiving the “Rosemary Award for worst open government performance over the past year.” It is named after Richard Nixon’s notorious tape-erasing secretary. NSA says the the DOJ put its 94.5% rate on its web site shortly thereafter.
On another DOJ FOIA issues, the ACLU filed a FOIA request in mid-February asking the Justice Department to disclose how often it uses “pen registers” to track private communications, such as e-mail, phone numbers and website IP addresses.
POGO and partners say cybersecurity bill is flawed
The Cybersecurity Act of 2012, being rushed through Congress (some say to avoid another SOPA/PIPA social media uprising), includes “unnecessary, overbroad and unwise limitations to access of information, including broad exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)” and “jeopardize the rights of whistleblowers.”
Project on Government Oversight, American Society of News Editors and others have protested in a letter to Senate leadership.
New FOIA request seeks stats on Justice Department surveillance
(ACLU release) Today the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Justice Department asking it to make public how frequently it uses surveillance tools called pen registers and trap and trace devices to intercept Americans’ communications. These devices make it possible for the government to access the to/from lines of emails, the telephone numbers people dial as well from which they receive calls, and the IP addresses of the websites they visit.
[T]he Justice Department is legally mandated to compile statistics about how frequently it uses pen registers and trap and trace devices and submit them to Congress, but it has repeatedly failed to live up to that obligation.
