"As announced previously by OIP, we are now posting up-to-date summaries of new court decisions. To facilitate their review, the cases are broken down by FOIA Exemption or procedural element and internal citations and quotations have been omitted. OIP provides these case summaries as a public service; due to their nature as summaries, they are not intended to be authoritative or complete statements of the facts or holdings of any of the cases summarized, and they should not be relied upon as such. Set out below are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of April 2008."

• A Little Grafting of Second Life into a Legal Research Class: Rob Hudson discusses how Second Life can be used to enhance legal research instruction. Experiments in full class lectures and other uses of Second Life in higher education offer a mixture of hype and excitement. Published May 9, 2008
• CongressLine: Running for Congress: Paul Jenks recounts how for the past two years he has run marathons and monitored Congress at the same time, describing how the two experiences are very similar. Published May 9, 2008
• LLRX Book Review by Heather A. Phillips - A Guide to HIPAA Security and the Law: Heather A. Phillips reviews Stephen S. Wu's book whose focus is coming into compliance with the recent and complex new HIPAA requirements. Published May 7, 2008
• Conrad Jacoby's E-Discovery Update: Attorneys, Experts, and E-Discovery Competence: Conrad J. Jacoby focuses on two recent cases that emphasize the credibility problems counsel can face in the context of e-discovery - and suggest that outside assistance may be the only way for some counsel to demonstrate that these materials are being managed in a competent and trustworthy way. Published May 7, 2008
• FOIA Facts - My Proposal: FOIA Litigation Reporting Requirements: Scott A. Hodes makes the case that there should be a reporting requirement for all FOIA lawsuits requiring agencies to inform a central FOIA Office the outcome of FOIA lawsuits. Published May 7, 2008

Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff Reading Room: These documents were released to the New York Times regarding the Pentagon's Military Analyst program."

European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) news release: "The European Commission is publishing amendments to Regulation 1049/2001. The new regulation is an exercise more in clarification and codification, rather than more ambitious reform towards genuine freedom of information. The European Parliament and Council will need to look carefully at whether the adjustments reflect a balance between the interests of the public to have greater access to documents and those of the institutions to protect their decision-making processes. This is part of the European transparency initiative, but is transparency moving forward?"

"Every year the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) receives thousands of complaints about television shows. Sometimes insightful, sometimes hilarious, sometimes horrifying, they provide a fascinating glimpse into the psyches of our fellow TV-watching Americans.

This web site, TV Show Complaints.org, helps you obtain copies of these complaints! It's as simple as sending an email to the FCC, and our web site will help you write one -- it will take just a few seconds of your time and is usually free."

"Consistent with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as amended by the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007, and Executive Order 13392, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has undertaken and completed a review of its public FOIA regulations that govern certain aspects of its processing of FOIA requests. As a result of this review, the Agency proposes to revise its FOIA regulations to more clearly reflect the current CIA organizational structure, record system configuration, and FOIA policies and practices and to eliminate ambiguous, redundant and obsolete regulatory provisions. As required by the FOIA, the Agency is providing an opportunity for interested persons to submit comments on these proposed regulations." [Federal Register: April 17, 2008 (Volume 73, Number 75)] [Proposed Rules][Page 20882-20884]

• The Personal Information Trainer, by Stuart Basefsky
• Criminal Law Resources: Fingerprint Evidence Challenges, by Ken Strutin
• The Social Networking Titans: Facebook and MySpace, by Deborah Ginsberg and Meg Kribble
• Update to Choosing Law Librarianship: Thoughts for People Contemplating a Career Move, by Mary Whisner
• Living With the Asus Eee PC, by Conrad J. Jacoby
• Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide, by Sabrina I. Pacifici, completely revised and updated.
• Doing Legal Research in Canada - revised and updated, by Ted Tjaden
• The Tao of Law Librarianship: If the Books Go, Will They Still Want Us? by Connie Crosby
• E-Discovery Update: Minimizing E-Mail Archive Data Conversion Issues, by Conrad J. Jacoby
• Reference from Coast to Coast: Making A Federal Case Out of It, by Jan Bissett and Margi Heinen
• FOIA Facts: Increasing the Quality of FOIA Releases, by Scott A. Hodes
• The Government Domain: Rich Resources from the Librarians of the Fed, by Peggy Garvin
• LLRX Book Review by Heather A. Phillips - Jerome Neu’s Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults
• Commentary: Waterboarding, Congress and the President, by Beth Wellington

Monthly Performance Reports [the related links appears toward the bottom of this page] - "Generally, reports are available 6 weeks after the end of the month. The unaudited financial statements included herein are subject to adjustment based on the results of the annual audit." [via Michael Ravnitzky]

News release: "To increase public awareness about the causes of specific train accidents and to reduce the need for individuals to submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is for the first time making its investigation reports of major train accidents and other incidents available online, FRA Administrator Joseph H. Boardman announced today...FRA does not typically release its own report about an accident until the NTSB has issued its findings. Due to size constraints and other considerations, attachments and exhibits associated with the FRA investigation reports are not being posted online, and will continue to be available only through a FOIA request. The accident/incident reports that railroads are required by federal law to routinely file with the FRA will continue to be available online. Individuals may sign up for automatic email notification of when a new investigation report is added to the public webpage. The accident investigation webpage is here."

