ABCNews: "The Department of Justice complied with the letter of the law and responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU seeking insight into the Obama Administration’s policy on intercepting text messages from cell phones. But -- it didn’t release any actual information. Or even any words or letters. As one Reddit comment put it, “[the document is] so transparent it’s completely invisible.” Instead, the Justice Department released 15 pages that were entirely redacted, shaded over in heavy black from top to bottom. All that was visible is the subject of the memo: “Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones” It is all part of a larger legal battle between civil rights activists and the federal law enforcement about electronic communications. The ACLU has argued that current government surveillance practices on electronic communications violate citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, which are meant to protect Americans from unlawful searches and seizures. With the FOIA request they were trying to determine if the FBI had properly complied with a 2010 appeals court decision that concerned when email providers must turn over messages to law enforcement and whether the guidelines apply to text messages."

Unclassified and released on 4/19/2013 in response to a FOIA request by MuckRock and reported by Wired: request, Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research has not been updated since 2007. It is 651 page document that on one hand references sites and sources that no longer exist, but on the other offers insights in techniques and leverage the deep web and techniques to obtain effective competitive intelligence information and data.

"To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable. In making this the new default state, executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall ensure that they safeguard individual privacy, confidentiality, and national security."

• Executive Order
  
• Implementation Memo
  
• Digital Government Strategy

Sunlight Foundation - Municipal Lobbying Data Guidebook

"Reporters Without Borders is today, World Press Freedom Day, releasing an updated list of 39 Predators of Freedom of Information
– presidents, politicians, religious leaders, militias and criminal organizations that censor, imprison, kidnap, torture and kill journalists and other news providers. Powerful, dangerous and violent, these predators consider themselves above the law. “These predators of freedom of information are responsible for the worst abuses against the news media and journalists,” Reporters
Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. “They are becoming more and more effective. In 2012, the level of violence against news providers was unprecedented and a record number of journalists were killed. “World Press Freedom Day, which was established on the initiative of Reporters Without Borders, must be used to pay tribute to all journalists, professional and amateur, who have paid for their commitment with their lives, their physical integrity or their freedom, and to denounce the impunity enjoyed by these predators."

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: "At Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) there has been a rapid rise in the backlog of FOIA requests received that have been waiting unanswered for long periods of time. According to its annual FOIA report, ICE had only 50 pending requests at the end of FY 2011; this number jumped to 2,903 at the end of FY 2012 after the agency was assigned the responsibility of processing some of the backlog of FOIA requests received by the Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS). And according to the latest available agency records analyzed by TRAC, ICE's backlog is projected to grow to over 13,125 by the end of September 2013 when the fiscal year ends, three and a half times higher than it was at the end of FY 2012. For the latest FOIA Project report, with more details on the ICE FOIA request backlog, go here."

EPIC: "New documents obtained by EPIC in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit reveal that the Department of Defense advised private industry on how to best circumvent federal wiretap law. The documents concern a collaboration between the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and private companies to allow government monitoring of private Internet networks. Though the program initially only applied to defense contractors, an Executive Order issued by the Obama administration earlier this year expanded it to include other "critical infrastructure" industries. The documents obtained by EPIC also cited NSPD 54 as one source of authority for the program. NSPD 54 is a presidential directive issued under President Bush that EPIC is pursuing in separate FOIA litigation. For more information, see EPIC: EPIC v. DHS (Defense Contractor Monitoring), and EPIC: EPIC v. NSA - Cybersecurity Authority."

News release: "The process for obtaining FBI files about family members who may have been the subject of a federal investigation has just become much simpler with the help of a step-by-step consumer website: GetGrandpasFBIfile.com established by Virginia-based Meme Transmission Enterprises...The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains billions of pages of records and millions of files -– all compiled using taxpayer dollars. But the clock is ticking. Recently, the FBI has begun destroying the bulk of its historic files to save space. Only a very tiny fraction of its voluminous files will be preserved at the National Archives So time is of the essence in asking for files before they are gone forever. Get Grandpas FBI File makes it easy to get these files by guiding the public through the process of completing a request letter. The website does not ask for any payment, and most requests for FBI files are processed by the FBI without any fees whatsoever."

"EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI to obtain documents about "Next Generation Identification", a massive database with biometric identifiers on millions of Americans. The EPIC lawsuit follows the FBI's failure to respond to EPIC's earlier FOIA requests for technical specifications and contracts. According to EPIC's complaint, "When completed, the NGI system will be the largest biometric database in the world." NGI aggregates fingerprints, DNA profiles, iris scans, palm prints, voice identification profiles, photographs, and other identifying information. The FBI will use facial recognition to match images in the database against facial images obtained from CCTV and elsewhere. For more information, see EPIC v. FBI - Next Generation Identification, EPIC: Biometric Identifiers and EPIC: Face Recognition."

News release: "The Kissinger Cables are part of today's launch of the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which holds the world's largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of its launch on April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words. WikiLeaks' publisher Julian Assange stated: "The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published."

"EPIC joined a letter signed by a coalition of privacy and civil liberty organizations to urge the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to open the markup process of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) to the public. CISPA suspends privacy safeguards so that companies can disclose vast amounts of customer and client information to the government, including the National Security Agency, for "cybersecurity purposes." Some in Congress believe that the proposal should be adopted in a secret committee meeting. EPIC favors government transparency and is currently pursuing a lawsuit against the NSA stemming from a FOIA request for National Security Presidential Directive 54, which grants the NSA broad authority over computer networks in the United States. For more information, see EPIC: EPIC v. NSA - Cybersecurity Authority."

James R. Jacobs - Government Information Librarian - Stanford University: "...[we have created] a petition on the White House's "We the People" petition site. If you believe in free permanent public access to authentic government information, we hope you'll sign the petition. And if every one of the @2500 govdoc-l subscribers signs, posts to their Facebook accounts and sends to 10 friends who sign, we'll reach our goal of 100,000 signatures by April 11, 2013! If we get enough signatures, the White House will respond and the FDLP community will move forward by leaps and bounds." See the Petition and the Context.
WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Require free online permanent public access to ALL federal government information and publications.
1. Assure that GPO has the funds to continue to maintain and develop the Federal Digital System (FDsys).
2. Raise ALL Congressional, Executive & Judicial branch information, publications & data to the level of federally funded scientific information & publish ALL government information as "Open Access."
3. Mandate the free permanent public access to other Federal information currently maintained in fee-based databases - including the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL), & USA Trade Online.
4. Establish an interagency, govt-wide strategy to manage the entire lifecycle of digital government information w/ FDLP Libraries - publication, access, usability, bulk download, long-term preservation, standards & metadata.

EFF: "Law professor and historian Tim Wu has called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) the “worst law in technology.” The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has described the government’s interpretation of it “expansive,” “broad,” and “sweeping.” And Orin Kerr, former federal prosecutor and law professor, has detailed how the government could use it to put "any Internet user they want [in jail]." So it's pretty surprising to see that now, instead of reining in the CFAA’s dangerous reach, the House Judiciary Committee is floating a proposal to dramatically expand it and is reportedly planning to rush it to the floor of Congress during its April “cyber” week...Techdirt’s Mike Masnick posted a new draft and analysis of the CFAA expansion bill on Monday."

Union of Concerned Scientists - "A strong democracy depends on transparency, accountability, and trust in the government to make evidence-based decisions that protect public health and the environment. Federal scientists play an important role in fulfilling this mandate by providing critical expertise to decision makers and the American people. But sometimes, political or commercial forces interfere with this process, preventing scientific information from reaching those who need it. Strong policies governing external communications serve as the first line of defense against such abuses. Our 2013 report, Grading Government Transparency, looks at the policies governing scientists' communications through both traditional and social media at 17 federal agencies, evaluating the policies in a variety of categories and summarizing each evaluation with a letter grade."

"A federal district court judge in San Francisco has ruled that National Security Letter (NSL) provisions in federal law violate the Constitution. The decision came in a lawsuit challenging a NSL on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In the ruling publicly released [March 15, 2013], Judge Susan Illston ordered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stop issuing NSLs and cease enforcing the gag provision in this or any other case. The landmark ruling is stayed for 90 days to allow the government to appeal."

The Implausibility of Secrecy, by Mark Fenster. University of Florida - Fredric G. Levin College of Law. February 18, 2013

"In celebration of Sunshine Week, a number of organizations released Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reviews. These reviews, conducted by National Security Archives, the Center for Effective Government, Cause of Action, Associated Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org, indicate how agencies measure up when it comes to providing the public with information. Although the studies indicate that agencies on the whole increased their responses to FOIA requests in 2012, disparities remain between agencies on things like response time, compliance with the 2007 Open Government Act and 2009 Guidance from the White House, cost of responding, fee waivers, and backlog reductions. A majority of responses to FOIA requests in 2012 were only partial responses, and use of exemptions to withhold or redact information increased. The following snapshots contain some of the highlights of each review."

Follow up to previous postings on Aaron Swartz, news that Aaron is to be honored with freedom of information award by the American Library Association - "A champion of open access rights to documents on the Internet, the 26-year-old activist under prosecution committed suicide earlier this year."

"The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gives you the right to access information from federal agencies. FOIAonline allows you to submit FOIA requests to all participating agencies from this website, track the status of requests, search for requests submitted by others, and generate up-to-the-minute reports on FOIA processing. FOIAonline participating agencies include: the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Commerce (except the US Patent and Trademark Office), Office of General Counsel of the National Archives and Records Administration, Merit Systems Protection Board, Federal Labor Relations Authority, and the Department of the Treasury's Departmental Offices (headquarters), Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Bureau of the Fiscal Service, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and United States Mint. Please note that the Internal Revenue Service, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration are not participating in FOIAonline. Moreover, Treasury only participates in FOIAonline to the extent of allowing submission of requests; Treasury manages processing in a separate system. A chart provides further details on the information available in FOIAonline by participating agency."

"Federal court records show that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits challenging government secrecy by news groups have declined, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). This slump in the number of media suits does not seem to indicate that there is less government secrecy. In fact, the overall number of FOIA suits by individuals and other organizations has increased under the Obama administration. Among the reasons cited for the decline are slashes in newsroom budgets and the development of alternative organizations ferreting out more and more government information that was previously unavailable. Included in the short list of the most active news organizations using the FOIA were the New York Times, the Fox News Network and the Associated Press. Among those who did not file a single suit during the last term of President Bush and the first term of President Obama were USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post. The report also examined usage of FOIA by reporters submitting requests to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the last two years."

Freedom of Information Act Performance, 2012: Agencies Are Processing More Requests but Redacting More Often. Center for Effective Government, March 13, 2013

News release: "The Justice Department’s Open Government Plan version 2.0 (PDF) announced a variety of new Department initiatives concerning the administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A key initiative of this plan was the development of metadata standards that would “facilitate the ability of interested persons to search and retrieve documents across websites and disparate record keeping systems.” The plan called for the Office of Information Policy (OIP) to issue guidance for developing metadata standards in the posting of FOIA documents. Today, OIP posted the first in a series of guidance pieces designed to implement these standards across all agencies of the federal government. As the volume of material posted to agency websites continues to increase and “given that information on a given topic often is separately maintained by multiple agencies, it is essential that the public can quickly retrieve records of interest that are posted across government websites.” Looking to make government information not only available, but also accessible and usable, this initial guidance piece introduces the concept of a standard metadata “FOIA” tag to be used by agencies in the posting of FOIA material on agency websites."

The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information, David Pozen, Columbia Law School. March 2013, Harvard Law Review, Forthcoming

Lili Shirley: "Thanks to our open records laws, you can find a treasure trove of information on the web—everything from details about publically traded companies to where stimulus funds are going. You can even submit Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests online. Take some time this week to educate yourself about the information and data available from government websites. Below are five great online tools that you can use to help hold government accountable."

"The Obama administration has dedicated more effort to strengthening government transparency than previous administrations. The president entered office offering a grand vision for more open and participatory government, and this administration used its first term to construct a policy foundation that can make that vision a reality, issuing an impressive number of directives, executive orders, plans, and other actions aimed at bolstering government openness. With the notable, glaring exception of national security, the open government policy platform the Obama administration built is strong. However, the actual implementation of open government policies within federal agencies has been inconsistent and, in some agencies, weak. This report, Delivering on Open Government: The Obama Administration's Unfinished Legacy, examines progress made during President Obama’s first term toward open government goals outlined in a comprehensive set of recommendations that the open government community issued in November 2008, titled Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda. We examine activity in the three main areas of the 2008 report: creating an environment within government that is supportive of transparency, improving public use of government information, and reducing the secrecy related to national security issues."

Follow up to related postings on TSA body scanners, via EPIC: "A federal judge has granted EPIC victories in two Freedom of Information Act cases involving the controversial airport body scanners. Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, DC held that the Department of Homeland Security must turn over two safety reports detailing radiation output by the scanners and a set of power point slides containing details on automated target recognition software. The agency previously claimed it was not required to release the documents to EPIC. EPIC has pursued several related Freedom of Information Act cases as a challenge to the deployment of the devices. In 2011, the DC Circuit of Appeals ruled in EPIC v. DHS that the agency must receive public comments on the decision to deploy body scanners for primary screening. For more information see: EPIC: Whole Body Imaging Technology and EPIC v. DHS (Suspension of Body Scanner Program)"

Sunlight Foundation Blog, by Matthew Rumsey: March 7, 2013, "Representatives Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) reintroduced legislation that will make it easier for the public, the media, and government employees to better understand the important policy matters facing Congress. The bipartisan "Public Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Resolution of 2013" would ensure that these reports, which are often cited by courts and the media and sold by third parties for $20 per copy, are freely available to the public on a website maintained by the House Clerk. When Representatives Lance and Quigley introduced this resolution in the 112th Congress we praised the bill, noting that "reliable access to CRS Reports would ensure that everyone has timely and comprehensive access to the collective wisdom of hundreds of analysts and experts on political issues when they're at their most salient." This is perhaps even more important today with controversial issues like the sequester and gun control tying our legislature in knots. A few non-profit organizations manage to make some of these reports freely available, but only the CRS can do this in a truly comprehensive manner."

Public Access to Data from Federally Funded Research: Provisions in OMB Circular A-110. Eric A. Fischer, Senior Specialist in Science and Technology. March 1, 2013

"EPIC has obtained a court order and an opinion in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, requiring the agency to turn over more documents about the monitoring of social media and Internet media organizations. EPIC had previously obtained several hundred pages of documents, revealing that the agency monitors the internet for reports that “reflect adversely” on the agency or the federal government. EPIC also obtained a list of very broad search terms used by the agency to monitor social media. As a result of EPIC’s findings, Congress held a hearing on "DHS Monitoring of Social Networking and Media: Enhancing Intelligence Gathering and Ensuring Privacy." For more information see: EPIC: EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring."

The Saga of Barrett Brown: Inside Anonymous and the War on Secrecy, By Christian Stork, February 21, 2013

"On March 31, 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr., shot President Ronald Reagan and several others in a failed assassination attempt. The FBI conducted an extensive investigation, named REAGAT. This FOIA release consists of an extensive “Prosecutive Report” submitted by the FBI to the Department of Justice in May 1981 as Justice lawyers considered how to prosecute Hinckley for the attacks."