The Sunshine in Litigation Act: Does Court Secrecy Undermine Public Health and Safety? Senate Judiciary Committee, S. HRG. 110–263 [248 pages, PDF]. Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 110th Congress, 1st Session, December 11, 2007. [via FAS]

News release: "Many Americans assume that China's internet users are unhappy about their government's control of the internet, but a new survey finds most Chinese say they approve of internet regulation, especially by the government."

"Today is Document Freedom Day: The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with roughly 200 active teams worldwide. It is a day of grassroots effort around the world to promote and build awareness for the relevance of Free Document Formats in particular and Open Standards in general...Open Standards are essential for interoperability and freedom of choice based on the merits of different software applications. They provide freedom from data lock-in and the subsequent vendor lock-in... This makes Open Standards essential for governments, companies, organisations and individual users of information technology.This is where teams will report their activities in 2008."

"In celebration of Sunshine Week, the National Security Archive's Mexico Project publishes today a new study of Mexico's transparency law: FOI in Practice: Measuring the Complexity of Information Requests and Quality of Government Responses in Mexico.

The study represents the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican freedom of information law: what information requesters have sought and how the government has responded.

The authors analyzed the quality of government responses in relation to the complexity of FOI requests sent through Mexico's electronic information system from June 12, 2003 to April 30, 2006. After examining 1,000 information requests and corresponding government responses, the authors concluded that in 76% of the cases the government responses satisfied the requests of the user during the first three years of the law's existence. Nevertheless, the results also demonstrated that the most complex FOI requests were more difficult for public officials to answer, and received satisfactory responses in only 57% of the cases analyzed.

The findings serve as a warning about Mexico's need to improve the capacity of government agencies to respond to more complex requests for information as requesters become increasingly sophisticated in their demands over time."

National Archives and Records Administration: "The William J. Clinton Presidential Library and the National Archives opened 11,046 pages of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's White House schedules. These Presidential records are...now available [via this page at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum site]...These schedules are from the First Lady's Staff files of Patti Solis Doyle, Special Assistant to the President and Director of Scheduling for the First Lady. Doyle was responsible for the First Lady's schedule from 1993 to 1998, and then assumed additional responsibilities as Director of Advance for the First Lady throughout the rest of the Clinton Administration. Arranged chronologically, these records document in detail the activities of the First Lady, including meetings, trips, speaking engagements and social activities for the eight years of the Clinton Administration...Of the 11,046 pages of schedules that are being opened, 4,746 have redactions. The majority of the redactions pertain to the privacy interests of third parties, including their social security numbers, telephone numbers, and home addresses."

"Three-quarters of American adults view the federal government as secretive, and nearly nine in 10 say it's important to know presidential and congressional candidates' positions on open government when deciding who to vote for, according to a Sunshine Week survey by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University. The survey shows a significant increase over the past three years in the percentage of Americans who believe the federal government is very or somewhat secretive, from 62 percent of those surveyed in 2006 to 74 percent in 2008."

DOJ Office of Information and Privacy: "On March 16 we celebrate the anniversary of James Madison's birthday. Madison, traditionally viewed as the Father of the United States Constitution, is also seen by many as a defender of open government. He once wrote, "[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." In a similar vein, he asserted that "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge" is "the only Guardian of true liberty." ...With Madison's views on the importance of an informed citizenry in mind, the occasion of James Madison's birthday is an excellent opportunity for federal agencies to review their FOIA operations to ensure that this vital government function is receiving the attention it deserves."

FOIA Annual Report for 2007 (PDF, 94 pages)

The Connection Has Been Reset, by James Fallows.

Summaries of New Decisions - January 2008, posted 2/25/2008

DHS Privacy Office 2006 Annual Freedom of Information Act Report to the Attorney General of the United States, October 1, 2005 – September 30, 2006 (61 pages, PDF)

J.M. Berger, INTELWIRE.com: "INTELWIRE has obtained more than 1,700 pages of FBI documents cited in the end notes of the Final Report of the 9/11 Commission...The package covers a wide variety of topics, including the movements of the hijackers over more than 10 years, people who associated with the hijackers in the U.S., FBI interviews with the victims, transcripts of phone calls to the hijacked flights, intelligence obtained by overseas agencies... Documents are listed here according to the chapter of the 9/11 Report in which they appeared...and may be the largest online repository of 9/11 source documents on the Web." [Note: these documents are heavily redacted.]

ACLU Blog: "...the Open Government Act of 2007, a bill that enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress...called for the appointment of a FOIA ombudsman, to work out of the National Archive, who would serve as an impartial mediator between citizens and the government agencies receiving their FOIA requests...Agencies would be held to the FOIA standards by the ombudsman and not just by threat of court action. FOIA requesters would find it less necessary to bring lawsuits and the government itself would save itself from having to spend public money and time to mount defenses...Tucked away in Bush's proposed new budget for 2008 — in the 1,300-page appendix — was language that stripped funding for the FOIA ombudsman role, and shoves the responsibilities off to the Justice Department. The same department, we might add, responsible for defending the government agencies when they're named in lawsuits to have FOIA requests enforced."

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) press release: "The Internal Revenue Service is flouting three court orders requiring it to regularly provide a nationally-recognized researcher with the statistical data she needs for her studies, according to a court action brought today by the researcher. The new motion was filed by Susan B. Long, a professor at Syracuse University's Martin J. Whitman School of Management. For more than 30 years Long has used the IRS's own statistical data to examine how this powerful agency has been enforcing the nation's tax laws. In the February 11 filing Long requests that Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington enforce two of her own court orders against the agency, issued in 2006, as well as the court's 1976 consent agreement on the same issue."

Central Intelligence Agency Freedom Of Information Act Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2007, Unclassified.

"China’s onerous media restrictions, the erosion of press freedom in African democracies, the criminalization of journalism in central Asia, and the use of vague “antistate” charges to jail journalists worldwide are among the troubling trends revealed in the new edition of Attacks on the Press."

Annual FOIA Reports for 2007 currently posted for:

The Herald (United Kingdom): "The US has suffered more than 72,000 battlefield casualties since the start of the war on terror in 2001, a Freedom of Information request has revealed. The query by the campaigning Veterans for Common Sense organisation shows that 4,372 American soldiers have died and another 67,671 have been wounded in action, injured in accidents or succumbed to illness in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veterans' group had to force the US Defence Department to release the figures by persuading judges to uphold their FoI rights. A second request to the Veterans' Administration, the government-funded body responsible for taking care of ex-servicemen and women, showed 263,909 soldiers with experience of the two 21st-century wars have so far received treatment for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the aftermath of amputated limbs."

Press release: "The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has underlined the importance of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in pointing out possible instances of maladministration in the EU institutions. Over the past ten years, the Ombudsman's office has received almost 1,000 complaints from NGOs and associations. They included alleged maladministration concerning environmental projects, late payment for EU contracts, and lack of transparency in the EU institutions. Among the NGOs that complained were Statewatch, Corporate Europe Observatory, and the European Citizen Action Service (ECAS). Two recent complaints concerning the environmental policy of the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the question of "revolving doors" in the Commission were lodged, respectively, by two Polish NGOs and Greenpeace. Mr Diamandouros commented: "The Ombudsman relies on complaints from NGOs to help him uncover possible instances of maladministration in the EU institutions. The institutions, in turn, profit from the active involvement of NGOs to help them rectify problems in the system."

"As announced previously by Office of Information and Privacy, we are now posting up-to-date summaries of new court decisions. To facilitate their review, the cases are broken down by FOIA Exemption or procedural element and internal citations and quotations have been omitted. OIP provides these case summaries as a public service; due to their nature as summaries, they are not intended to be authoritative or complete statements of the facts or holdings of any of the cases summarized, and they should not be relied upon as such. Set out here are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of December 2007."

Annual FOIA Reports Submitted by Federal Departments and Agencies: This site has been created in accordance with the Electronic FOIA Amendments of 1996, which specifies that the Attorney General should make annual FOIA reports from all federal departments and agencies available at "a single electronic access point," beginning with reports for fiscal year 1998.

Follow up to postings on EPA library closures, this press release from January 10, 2008: EPA To Set Up Human Resources Shared Service Centers: "The Environmental Protection Agency has announced plans to establish shared service centers in three locations, beginning in June 2008, to process personnel and benefits actions for the agency's 17,000 employees. The centers, to be located in current EPA facilities in Cincinnati, Ohio, Las Vegas, Nev., and Research Triangle Park, N.C., also will process vacancy announcements throughout the agency. The move will improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and customer service of agency human resources operations. It is expected to take 12-24 months to complete. Staff affected by the creation of the shared service centers will continue their employment at one of the centers or elsewhere in the agency. The centers will enhance the timeliness and quality of customer service and standardize work processes."

"Most federal judges come into contact with classified information infrequently, if at all, but when they do, they are faced with the dilemma of how to protect government secrets in the context of an otherwise public proceeding. This pocket guide is designed to familiarize federal judges with statutes and procedures established to help public courts protect government secrets when courts are called upon to do so. The guide provides information about the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), information security officers, and secure storage facilities. I hope you will find this guide useful in meeting the challenge of protecting government secrets in a public forum. Barbara Jacobs Rothstein, Director, Federal Judicial Center"

Press release: "In the wake of the Indian "peaceful nuclear explosion" on May 17, 1974 and growing concern about the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities, the U.S. intelligence community prepared a Special National Intelligence Assessment, "Prospects for Further Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," published today by the National Security Archive."

Law.com: Tripled FOIA Requests Put SEC to the Test, Harold K. Gordon and Tracy V. Schaffer.