What Are the Retirement Prospects of Middle-Class Americans? - Barbara A. Butrica
Urban Institute; Mikki D. Waid, AARP Public Policy Institute, January 2013

Via LLRX: FOIA Facts - What I’ve Learned - Scott A. Hodes' New Year's commentary is both an overview and a roadmap to the FOIA process. Scott's experience has taught him that requesters do not realize that their biggest obstacle to having their requests processed in a timely manner is not usually FOIA offices. The biggest obstacles tend to be the program offices that have equity in the records sought and the agency executives who see FOIA offices as an expense they don’t want to fund.

Matt Compton: "In September 2009, the President announced that—for the first time in history—White House visitor records would be made available to the public on an ongoing basis. Today’s release also includes visitor records generated prior to September 16, 2009 that were requested by members of the public in November 2012 pursuant to the White House voluntary disclosure policy. This release brings the total number of records made public by this White House to nearly 2.9 million—all of which can be viewed in our Disclosures section."

"A new study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has found that there were more court complaints asking federal judges to force the government to abide by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) during the first term of the Obama Administration than there were in the last term of President Bush. While the administration-to-administration increase -- documented in court records for the entire FY 2005 to FY 2012 period -- was relatively small at 6 percent, a comparison of the FOIA filings in the last two years of Mr. Bush's second term and the last two years of Mr. Obama's first term showed a far more pronounced jump of 28 percent -- from 562 to 720. For more detailed information about the growing number of FOIA suits in the last two years, including which federal departments had the worst and best records, view the latest report from the FOIA Project."

News release: "Today EFF posted several thousand pages of new drone license records and a new map that tracks the location of drone flights across the United States. These records, received as a result of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and—for the first time—three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)."

National Security Archive: "A government-wide Freedom of Information Act audit by the National Security Archive has found that sixty-two out of ninety-nine government agencies have not updated their FOIA regulations since US Attorney General Eric Holder issued his March 19, 2009 FOIA memorandum to all heads of executive departments instructing them to make discretionary FOIA releases of documents that might be technically exempt from release (especially with respect to the "deliberative" b(5) exemption), to proactively post records of interest to the public, and to remove "unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles." Original FTC regulations from 1975, still on the books. Fifty-six agencies have not updated their Freedom of Information Act regulations since the passage of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which mandated that agencies reform their fee structures, institute request tracking numbers, publish specific data on their FOIA output, and cooperate with the new FOIA mediators at the Office of Government Information Services."

CRS - Government Transparency and Secrecy: An Examination of Meaning and Its Use in the Executive Branch, November 8, 2012

News release: "From cell phone location tracking to the use of surveillance drones, from secret interpretations of electronic surveillance law to the expanding use of biometrics, EFF has long been at the forefront of the push for greater transparency on the government’s increasingly secretive use of new technologies. With the launch of our new Transparency Project, we’ve made the information we’ve received easier to access and added new tools to help you learn about the government and file your own requests for information. The new name—Transparency Project—reflects the fact that EFF’s work has expanded far beyond filing and litigating federal Freedom of Information Act requests. While that work still makes up a solid core of what our Transparency Team does, we also seek information from state and local governments, regularly report on transparency issue more broadly, and provide tools to help you find out more about our government and what it’s up to."

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC): "The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Justice Department has just released a report criticizing the statistics of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). Lost in the news coverage of the OIG's report are several important points:

• First, in criticizing the EOIR numbers, the OIG's report doesn't acknowledge that there is already a source for the very statistics it recommends EOIR develop: TRAC's public website. TRAC compiles these statistics each month using EOIR's official case-by-case records.
  
• Second, the OIG does not credit EOIR for the very important role the agency has played in the development of these TRAC statistics. We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the cooperation we have received from EOIR, which has been truly exceptional in expediting the release of its case-by-case data to TRAC each month under the Freedom of Information Act. Other federal agencies would do well to emulate EOIR's commitment to providing greater public transparency.
  
• Third, the OIG report doesn't acknowledge that the approach taken by EOIR in reporting its workload statistics isn't at all unusual. The same approach criticized by the OIG is used by the federal courts in their annual statistical reports, and by other Justice Department components including the Executive Office for United States Attorneys. When cases are transferred from one court to another, or one U.S. Attorney's office to another, the case is counted as a closing in one, and a new filing or receipt in the other. And while the widespread use of this method by other well-respected bodies does not mean that the OIG's criticism is without merit, it does place the issue into a broader context. When measuring "workload" there are equally valid reasons to support the approach used by EOIR and other organizations. Though TRAC long ago adopted the method OIG now recommends, there simply isn't just one "best" method."

News release: "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), along with the Department of Commerce (DOC), have partnered to develop an online system aimed at expanding public access to information requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIAonline, formerly known as the FOIA Module, is available as of today (October 1). It offers the public one place to submit FOIA requests, track their progress, communicate with the processing agency, search other requests, access previously released responsive documents and file appeals with participating agencies. For agencies, FOIAonline provides a secure website to receive and store requests, assign and process requests, post responses, generate metrics, manage records electronically, create management reports and electronically generate the annual report required from each agency by FOIA. EPA began looking at the feasibility of a FOIA portal in 2010 with the idea of leveraging Regulations.gov, the Federal rulemaking portal that allows people to comment on Federal regulations and other agency regulatory actions. EPA administers Regulations.gov, which launched in 2002 and now has 38 partner agencies that govern and financially support the program. By leveraging the infrastructure of Regulations.gov, FOIAonline avoided many start-up costs, resulting in a total of $1.3 million to launch and an estimated cost avoidance of $200 million over the next five years if broadly adopted."

"FOIAonline is a tool that allows both the public and agency staff to make, monitor, and manage FOIA requests from a single website. Requesters may choose to submit requests and file appeals by registering for an account. This will also allow requesters to track progress and communicate directly with agency staff. Prior to making a request, a searchable repository of records previously released may be reviewed to eliminate the need to make a new request. Agency staff can move requests between organizations, review documents for potential withholding, generate invoices and make referrals and consultations quickly to other partner agencies. Agency management will be pleased with the time saved to prepare the Annual Report to the Department of Justice, a standard report in FOIAonline. FOIAonline was developed by a small group of government agencies looking for ways to use technology to process FOIA requests in a cost-effective way. FOIAonline operates as a module of the eRulemaking system and, like eRulemaking, is managed by a Change Control Board of partner agencies. The current partner agencies are: Departments of Commerce and Treasury, Environmental Protection Agency, National Archives and Records Administration, Merit System Protection Board and Federal Labor Relations Authority."

Interactive Graphic by David Ingold, David Evans and Danny Dougherty. Reporting by Danielle Ivory and Jim Snyder: "On his first full day in the White House, Barack Obama promised to “usher in a new era of open government” and ordered officials to be more transparent with the public they serve. An investigation to test that pledge shows that many of the president’s own appointees haven’t met those goals. In June, Washington-based reporters at Bloomberg News filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the out-of-town travel records for fiscal year 2011 for Cabinet secretaries and top officials at 57 major federal agencies subject to the law. Only about half of those contacted provided the records and costs."

"Through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Federal Trade Commission, EPIC has obtained Google's initial privacy assessment. The assessment was required by a settlement between Google and the FTC that followed from a 2010 complaint filed by EPIC over Google Buzz. The FTC has withheld from public disclosure information about the audit process, procedures to assess privacy controls, techniques to identify privacy risks, and the types of personal data Google collects from users. EPIC intends to challenge the agency withholdings. For more information, see EPIC: Google Buzz."

Naomi Gilens: "Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability. The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power. (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)"

News release: "The 2012 Secrecy Report released today by OpenTheGovernment.org — a coalition of more than 80 groups advocating for open and accountable government — reveals that positive changes from the Obama administration’s open government policies nevertheless appear diminished in the shadow of the President’s bold promise of unprecedented transparency. Ultimately, though, the public needs more information to judge the size, shape, and legitimacy of the government’s secrecy...Efforts to open the government continue to be frustrated by a governmental predisposition towards secrecy, especially in the national security bureaucracy. Among the troubling trends: the National Declassification Center will not meet its goal for declassifying old records on time; the government continues to use the state secrets privilege in the same way it did prior to release of a new procedural policy; and the volume of documents marked “Classified” continues to grow, with little assurance or reason offered for the decision that the information properly needs such protection. The report also indicates some of the Administration’s openness policies are having a positive effect. The federal government received and processed significantly more public requests for information than in previous years. The Office of Special Counsel is also on track to deliver an all-time high number of favorable actions for federal employees who have been victims of reprisal, or other prohibited personnel practices, for blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality. Even in the national security field, there is some progress: most notably, the total amount of money requested for intelligence for the coming year was formally disclosed. This is a tremendous success because such disclosure was resisted by government officials for so long. Additionally, the number of people with the authority to create new secrets continued to drop."

News release: "The online magazine ForeignPolicy.com today published an extraordinary CIA document on the recent Iraq war which the National Security Archive obtained through a Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request to the CIA. The document, "Misreading Intentions: Iraq's Reaction to Inspection Created Picture of Deception," dated January 5, 2006, blames "analyst liabilities," such as neglecting to examine Iraq's deceptive behavior "through an Iraqi prism," for the failure to correctly assess the country's virtually non-existent WMD capabilities. The review was one in a series of reevaluations the agency produced of its own work after Operation Iraqi Freedom."

• Coast Guard - Legacy Vessels' Declining Conditions Reinforce Need for More Realistic Operational Targets [Reissued on August 30, 2012], GAO-12-741, Jul 31, 2012
• Freedom of Information Act, Additional Actions Can Strengthen Agency Efforts to Improve Management, GAO-12-828, Jul 31, 2012
• Income Security - Overlapping Disability and Unemployment Benefits Should be Evaluated for Potential Savings, GAO-12-764, Jul 31, 2012

Summary of Agency Chief FOIA Officer Reports for 2012 and
Assessment of Agency Progress in Implementing the President's FOIA Memorandum and the Attorney General's FOIA Guidelines With OIP Guidance for Further Improvement, August 2012

News release: "Marking the 46th anniversary of President Johnson's signing the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Archive [July 4, 2012] posted a compilation of 46 news headlines from the past year made possible by active and creative use of the FOIA. This representative sample, drawn from hundreds of FOIA stories reported by newspapers, blogs, broadcasters, and researchers, describe FOIA requests that revealed the theft of Jack Daniels whiskey by airport security screeners, the keywords used by homeland security officials to monitor social networking sites, the soil contamination endangering Marines and their families at Camp Lejeune, pre-9/11 attempts to 'hit' Osama bin Laden, and $1.2 trillion of secret Federal Reserve loans to banks, among dozens of other topics that the public has a right and a need to know."

"[June 27, 2012] the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released information revealing the existence of hundreds of previously unknown coal ash dumps nationwide. The information comes pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) by Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. The data released...by the EPA reveal that there are at least 451 more coal ash ponds than previously acknowledged—significantly increasing the known threat from coal ash. The EPA had admitted to 710 ponds, and today’s numbers increase that total to at least 1,161. In addition, the agency previously did not know how many ponds were unlined. [The] data indicate that at least 535 ponds (46 percent) operate without a liner to prevent hazardous chemicals from reaching drinking water sources.

News release: "The National Security Archive today is posting over 100 recently released CIA documents relating to September 11, Osama bin Laden, and U.S. counterterrorism operations. The newly-declassified records, which the Archive obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, are referred to in footnotes to the 9/11 Commission Report and present an unprecedented public resource for information about September 11. The collection includes rarely released CIA emails, raw intelligence cables, analytical summaries, high-level briefing materials, and comprehensive counterterrorism reports that are usually withheld from the public because of their sensitivity. Today's posting covers a variety of topics of major public interest, including background to al-Qaeda's planning for the attacks; the origins of the Predator program now in heavy use over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; al-Qaeda's relationship with Pakistan; CIA attempts to warn about the impending threat; and the impact of budget constraints on the U.S. government's hunt for bin Laden. Today's posting is the result of a series of FOIA requests by National Security Archive staff based on a painstaking review of references in the 9/11 Commission Report."

Via FAS - this report by the Director, Information Security Oversight Office, National Archives, John P. Fitzpatrick "Dear Mr. President: I am pleased to submit the Information Security Oversight Office’s (ISOO) Report for Fiscal Year 2011, as required by Executive Order 13526, “Classified National Security Information” (the Order). This report provides statistics and analysis concerning key components of the system of classification and declassification, as well as coverage of ISOO’s reviews of Departments’ and Agencies’ programs. It also contains information with respect to industrial security in the private sector as required by Executive Order 12829, as amended, “National Industrial Security Program."

via LLRX - FOIA Facts: Things Requesters Should Know: FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes shares his professional experience working with FOIA Analysts, and their perspective on how they make the FOIA process smoother in regard to their relationships with requesters. This however is a double edged coin – FOIA requesters can also take specific steps and make efforts to assist with the satisfactory and timely completion of a request when communicating with government FOIA personnel.

Secrecy News, Steven Aftergood: "In 2011, the US Government submitted 1,745 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for authorization to conduct electronic surveillance or physical searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), according to a new annual report to Congress. Of these, 1,676 included requests for authority for perform electronic surveillance, the report said. That compares to 1,579 such applications in 2010 (including 1,511 for electronic surveillance). As is usually the case, the FIS Court did not deny any electronic surveillance applications in whole or in part last year, though it made modifications to 30 of them. The new report says that the government filed 205 applications for business records (including “tangible things”) for foreign intelligence purposes last year, compared to 96 in the previous year."

Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined? May 03, 2012. Authors: Don Rassler, Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, Liam Collins, Muhammad al-Obaidi, Nelly Lahoud

Via LLRX.com - Opening Government: On the Limits of FOIA and the Metaphor of Transparency - Professor Annmarie Bridy discusses the use of “transparency” as a metaphor for openness in government, the use of FOIA as a mechanism for ensuring such openness, and the ways in which proponents of greater public involvement in policy-making may disserve the cause by focusing too single-mindedly on access to information and the right to know, both of which are operationalized through FOIA.

"A prosecutorial discretion initiative by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has resulted in the closure of a total of 2,609 Immigration Court cases, according to the latest data obtained and analyzed by TRAC, current through the end of March. This is less than one percent of the 298,173 cases pending before the Immigration Courts at the end of last September. A new report by TRAC presents detailed results from the Baltimore and Denver pilots of this program, and also includes figures from other courts around the nation.,,TRAC's findings are based on case-by-case data, obtained from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). These data included special codes that identified closures under ICE's prosecutorial discretion initiative."

Report Card on Federal Government’s Efforts to Track and Manage FOIA Requests, Staff Report, House of Representatives, 112th Congress Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, March 15, 2012

Mediated Access: Journalists' Perceptions of Federal Public Information Officer Media Control, by Carolyn Carlson, David Cuillier and Lindsey Tulkoff - Society of Professional Journalists, March 12, 2012

"In Following the Money 2012: How the States Rank on Providing Online Access to Government Spending Data, researchers at the United States Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) graded all 50 states on how well they provide online access to information about government spending. States were given “A” to “F” grades based on the characteristics of the online transparency systems they have created to provide information on contracts, subsidies and spending at quasi-public agencies...This report is U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s third annual ranking of states’ progress toward “Transparency 2.0” – a new standard of comprehensive, one-stop, one-click budget accountability and accessibility. The past year has seen continued progress, with new states providing online access to government spending information and several states pioneering new tools to further expand citizens’ access to spending information and engagement with government."