"For the first time in well over a decade, Congress has enacted amendments to the Freedom of Information Act. No changes to the Act’s nine exemptions were made. Rather, the amendments address a range of procedural issues impacting FOIA administration, including the codification of several provisions of Executive Order 13,392, “Improving Agency Disclosure of Information.” Entitled the “Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007,” or the “OPEN Government Act of 2007,” the bill was signed into law by the President on Monday, December 31, 2007. The amendments consist of ten substantive sections, each of which is summarized and discussed below. The complete text of the OPEN Government Act of 2007."

Improving Declassification - A Report to the President from the Public Interest Declassification Board Report, December 2007 (48 pages, PDF): "There are at least eight ways by which security classified national security information may become declassified, including through Freedom of Information Act requests and through automatic declassification under Executive Order 12958. The Board presents several recommendations that would increase the efficiency of the system as a whole."

"On January 16, 2008, the Office of Information and Privacy (OIP), Department of Justice, will host a conference on the newly enacted amendments to the Freedom of Information Act. Entitled the "Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007," the bill was signed into law by the President on Monday, December 31, 2007. See, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/12/print/20071231-4.html

Via Secrecy News, "this 2002 study was released in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request filed by Michael Ravnitzky": Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975 by Robert J. Hanyok, Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002.

The Best and Worst of 2007: Government Secrecy, Patrick Radden Keefe, The Century Foundation, 1/2/2008.

Press Freedom Round-up 2007, Reporters Without Borders: "At least 86 journalists were killed around the world in 2007. The figure has risen steadily since 2002 - from 25 to 86 (+ 244%) - and is the highest since 1994, when 103 journalists were killed, nearly half of them in the Rwanda genocide, about 20 in Algeria’s civil war and a dozen in the former Yugoslavia. More than half those killed in 2007 died in Iraq."

White House press release: "On Monday, December 31, 2007, the President signed into law: S. 2488, the "Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007," which amends the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by: (1) establishing a definition of "a representative of the news media;" (2) directing that required attorney fees be paid from an agency's own appropriation rather than from the Judgment Fund; (3) prohibiting an agency from assessing certain fees if it fails to comply with FOIA deadlines; and (4) establishing an Office of Government Information Services in the National Archives and Records Administration to review agency compliance with FOIA."

Press release: "The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press asked a federal court in Manhattan [December 21, 2007] to require open access to records in the civil case over liability following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Victims of the attacks and their families filed lawsuits against airline and security companies seeking to determine liability for their injury or losses due to the security breaches that led to the attacks. Documents filed with the court in this case were presumed open, except for a few narrow categories of records Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein deemed could be confidential, including financial and trade secrets data. However, the airline and security companies have been using the narrow protective order to assert that more than 99 percent of the tens of thousands of pages of documents they filed with the court should be covered as confidential under the order. The Reporters Committee argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that is extremely unlikely that nearly all the records contain the information required for confidentiality under the order and asked Hellerstein to require the parties to strictly adhere to the order, only limiting public access to that information allowable under the order...The brief was filed in In re September 11 Litigation, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York."

New York Times, Hoover Planned Mass Jailings in 1950: "A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty. Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons. Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau."

TPMmuckraker, State Dept Document from 2005 Shows Fraud in Blackwater's Iraq Contract:

"A report prepared for the State Department's inspector general in January 2005, and obtained by TPMmuckraker, shows Blackwater's accounting system for its no-bid, multimillion dollar Iraq contract was "not considered adequate for accumulating costs on government contracts." The report is an audit of Blackwater's contract prepared by the accounting firm of Leonard H. Birnbaum. It has been referred to by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and in a 2006 story in The Nation, but has not been made publicly available until now. It was obtained by TPMmuckraker after we filed a Freedom of Information Act request in October with the State Department for Blackwater-related documents. You can read the 2005 State Department report in our Documents Collection here."

"As announced previously by OIP, we are now posting up-to-date summaries of new court decisions. To facilitate their review, the cases are broken down by FOIA Exemption or procedural element and internal citations and quotations have been omitted. OIP provides these case summaries as a public service; due to their nature as summaries, they are not intended to be authoritative or complete statements of the facts or holdings of any of the cases summarized, and they should not be relied upon as such. Set out [here] are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of November 2007."

The National Security Archive: "The House of Representatives at 5:18 pm today unanimously passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill (S. 2488) that passed the Senate by unanimous consent on December 14. The bill aims to fix some of the most persistent problems in the FOIA system, including excessive delay, lack of responsiveness, and litigation gamesmanship by federal agencies. Following today’s approval by the House, the OPEN Government Act will be sent to the President's desk for approval...The new law would mandate tracking numbers for FOIA requests that take longer than 10 days to process to ensure they will no longer fall through the cracks, require agencies to report more accurately to Congress and the public on their FOIA programs, create a new ombuds office at the National Archives to mediate conflicts between agencies and requesters, clarify the purpose of FOIA to encourage dissemination of government information, and provide incentives to agencies to avoid litigation and processing delays."