"In celebration of Sunshine Week, EPIC published the EPIC FOIA Gallery: 2012. The gallery highlights key documents obtained by EPIC in the past year, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's watch list guidelines, records of the Department of Homeland Security's social media monitoring program, Google's first Privacy Compliance Report, records detailing the government's FAST scanning program, records of the FBI's surveillance of Wikileaks supporters, and DHS records detailing the use of body scanners at the U.S. border. EPIC regularly files Freedom of Information Act requests and pursues lawsuits to force disclosure of critical documents that impact privacy. EPIC also publishes the authoritative FOIA litigation manual. For more, see EPIC Open Government and EPIC Bookstore: FOIA.

LLRX.com - FOIA Facts: FOIA as Golf - Recent reports of both the Department of Justice and others about the administrations FOIA overall program have led FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes to imagine FOIA as golf. President Obama is currently on the fairway of the ninth hole. Voters will let him know in November if he gets to play the back nine.

Virginia Coalition for Open Government: "We are a nonprofit alliance formed to promote expanded access to government records, meetings and other proceedings at the state and local level. Our efforts are focused solely on local/state information access. While we do some lobbying (within limits imposed by IRS rules), our primary work is educational. The Coalition was formed in 1996, after a year-long organizing effort. Our 23-member board of directors represents the state's access activists and friends of open government, including Virginia's librarians, genealogists, broadcasters, newspapers and the public at large. Start-up funding was provided by the Virginia Press Association, the Virginia Association of Broadcasters, Media General, the Landmark Communications Foundation, America Online, all of the major in-state newspapers, public radio and television stations, a number of commercial stations and other friends of open government. Supporters also include Dominion, Appalachian Power, SunTrust, LexisNexis, Christian & Barton, Conservation Voters League, Woods Rogers, Gentry Locke."

Via WSJ, this commentary by FTC Commission Robert K. McDowell: "On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year's end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish "international control over the Internet" through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices. If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet's flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time...Russia, China and their allies within the 193 member states of the ITU want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. Reading even a partial list of proposals that could be codified into international law next December at a conference in Dubai is chilling..."

News release: ""The Department of Justice – which is responsible for enforcing FOIA government-wide – was supposed to be the change agent and role model for President Obama's FOIA reforms," said Nate Jones, the Archive's Freedom of Information Act Coordinator. "But, despite the president's clear instructions, the DOJ has embraced a 'FOIA-as-usual mindset' that has failed to transform the decades-old FOIA policies within its department, much less throughout the government."

"EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency's social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies.The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. For more information, see EPIC: Social Networking Privacy."

News release: "As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples...

"Bloomberg News today released spreadsheets showing daily borrowing totals for 407 banks and companies that tapped Federal Reserve emergency programs during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. It’s the first time such data have been publicly available in this form. To download a zip file of the spreadsheets, go to http://bit.ly/Bloomberg-Fed-Data. For an explanation of the files, see the one labeled “1a Fed Data Roadmap.” The day-by-day, bank-by-bank numbers, culled from about 50,000 transactions the U.S. central bank made through seven facilities, formed the basis of a series of Bloomberg News articles this year about the largest financial bailout in history."

The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), Feature 1375–1405 1932–8036/2011FEA1375 [via gigaom]

News release: "Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org released a joint report, Measuring Transparency Under the FOIA: The Real Story Behind the Numbers, analyzing the government’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data for 2010 and how it compares to the previous administration’s data...The results paint a very mixed picture on the FOIA front, with agencies generally processing more requests more quickly, but also increasing their reliance on the FOIA’s nine exemptions to withhold more information from the public. Our analysis revealed an even more alarming truth: the government’s FOIA data is flawed, making it impossible to assess key areas of progress and casting doubt on its overall reliability. As a result, what started as a statistical report on agencies’ handling of FOIA requests ended as an expose of the problems with the data and tools the government has developed to measure its progress in implementing the FOIA."

News release: "The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today published new guidance making it clear that information concerning official business held in private email accounts is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham said:

"This memorandum begins an executive branch wide effort to reform records management policies and practices. Improving records management will improve performance and promote openness and accountability by better documenting agency actions and decisions. Records transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provide the prism through which future generations will understand and learn from our actions and decisions. Modernized records management will also help executive departments and agencies (agencies) minimize costs and operate more efficiently. Improved records management thus builds on Executive Order 13589 of November 9, 2011 (Promoting Efficient Spending), which directed agencies to reduce spending and focus on mission critical functions. When records are well managed, agencies can use them to assess the impact of programs, to reduce redundant efforts, to save money, and to share knowledge within and across their organizations. In these ways, proper records management is the backbone of open Government."

News release [Note; scroll down to locate links to the documents obtained via FOIA]: "President Ronald Reagan was briefed in advance about every weapons shipment in the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in 1985-86, and Vice President George H. W. Bush chaired a committee that recommended the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983, according to previously secret Independent Counsel assessments of "criminal liability" on the part of the two former leaders posted today by the National Security Archive. Twenty-Five years after the advent of the "Iran-Contra affair," the two comprehensive "Memoranda on Criminal Liability of Former President Reagan and of President Bush" provide a roadmap of historical, though not legal, culpability of the nation's two top elected officials during the scandal from the perspective of a senior attorney in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh. The documents were obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the National Security Archive for the files compiled during Walsh's six-year investigation from 1987-1993."

"The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presents a snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. For countries that have been more successful in implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities. The portal has country reports from over 148 countries with weblinks to over 2000 initiatives/projects in Member States. The portal is supported by an existing Community of Practice (CoP) on Open Access on the WSIS Knowledge Communities Platform that has over 1400 members."

LLRX.com - FOIA Facts: DOJ FOIA Regulations - Scott A. Hodes addresses the proposed new Department of Justice ("DOJ") FOIA regulations which call for DOJ components to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist." This response should not differ in wording from any other response given by the component" when applying an exclusion to the FOIA. The purpose of this article is to clear up some of the confusion around FOIA exclusions and these proposed regulations. He is giving no opinion on whether or not the proposed regulations should be adopted.

Google Transparency Report - Government Requests: "Like other technology and communications companies, Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from our services and hand over user data. Our Government Requests tool discloses the number of requests we receive from each government in six-month reporting periods with certain limitations. Governments ask companies to remove content for many different reasons. For example, some content removals are requested due to allegations of defamation, while others are due to allegations that the content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or pornography. Laws surrounding these issues vary by country, and the requests reflect the legal context of a given jurisdiction. We hope this tool will be helpful in discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. These observations on content removal requests highlight some trends that we've seen in the data during each reporting period, and are by no means exhaustive."

These documents via governmentattic.org:

• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011
  
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) internal agency records which discuss the merits of iPads and/or similar pad/tablet computer devices for agency employee use, 2011

Reducing Overclassification Through Accountability Publications, by Elizabeth Goitein and David M. Shapiro, October 5,2011

The Open Government Partnership - National Action Plan for the United States of America, September 20, 2011

"The Circuit Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that the Department of Justice must release information regarding government surveillance of cell phone location data. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for information regarding current and past cases where the Department of Justice had accessed cell phone location data without a warrant. The agency sought to keep this information secret, claiming that releasing cell phone tracking data could implicate privacy of investigation subjects. The court, however, disagreed, stating, "The disclosure sought by the plaintiffs would inform this ongoing public policy discussion by shedding light on the scope and effectiveness of cell phone tracking as a law enforcement tool." For more information, see EPIC: Wiretapping and EPIC: Electronic Surveillance 1968-2010."

Obama Administration Fulfills Some Open Gov Goals, National Security Bureaucracy Hinders Progress - "The Obama Administration has made some positive changes towards an open government this year, but the national security bureaucracy continues to hinder progress, according to a report released today. The 2011 Secrecy Report was released by OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of more than 80 groups (including POGO) advocating for a more open and accountable government. According to the report, some of the Obama Administration’s promises of transparency are paying off—but certain national security agencies are ignoring the open government agenda. Some of the good news highlighted in the report centers on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Administration has been “rebuilding openness” and FOIA performance has improved from previous years. Compared to 2009, FOIA backlogs in 2010 were reduced by 10 percent.Other moves the Obama Administration has made towards transparency include releasing newly declassified details about the U.S. nuclear stockpile, updating sites like FederalReporting.gov and USAspending.gov, and refusing to assert Executive Privilege to deny congressional requests for information (Obama is the first president in OpenTheGovernment.org’s records not to do so.)...The report points to an Associated Press study that found that the Central Intelligence Agency and Securities and Exchange Commission rejected information requests more than half the time during 2010."

"Freedom House launched a special report, Promise and Reversal: The Post-Soviet Landscape Twenty Years On, to mark the 20th anniversary of the failed Soviet coup of August 19, 1991. A retrospective essay examining changes in the state of political rights and civil liberties in the former Soviet Union over the last two decades, as well as graphs and rankings that illustrate the region’s performance in the annual Freedom House publications Freedom in the World and Freedom of the Press, highlight that there is a serious and disturbing failure to embrace democratic institutions in most of the post-Soviet region."

"The Department of Justice has published a FOIA Contacts Listing on the FOIA.gov website. The listing was updated on August 1, 2011. The Developer Resources Page hosts a listing of FOIA contacts across federal departments and agencies." [Michael Ravnitzky]

Privatization of GPO, Defunding of FDsys, and the Future of the FDLP, by jajacobs

DOJ News release: "After reviewing the Chief FOIA Officer Reports, OIP has prepared an assessment of the progress made by the Executive Departments in implementing the President's FOIA Memorandum and the Attorney General's FOIA Guidelines. The fifteen Departments account for nearly 80% of all FOIA requests processed by the government. Those Departments were scored on elements from all five of the key areas, as reflected by the information provided in their 2011 Chief FOIA Officer Reports and their Fiscal Year 2010 Annual FOIA Reports. A green score was given by OIP when the Department reported accomplishing the milestone; yellow reflects mixed progress in reaching the milestone; and red reflects that the milestone was not met. This graphic representation readily illustrates the many accomplishments achieved by the Departments this past year. It also highlights the areas in need of further improvement...As to numerical increases in the numbers of requests where records are provided in full or in part, eight of the fifteen Departments increased their disclosures in full, while seven did not. Ten Departments increased their partial disclosures, while five did not."

News release: "Pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive on the 50th anniversary of the infamous CIA-led invasion of Cuba, the CIA has released four volumes of its Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. The Archive today posted volume 2, "Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy" (Part 1 | Part 2), classified top secret, which contains detailed information on the CIA's negotiations with Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Panama on support for the invasion. "These are among the last remaining secret records of this act of U.S. aggression against Cuba," noted Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the Archive. "The CIA has finally seen the wisdom of letting the public scrutinize this major debacle in the covert history of U.S. foreign policy." Kornbluh noted that the agency was "still refusing to release volume 5 of its official history." Volume 5 is a rebuttal to the stinging CIA Inspector General's report, done in the immediate aftermath of the paramilitary assault, which held CIA officials accountable for a wide variety of mistakes, miscalculations and deceptions that characterized the failed invasion. The National Security Archive obtained the declassification of the ultra-secret Inspector General's report in 1998."

ACLU news release: "Today, we’re releasing a report, Drastic Measures Required: Congress needs to Overhaul U.S. Secrecy Laws and Increase Oversight of the Secret Security Establishment...we lay out the scope of the problem and analyze its unfortunate consequences for the operation of our government, for our national security, and for our democracy at large. The report asserts that Congress must overhaul U.S secrecy laws and increase its oversight of the secret security establishment in order to rein in the out-of-control secrecy that is poisoning our democracy. We present a number of detailed recommendations for how, exactly, Congress should act to reform the “state secrets privilege,” strengthen Congressional oversight of national security programs, and regulate the use of classification by the executive branch."

"Standard & Poor's Ratings Services today said it placed its 'AAA' long-term and 'A-1+' short-term sovereign credit ratings on the United States of America on CreditWatch with negative implications. The CreditWatch action reflects our view of two separate but related issues. The first issue is the continuing failure to raise the U.S. government debt ceiling so as to ensure that the government will be able to continue to make scheduled payments on its debt obligations. The second pertains to our current view of the likelihood that Congress and the Administration will agree upon a credible, medium-term fiscal consolidation plan in the foreseeable future. On May 16, 2011, the U.S. government reached its Congressionally mandated ceiling for federal debt of $14,294 billion. Since then, the government has undertaken exceptional measures to avoid breaching the debt ceiling. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner wrote, "The unique role of Treasury securities in the global financial system means that the consequences of default would be particularly severe....Even a short-term default could cause irrevocable damage to the American economy." The Treasury currently estimates that it will have exhausted these exceptional measures on or about Aug. 2, 2011, at which time it will either have to curtail certain current expenses or risk missing a scheduled payment of interest or principal on Treasury securities held by the public...Congress and the Administration are debating various fiscal consolidation
proposals. At the high end, budget savings of $4 trillion phased in over 10 to 12 years proposed by the Adminstration, (separately) by Congressional leaders, as well as by the Fiscal Commission in its December 2010 report, if accompanied by growth-enhancing reforms, could slow the deterioration of the U.S. net general government debt-to-GDP ratio, which is currently nearing 75%. Under our baseline macroeconomic scenario, net general government debt would reach 84% of GDP by 2013. (Our baseline scenario assumes near 3% annual real growth and a post-2012 phaseout of the December 2010 extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.) Such a percentage indicates a relatively weak government debt trajectory compared with those of the U.S.' closest 'AAA' rated peers (France,
Germany, the U.K., and Canada)."

"Forty-five years after President Johnson signed the U.S. Freedom of Information Act into law in 1966, federal agency backlogs of FOIA requests are growing, with the oldest requests at eight agencies dating back over a decade and the single oldest request now 20 years old, according to the Knight Open Government Survey by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The Knight Survey of the oldest requests utilized the FOIA to examine the actual copies of the oldest requests from the 35 federal agencies and components that process more than 90 percent of all FOIAs. It shows that the oldest requests in the U.S. government were submitted before the fall of the Soviet Union. These unfulfilled requests – some are for documents that are themselves more than 50 years old – are victims of an endless referral process in which any agency that claims “equity” can censor their release."

Via Project On Government Oversight (POGO): "Taxpayers were massively overcharged in dozens of transactions between the Army and Boeing for helicopter spare parts, according to a full, unredacted Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) audit - that POGO is making public for the first time. The overcharges range from 33.3 percent to 177,475 percent for mundane parts, resulting in millions of dollars in overspending. The May 3, 2011, unclassified “For Official Use Only” report is 142 pages. Prior to POGO’s publication of the full report, the only publicly available version was a 3-page “results in brief” [Excess Inventory and Contract Pricing Problems Jeopardize the Army Contract with Boeing to Support Corpus Christi Army Depot] on the DoD OIG’s website, first reported by Bloomberg News. The findings in the results in brief, while shocking on their own, pale in comparison to the detail contained within the full report. The DoD OIG scrutinized Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command (AMCOM) transactions with Boeing that were in support of the Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) in Texas. The audit focused on 24 “high-dollar” parts. Boeing had won two sole-source contracts (the second was a follow-on contract awarded last year) to provide the Army with logistics support—one of those support functions meant Boeing would help buy and/or make spare parts for the Army—for two weapons systems: the Boeing AH-64 Apache and Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopters."

The Freedom of Information Act on its 45th anniversary | Commentary - July 01, 2011: "Lyndon Johnson opposed FOIA — said it was a plot against his administration — but a tenacious backbencher from California, John Moss, had pursued it for 12 years and LBJ finally relented, signing the legislation on July 4th, 1966. Here Michael Lemov, author of a new book on Moss and FOIA, recounts events leading to the enactment."