Press release from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: "From its first days, this administration has tried to keep the American public in the dark about what goes on behind closed White House doors. Through a secret agreement and a letter from Vice President Cheney’s counsel, the administration had attempted to permanently hide from view records related to those who visit the White House and the vice president’s residence. Today, a federal judge has cracked open those doors by holding that these are Secret Service subject to public disclosure. As a result of CREW’s lawsuit, District of Columbia District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth has ordered the Secret Service to produce records of certain conservative leaders’ visits to the White House within 20 days."

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has received a second set of records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) detailing behind-the-scenes briefings for lawmakers working to make substantial changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). EFF requested release of the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) earlier this year...Last month, a federal judge ordered ODNI to release all documents by December 10. The first batch of records, made public on November 30, detailed contentious negotiations between Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and members of Congress that resulted in the passage of the Protect America Act...The second set of records contains more correspondence between McConnell and members of Congress, as well as heavily redacted versions of classified testimony delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and an FAQ detailing how the National Security Agency performs electronic surveillance. Withheld records include ODNI presentation slides used to brief Congress on foreign intelligence issues, and other classified documents."

Press release: "Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) Tuesday introduced bipartisan, revised legislation to increase government transparency and provide the first major reforms to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in more than a decade. The Senate passed an earlier version of the Leahy-Cornyn bill -- the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National (OPEN) Government Act -- and the House has passed a counterpart measure, but efforts to reconcile the two bills were stymied over House concerns about “pay-go” issues...The OPEN Government Act would:

• Restore meaningful deadlines for agency action under FOIA;


• Impose real consequences on federal agencies for missing FOIA’s 20-day statutory deadline;


• Clarify that FOIA applies to government records held by outside private contractors;


• Establish a FOIA hotline service for all federal agencies;
• and Create a FOIA Ombudsman to provide FOIA requestors and federal agencies with a meaningful alternative to costly litigation.


• Related postings on FOIA

"The FOIA Reading Room contains frequently requested documents as well as EAC statements, correspondence, and administrative policies."

Provisional Voting Research Project: "In October 2006, the EAC adopted a set of best practices regarding provisional voting. The best practices document was based on research provided by the Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and the Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University. The EAC best practices document and the research are available below. Please note that some of these files are large and may take a few minutes to download."

• EAC Best Practices on Provisional Voting


• Report to the EAC on Best Practices to Improve Provisional Voting
  
  • Appendix A: A National Survey of Local Election Officials' Experiences with Provisional Voting
  
  
  • Appendix B: Relationship Between Time Allotted to Verify Provisional Ballots and the Level of Ballots that are Verified
  
  
  • Appendix C: Provisional Ballot Litigation by Issue
  
  
  • Appendix D: Provisional Ballot Litigation by State
  
  
  • Appendix E: State Summaries
  
  
  • Appendix F: Provisional Voting Statutes by State
  
  
  Permanent Link

Press release: Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that New York and eleven other states are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over new regulations denying the public access to information about toxic chemicals in their communities. The EPA will allow thousands of companies to avoid disclosing information to the public about the toxic chemicals they use, store, and release into the environment by rolling back chemical reporting requirements. The suit seeks to overturn the weakened reporting requirements and provide the public with the access they had in the past."

DOJ FOIA Post: Summaries of New Decisions -- October 2007: "As announced previously by OIP, we are now posting up-to-date summaries of new court decisions. To facilitate their review, cases are broken down by FOIA Exemption or procedural element and internal citations and quotations have been omitted. OIP provides these case summaries as a public service; due to their nature as summaries, they are not intended to be authoritative or complete statements of the facts or holdings of any of the cases summarized, and they should not be relied upon as such. Set out below are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of October 2007."

"At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY. The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon's official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327."

Blog announcement: "Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in conjunction with a coalition of government watchdog groups, launched a new online government document database, governmentdocs.org on Thursday, November 8. The database houses Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind...Governmentdocs.org for the first time creates a central repository of government documents, promoting greater transparency into the inner-workings of our government. Traditionally, most government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. This has historically limited the public's access to FOIA documents, and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures. Governmentdocs.org changes that: Each and every document goes through an optical character recognition (OCR) process, so that the text of each document is entirely searchable; A powerful search engine provides full-text searches and hit highlighting; Citizen reviewers can add information to each document page and highlight important findings, allowing for more robust and targeted searches.
Every page of every document has its own unique URL so that documents can be linked, shared, or posted onto websites; The database is a coalition effort, so all of the organizations’ documents will be housed on governmentdocs.org and searches will work across collections."

Center for Public Integrity: "It's been four years since the Center released its acclaimed Windfalls of War investigation, which first named Halliburton as the largest single contractor in Iraq and revealed the most comprehensive list of the top Iraq and Afghanistan contractors available at the time. That list included more than 70 American companies that had been awarded up to $8 billion in contracts from 2002 through July 1, 2004. By the end of 2006, U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown to $25 billion, while oversight has seriously deteriorated, according to a new Center analysis, Windfalls of War II. The Center report shows that KBR, Inc., formally known as Kellogg, Brown and Root and a Halliburton subsidiary until April 2007, continues to top the list at more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts from 2004 to 2006. DynCorp International, at $1.8 billion, came in at a distant second...The Center assembled its list of the top 100 contractors, where the reported place of performance was in Iraq and Afghanistan, by analyzing the General Service Administration's Federal Procurement Data System. After reviewing this federal database, the Center was able to piece together the 100 companies that received the most contracts from fiscal years 2004 to 2006. However, even this publicly available federal database does not include all Iraq and Afghanistan contracts, including the ones originating at the Baghdad contracting agency. The Baghdad contracting agency has rebuffed Center efforts to obtain missing contracts. The Center is now seeking to acquire them through Freedom of Information Act requests."

Stateline.org: "The 2001 terrorist attacks led every state but South Dakota to restrict access to information deemed critical to homeland security — from architectural blueprints to emergency evacuation routes, according to a comprehensive, state-by-state study of post-9/11 changes to open-government laws. Wary of terrorists, state lawmakers closed government meetings previously open to the public, denied residents access to disaster-response plans and concealed documents on mass-transit systems, energy companies and research laboratories, according to the findings."

DOJ FOIA Summaries of New Decisions, September 2007: "OIP provides these case summaries as a public service; due to their nature as summaries, they are not intended to be authoritative or complete statements of the facts or holdings of any of the cases summarized, and they should not be relied upon as such. Set out below are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of September 2007."

Veteran Suicide - Methodology, November 13, 2007: "When CBS News began looking into veteran suicide, it found that no federal organization or agency tracks the number of veteran suicides nationally. No one is keeping count. We wanted to know how many veterans are committing suicide nationwide and how the rate of suicide for veterans compares to non-veterans. This is a summary of the methodology and results of the data that appeared in this CBS Evening News investigation, The Veteran Suicide Epidemic - A CBS News Investigation Uncovers A Suicide Rate For Veterans Twice That Of Other Americans.

Press release: "The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [October 30, 2007] amended its regulations for accessing critical energy infrastructure information (CEII) to create a more efficient process and provide additional guidance of what material is considered CEII...Specifically, the Commission is allowing landowners access to alignment sheets containing CEII for the limited portion of a project that would affect their land and the adjacent parcels on each side without going through the CEII process. In addition, the Commission is eliminating the non-internet public (NIP) category because much of the information currently designated as NIP is easily available on-line from other sources such as the U.S. Geological Survey or commercial mapping firms."

CIA FOIA Backlog Reduction Goals for Fiscal Years 2008, 2009, and 2010

Press release: "In anticipation of the planned launch of the final Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite tomorrow evening, which was originally scheduled to be orbited in October 2005, the National Security Archive has posted on the Web a collection of declassified documents tracing the history of the program from its roots as Subsystem G of WS-117L in 1957. At that time the U.S. began seriously planning to deploy satellites that would detect the infrared signals emitted by intercontinental ballistic missiles in order to provide warning of a Soviet missile attack.
The documents posted today, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and archival research, include documents on the theoretical work behind the concept of space-based missile detection, the early doubts about the feasibility of such detection, and 1960s research and development work on the Missile Defense Alarm System (MIDAS). They also include documents on the evolution of the DSP--with regard both to its capabilities and its use for a variety of additional missions, including the detection of intermediate-range missiles, bombers flying on afterburner and spacecraft. In addition, a number of documents focus on the decades-long search for a follow-on system to DSP.
Compiled by National Security Archive Senior Fellow Dr. Jeffrey T. Richelson, the documents in the briefing book originated with the Defense Department, Air Force, U.S. Space Command, Air Force Space Command, Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, Aerospace Corporation, Government Accounting Office, and other organizations."

GovernmentAttic.org has posted the FOIA Case Logs for the Federal Aviation Administration for the years 2006 and 2007.

• Cultural Challenges in Cross Border Mediation, by Vikrant Singh Negi
• Persuading Judges in Writing: Tips for Lawyers (And how technology can help), by Troy Simpson
• Competitive Intelligence on a Shoestring, by Susan Armstrong and Sabrina I. Pacifici
• E-Discovery Update: Discovery of Employee-Owned Computer Equipment, by Conrad J. Jacoby
• The Government Domain: Journalists and Government Information: SLA-DGI/GODORT Joint Meeting, by Peggy Garvin
• FOIA Facts - FOIA Litigation: When A Loss Isn't Always A Loss, by Scott A. Hodes
• LLRX Book Review by Heather A. Phillips - Nation of Secrets and Presidential Secrecy and the Law
• CongressLine by GalleryWatch.com: Lobbying and Ethics Rules, by Paul Jenks
• After Hours: Recommended Reading, by Kathy Biehl
• Rule the Web, by Julia Wotipka
• Commentary: Congress Looks Again at FISA, by Beth Wellington

"Chairman Waxman asks White House Counsel Fred Fielding to turn over more than 600 pages of documents relating to the activities of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff that are being withheld because they involve internal White House deliberations."

Press release: "The Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology Bart Gordon (D-TN) and Committee Members today heard from NASA Administrator Dr. Michael Griffin on his agency’s management of the National Aviation Operations Monitoring Service (NAOMS)...NAOMS has garnered headlines recently due to NASA’s refusal to release data collected from an air safety survey of 24,000 of the nation’s airline pilots. NASA had refused to release the survey because they claimed it “could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of the air carriers…” Committee Members called NASA’s refusal “troubling” and “unconvincing.” The survey, conducted over more than six years at a cost of more than $11 million taxpayer dollars, was expected to be the forward-looking tool the U.S. would use to identify emerging aviation safety problems. Instead, NASA stopped the NAOMS project – despite the fact that it had enjoyed unusual success in gathering responses from pilots – and has done nothing since to provide the flying public with the insights gained from the survey."

Press release: "Eritrea has replaced North Korea in last place in an index measuring the level of press freedom in 169 countries throughout the world that is published today by Reporters Without Borders for the sixth year running...Outside Europe - in which the top 14 countries are located - no region of the world has been spared censorship or violence towards journalists. Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the index, seven are Asian (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, China, Burma, and North Korea), five are African (Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Somalia and Eritrea), four are in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Palestinian Territories and Iran), three are former Soviet republics (Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) and one is in the Americas (Cuba)."

governmentattic.org..."rummaging in the government's attic" launches with the FOIA Logs for 50 federal agencies (in PDF), as well several dozen sets of government documents obtained via FOIA requests. The topical documents range from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Standardized Chapel Library Project book list to the US DOJ Federal Bureau of Investigation Documents re: No Fly Lists 2001 - 2003 [251 pages]. This is an eclectic, interesting and expanding treasure trove of government documents that otherwise may not be available to the public were it not for the efforts of the website's authors.

Michael Ravnitzky: "The new website, http://www.getmyfbifile.com provides a quick and easy way to request your FBI Files, if they exist, from FBI Headquarters as well as the various FBI Field Offices. Additional bonus features allow you to ask for files about you at other federal agencies including the CIA, DIA, NSA, the Secret Service, and the Army Criminal Investigative Command. This is a sister site to the successful Get Grandpas FBI File website, established due to the number of people asking how they could get their own FBI File."

DOJ FOIA Posts - Summaries of New Decisions -- July 2007 (posted 10/11/2007)

Press release, October 5, 2007: "The Inspector General of the Federal Communications Commission has released a report finding that the evidence did not substantiate allegations that two draft research reports of staff economists in the Commission’s Media Bureau had been suppressed by senior managers at the Commission or that senior managers had ordered one of the reports to be destroyed. The investigation was directed by Carla Conover, Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Investigations."

Press release: "In celebration of International Right to Know Day the National Security Archive's Mexico Project is launching a new Web site dedicated to its Transparency and Freedom of Information Program. The Web site features a new publication on the week-long media initiative Mexico Abierto, which launched its first edition during the week of March 11-17 of this year. With our partners at the Consejo Ciudadano del Premio Nacional de Periodismo, we are now preparing for the second edition that will be celebrated in March 2008. The Web site also includes a multi-media section with pictures, news publications and video clips of forums and delegations in Mexico. The Archive's Mexico Project has been actively involved in the movement for freedom of information rights in Mexico since 2001--a struggle which achieved its first success with the enactment of a landmark freedom of information statute in June 2002. The project supports the work of citizens' groups promoting greater transparency, openness and accountability in government. To this end, the Archive works closely with scholars, lawyers, freedom of information activists, NGOs, human rights groups and the press to design strategies for advancing the people's right to know in Mexico."

DOJ Office of Information and Privacy, Privacy Summaries of New Decisions -- June 2007: "Set out below are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of June 2007."

"As announced previously by OIP [Office of Information Policy], we are now posting up-to-date summaries of new court decisions. To facilitate their review, each case is broken down by FOIA Exemption or procedural element and internal citations and quotations have been omitted. OIP provides these case summaries as a public service; due to their nature as summaries they are not intended to be authoritative or complete statements of the facts or holdings of any of the cases summarized, and they should not be relied upon as such. Set out below are summaries of the court decisions that were received by OIP during the month of May 2007."

"In the past, although not required to do so under the FOIA, the Office of Information and Privacy (OIP) compiled summaries of the information contained in agency annual FOIA reports and made them publicly available. OIP is now resuming that practice starting with the annual FOIA reports for Fiscal Year 2006. Set forth below is a summary compilation of the information contained in the annual FOIA reports prepared by the fifteen federal departments and seventy-seven other federal agencies for Fiscal Year 2006."

Press release: "Today the National Security Archive publishes a collection of documents concerning the use of U.S. reconnaissance satellites to collect data on targets within the United States over the last four decades. This new publication follows the August 15, 2007, revelation in the Wall Street Journal that the United States is planning to expand the use of reconnaissance satellites over the United States in support of civil agencies (those outside of the Defense Department and Intelligence Community) in response to recommendations by an independent study group. Obtained primarily through the Freedom of Information Act and archival research, the declassified documents published today describe a number of uses for which U.S. reconnaissance satellites have been employed, including evaluation of satellite performance, mapping, disaster relief, and assistance to Environmental Protection Agency investigations."

Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) - Office of Disclosure Can Improve Compliance With the Freedom of Information Act Requirements, August 31, 2007: "The IRS improperly withheld information from requestors in 4 (4.6 percent) of the 88 FOIA and Privacy Act cases sampled. This represents a small improvement from the results in our Fiscal Year 2006 audit report (6.1 percent). Also, the IRS improperly withheld information from requestors in 12 (14.5 percent) of the 83 I.R.C. § 6103 cases. This represents a significant increase over the 2.3 percent error rate for I.R.C. § 6103 cases we reported last year. As a result, TIGTA estimates the Disclosure offices did not provide available tax records to 344 requests made under the FOIA and Privacy Act and to 815 requests made through I.R.C. § 6103. The errors appear to have occurred mainly because of inadequate research or simple oversight by the Disclosure office caseworkers."

Summaries of New Decisions -- April 2007: "As part of OIP's feature to provide up-to-date information on new court decisions, we have included below summaries of the court decisions that were decided in April 2007. OIP will continue to post monthly summaries until we are current. Thereafter, summaries of new court decisions will be posted regularly."

Guidance on Submitting Backlog Reduction Goals for Fiscal Years 2008, 2009, and 2010: "As part of the June 1, 2007 report to the President on agency progress under Executive Order 13,392, "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information," the Attorney General recommended that any agency that has a FOIA request or administrative appeal pending beyond the statutory time period (i.e., a backlog) at the end of Fiscal Year 2007, should establish backlog reduction goals for the next three fiscal years. These goals are required to be posted on each agency's FOIA web site by November 1, 2007."

Follow up to previous postings on missing White House e-mails and violations of the Presidential Records Act, this press release: "The National Security Archive today sued the White House seeking the recovery and preservation of more than 5 million White House e-mail messages that were apparently deleted from White House computers between March 2003 and October 2005. The lawsuit filed this morning in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia names as defendants the Executive Office of the President and its components that are subject to the Federal Records Act, including the White House Office of Administration (OA), and the National Archives and Records Administration (which is responsible for long-term preservation of federal and presidential records), under the records laws and the Administrative Procedure Act."

Follow up to September 3, 2007 posting White House Website States Executive Office of President Not Subject to FOIA, White House FOIA Handbook: "The Office of Administration, whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related authorities. This handbook is intended to assist you in making a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of Administration (OA), Executive Office of the President (EOP). For further details please refer to the OA FOIA Regulations which can be found at 5 CFR §2502. These regulations are currently being updated."

New FOIA Post Feature -- Summaries of New Decisions in FOIA Cases, (posted 9/4/2007): "Each year the federal courts issue hundreds of decisions in FOIA cases, addressing all aspects of the law. These decisions shape the way the law is interpreted and applied by the many attorneys and access professionals across the government who handle FOIA requests, administrative appeals, and litigation. To aid those professionals, and to facilitate greater understanding of the FOIA overall, OIP [Office of Informationn and Privacy] will begin publishing summaries of FOIA decisions on a regular basis."

Press release: "Government secrecy saw further expansion last year despite growing public concern, according to a report released today by a coalition of open government advocates. The Secrecy Report Card 2007, produced annually by OpenTheGovernment.org in order to identify trends in public access to information, found a troubling lack of transparency in military procurement, assertions of executive privilege, and expansion of "sensitive" categories of information, among other areas. In 2006, the public's use of the Freedom of Information Act continued to rise. Agency backlogs are significant; the oldest FOIA request in the federal government has now been pending for more than 20 years."

Follow up to previous posting on Presidential Records Act Violations, FOIA within the EOP: "The Office of Administration [OA], whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related authorities. OA is a distinct entity from the other components of the EOP. Please contact the separate EOP entities, that are subject to FOIA, individually, if you would like to make a FOIA request for their records.

The EOP entities subject to the FOIA are:
Council on Environmental Quality
Office of Management and Budget
Office of National Drug Control Policy
Office of Science and Technology Policy
Office of the United States Trade Representative

The EOP entities exempt from the provisions of the FOIA are:
White House Office
Office of Administration
Office of the Vice President
Council of Economic Advisers
National Security Council
Office of Policy Development

Domestic Policy Council
Office of National AIDS Policy
National Economic Council

Press release: "The Center on Government Secrecy (CGS) was created in August 2007 as a non-partisan academic center devoted to the study of government openness and secrecy. Established under the auspices of the Program on Law and Government in the Washington College of Law (“WCL”), at American University in Washington, D.C., it stands as the first such center of its kind at any law school in the United States. It operates in conjunction with both the JD and LLM/SJD degree programs at WCL and is designed to afford law students interested in this area of legal specialization the opportunity to gain both scholarly and practical experience, including in the growing field of international transparency. CGS is headed by former Department of Justice Office of Information and Privacy Director Daniel J. Metcalfe, who is a Faculty Fellow in Law and Government at WCL and also serves as CGS’s executive director."