EPIC: "In a FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, EPIC has just obtained documents concerning the radiation risks of TSA's airport body scanner program. The documents include agency emails, radiation studies, memoranda of agreement concerning radiation testing programs, and results of some radiation tests. One document set reveals that even after TSA employees identified cancer clusters possibly linked to radiation exposure, the agency failed to issue employees dosimeters - safety devices that could assess the level of radiation exposure. Another document indicates that the DHS mischaracterized the findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, stating that NIST "affirmed the safety" of full body scanners. The documents obtained by EPIC reveal that NIST disputed that characterization and stated that the Institute did not, in fact, test the devices. Also, a Johns Hopkins University study revealed that radiation zones around body scanners could exceed the "General Public Dose Limit." For more information, see EPIC: EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security - Full Body Scanner Radiation Risks and EPIC: EPIC v. DHS (Suspension of Body Scanner Program)."

Via LLRX.com - FOIA Facts: The Most Transparent Administration in History? - Scott A. Hodes argues that we have no real benchmark to determine executive branch success in fulfilling Presidential promises about openness and transparency. Rather he contends that the measure is not each time the administration doesn’t release something in a timely fashion to say it has failed the test.

United Nations General Assembly: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, May 16, 2011

"Those with access to private jets fly around the globe on a whim, their flight paths generally hidden from view. But The Wall Street Journal has penetrated this hidden world and, as the FAA considers publishing data on private-aircraft flights, the Journal unveils its own database."

Release of Faculty-Productivity Data Roils U. of Texas, By Audrey Williams June, Chronicle of Higher Education

FISA Annual Reports to Congress 2010 [via FAS]

FOIAs Related to Japan's Emergency: "To avoid duplication of effort and delays in response times, please take note of the following requests that have already been submitted to the NRC. Responses to these FOIA requests will be made publicly available as soon as possible."

Information Security Oversight Office’s (ISOO) Report to the President for Fiscal Year (FY) 2010: "This report provides information on the status of the security classification program as required by Executive Order 13526, “Classified National Security Information” (the Order). It provides statistics and analysis concerning key components of the system, primarily classification and declassification, and coverage of ISOO’s reviews. It also contains information with respect to industrial security in the private sector as required by Executive Order 12829, as amended, “National Industrial Security Program.” FY 2010 was a notable year for the security classification program. The initial implementation of Executive Order 13526 began in earnest and remains ongoing. To comply with your direction that a government-wide implementing directive be issued within 180 days, we led an interagency working group that developed 32 C.F.R. Part 2001 which became effective and binding on all appropriate Executive branch agencies on June 25, 2010. However, we are concerned about delays in the issuance of agency regulations implementing the Order. Despite the preparation of agency drafts and the completion of our review last Fall, many agencies failed to issue their regulations in final form by December 2010 and many have yet to issue them as of the date of this letter [April 15, 2011]."

"Details about every new court challenge to the withholding of information by the Obama Administration are now available on a new website developed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Designed to bring more transparency to FOIA withholding decisions, the new site -- http://FOIAproject.org -- gives the American people a way to track all instances in which a federal agency's decision to deny government records has become the subject of a suit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) since October 1, 2009. The site, supported with a grant from the CS Fund/Warsh-Mott Legacy, is updated daily with the latest court FOIA filings and provides extensive information about the names of withholding agency, the names of the plaintiffs, the location where the action was brought, along with the actual complaint and attachments that were filed."

"The Vault is our new electronic reading room, containing more than 2,000 documents that have been scanned from paper into digital copies so you can read them in the comfort of your home or office. Included here are more than 25 new files that have been released to the public but never added to this website; dozens of records previously posted on our site but removed as requests diminished; and files from our previous electronic reading room. The Vault includes several new tools and resources for your convenience: Searching for Topics; Searching for Key Words; Viewing the Files; Requesting a Status Update." [via Michael Ravnitzky]

News release: "Today, the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership between the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs (Munk School) and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, announced the release of a new report titled West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011 by Helmi Noman and Jillian C. York. The OpenNet Initiative has documented network filtering by national governments of the Internet in more than forty countries worldwide. National governments use network filtering as one of many methods to control the flow of online content, and utilize a variety of technical means to institute such filtering. The report analyzes the use of three American and Canadian-made tools: Websense, McAfee SmartFilter, and Netsweeper for the purpose of government-level filtering in the Middle East and North Africa. The investigation found that nine countries in the region utilize Western-made tools for the purpose of blocking social and political content, effectively blocking a total of over 20 million Internet users from accessing such websites. The authors analyze as well the increasing opacity of the usage of Western-made tools for filtering at the national level."

The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermarth of the Holocaust, by Judy Feigin, Edited by Mark M Richard, Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice Criminal Division, December 2008

Via LLRX.com - FOIA Facts: Funding FOIA: Scott A. Hodes contends that reducing FOIA Operations any further is the wrong way to go if the objectives of increasing government transparency are to be pursued. The actual process of searching for records in response to FOIA requests and processing those requests requires human interaction - in other words, while the documents themselves can be digitized, a person will always be required to search for and process responsive records.

"As the flagship initiative of the Department’s Open Government Plan, OIP [Office of Information Policy] is proud to announce the launch of FOIA.Gov, a comprehensive public resource for government-wide FOIA information and data. FOIA.Gov displays graphically a wealth of data on agency FOIA compliance, contains educational material about how the FOIA works, and contact information for all government agencies. OIP’s own website will always provide a link to FOIA.Gov on the right hand side of our site."

You Have No Sovereignty Where We Gather – Wikileaks and Freedom, Autonomy and Sovereignty in the Cloud, Balázs Bodó - Budapest University of Technology and Economics; Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, March 7, 2011

"The new data.gov.au site has now been released and I invite you to explore, access and reuse the data available on the site. The release of public sector information in the form of datasets allows the commercial, research and community sectors to add value to government data in new, innovative and exciting ways. Data.gov.au plays a crucial role in realising the Australian Government’s commitment to informing, engaging and participating with the public, as expressed in its Declaration of Open Government and Freedom of Information (FoI) reforms. It is the Australian equivalent to similar overseas sites such as the United States’ data.gov, the United Kingdom’s data.gov.uk and New Zealand’s data.govt.nz. Agencies such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Geoscience Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) already release large amounts of data to the public. An important goal of data.gov.au is to provide a broader range of agencies the opportunity to similarly release more data online. More than 200 datasets are accessible through data.gov.au"

EPIC: "In Navy v. Milner, the Supreme Court held that the Freedom of Information Act’s “Exemption 2” is limited to employee relations and human resources issues. The decision overturns previous decisions by lower courts that applied the exemption to broader categories of records, allowing federal agencies to block disclosure of documents to the public. The Court stated that this practice contravened Congress’s intent. The Court emphasized that Congress intended all nine FOIA exemptions to be construed narrowly. EPIC is currently challenging the use of Exemption 2 in its lawsuit to force disclosure of records concerning full body scanners at airport checkpoints. The Court's decision in Navy v. Milner demonstrates that the Department of Homeland Security is improperly withholding information about the scanners from the public. For more information, see EPIC-Milner v. Dept. of Navy, and EPIC: OPEN Government."

"EFF just received documents in response to a 2-year old FOIA request for information on the FBI’s "Going Dark" program, an initiative to increase the FBI's authority in response to problems the FBI says it's having implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders on new communications technologies. The documents detail a fully-formed and well-coordinated plan to expand existing surveillance laws and develop new ones. And although they represent only a small fraction of the documents we expect to receive in response to this and a more recent FOIA request, they were released just in time to provide important background information for the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing [February 17, 2011] on the Going Dark program."

The Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative: Issues for Congress, Wendy R. Ginsberg - Analyst in Government Organization and Management, January 28, 2011

PACER, RECAP, and the Movement to Free American Case Law, by Steve Schultze, VoxPopuLII, LII/Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School (February 3, 2011), via freegovinfo.info: "...The ultimate solution to the PACER {Public Access to Court Electronic Records) fee problem unfortunately lies...in bureaucratic details of authorization subcommittees and technical details of network architecture. This is the next front of PACER liberation. We now have friends in Washington, and we understand the process better every day. We also have very smart geeks, and I think that the ultimate finger on the scale may be our ability to explain how the U.S. Courts could run a tremendously more efficient system that would simultaneously generate a diversity of new democratic benefits. We also need smart librarians and archivists making good policy arguments. That is one reason why the Law.gov movement is so exciting to me. It has the potential not only to unify open-law advocates, but to go well beyond the U.S. Federal Case Law fiefdom of PACER."

Freedom in the World 2011: The Authoritarian Challenge to Democracy, Washington, D.C, January 13, 2011: "Global freedom suffered its fifth consecutive year of decline in 2010, according to Freedom in the World 2011, Freedom House’s annual assessment of political rights and civil liberties around the world. This represents the longest continuous period of decline in the nearly 40-year history of the survey. The year featured drops in the number of Free countries and the number of electoral democracies, as well as an overall deterioration for freedom in the Middle East and North Africa region. A total of 25 countries showed significant declines in 2010, more than double the 11 countries exhibiting noteworthy gains. The number of countries designated as Free fell from 89 to 87, and the number of electoral democracies dropped to 115, far below the 2005 figure of 123. In addition, authoritarian regimes like those in China, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela continued to step up repressive measures with little significant resistance from the democratic world. Published annually since 1972, Freedom in the World examines the ability of individuals to exercise their political and civil rights in 194 countries and 14 territories around the world. The latest edition analyzes developments that occurred in 2010 and assigns each country a freedom status—Free, Partly Free, or Not Free—based on a scoring of performance on key democracy indicators.

EPI: "The Department of Homeland Security has released the Freedom of Information Act Report for 2010. The report analyzes the processing of FOIA requests made throughout the year by each DHS component, detailing the disposition of each request, response times, and the number of backlogged requests. DHS is under scrutiny for their policy of referring FOIA requests to political appointees before processing. The release of over 1,000 agency documents revealed a persistent agency practice of flagging FOIA requests from EPIC and other watchdog organizations for referral.The FOIA does not permit agencies to select FOIA requests for political scrutiny and the Supreme Court has stated that neither the identity of the FOIA requester nor the reason for the request is relevant to the processing of requests. EPIC has recommended that the FOIA Ombudsman investigate the Department’s policy. For related information see EPIC: Open Government and EPIC: Litigation under the Federal Open Government Laws 2010."

SEC Inspector General Reports of Investigation: In recent years, investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Office of Inspector General (OIG) have exposed a wide range of serious misconduct, including the agency's failure to crack down on the Madoff and Stanford Ponzi schemes, retaliation against whistleblowers, conflicts of interest, revolving door abuses, the failure to take action against Bear Stearns, insider trading by SEC employees, and much more. Unfortunately, most of these reports are nowhere to be found on the SEC or OIG's website. POGO has obtained many of the OIG's recent investigative reports through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and from other sources. We've made the reports searchable and are compiling them here as a resource to the public. Reports that have not been posted on the SEC or OIG's website are marked in red."

Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports, this News release: "A federal district court has granted the Department of Homeland Security's motion to conclude one of EPIC's Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. EPIC was seeking more than 2,000 images generated by airport body scanners held by the TSA. The DHS objected to the disclosure and the court sided with the government. The court relied on a legal theory, "Exemption High (b)(2)" that is currently under review by the Supreme Court in Milner v. Dept. of Navy. As a result of this lawsuit, EPIC obtained many documents concerning the airport screening program, including Procurement Specifications, Operational Requirements, traveler complaints, and vendor contracts with L3 and Rapiscan, that were subsequently made available to the public. EPIC may appeal the district court's decision as to the release of the body scanner images. For more information see EPIC: EPIC v. DHS and EPIC: Body Scanners."

News release: "...the FCC announced a challenge to researchers and software developers to engage in research and create apps that help consumers foster, measure, and protect Internet openness. The Open Internet Challenge is part of the FCC’s efforts to empower end users to help preserve Internet openness. Details of the challenge are posted at openinternet.gov/challenge. “This challenge is about using the open Internet to protect the open Internet,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. “Our goal is to foster user-developed applications that shine light on any practice that might be inconsistent with the free and open Internet. Empowering consumers with information about their own connections will promote a vibrant, innovative, world-leading broadband ecosystem.” The Open Internet Challenge seeks to encourage the development of innovative and functional applications that provide users with information about the extent to which their fixed or mobile broadband Internet services are consistent with the open Internet. These software tools could, for example, detect whether a broadband provider is interfering with DNS responses, application packet headers, or content."

"The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the release of a new paper, Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing, by Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey."

"The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to share a new report, Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Against Independent Media and Human Rights Sites by Ethan Zuckerman, Hal Roberts, Ryan McGrady, Jillian York, John Palfrey

Via a posting to GOVDOC-L by Daniel Schuman, Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency, Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation: "I've just released a significant report on the link between congressional staff pay and congressional competence. What makes it relevant to this list is that the research wouldn't have been possible without a government document librarian, and it highlights how difficult it can be to obtain official gov't docs that aren't official enough to be available from GPO. Second, for those who care about the legislative branch, Congress must do a better job of making available information about itself. It was nearly impossible to obtain copies of staff salary surveys. Not until this past
year were House Expenditure Reports, which include staff pay, made available online, and they are in a terrible format that is difficult to evaluate. The Senate won't begin publishing comparable data online until the 3rd quarter of 2011. The publication. Vital Statistics on Congress 2008 is incredibly useful, but was compiled by private researchers. Again, Congress should make this information available online in formats that lend themselves to easy analysis."

Washington Post: "The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks...To some agency veterans, WikiLeaks has vindicated the CIA's long-standing aversion to sharing secrets with other government agencies, a posture that came under sharp criticism after it was identified as a factor that contributed to the nation's failure to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001...As recently as two years ago, the agency rejected a request to make more of its intelligence reports available on the SIPRNET, the classified network used by the Pentagon to pass information around the world."

Follow up to postings on Wikileaks, news of a Hearing on the Espionage Act and the Legal and Constitutional Issues Raised by WikiLeaks, Thursday 12/16/2010.

Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere, Jillian C. York, The OpenNet Initiative (ONI), November 2010

News release: "Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder expressing concern over the Department of Justice's (DOJ) failure to abide by President Obama's commitment to government transparency and accountability. Despite policy directives from President Barack Obama and Attorney General Holder mandating a presumption of openness in administering the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), DOJ continues to operate - as it did during the Bush administration -- under a presumption of secrecy, deliberately withholding information about what DOJ is up to and why."

FOIA Facts: High Profile FOIA Requests - Scott A. Hodes comments on recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) added a new layer of scrutiny for FOIA requests that came from what it considered high profile groups (basically political non-profits and media organizations). The argument is that this review did or could potentially deny these requesters material they should receive and these denials (or potential denials) were only for political purposes.

Eric Lichtblau: "A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations. The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said. The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials. The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times."

"This order establishes an open and uniform program for managing information that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls pursuant to and consistent with law, regulations, and Government-wide policies, excluding information that is classified under Executive Order 13526 of December 29, 2009, or the Atomic Energy Act, as amended. At present, executive departments and agencies (agencies) employ ad hoc, agency-specific policies, procedures, and markings to safeguard and control this information, such as information that involves privacy, security, proprietary business interests, and law enforcement investigations. This inefficient, confusing patchwork has resulted in inconsistent marking and safeguarding of documents, led to unclear or unnecessarily restrictive dissemination policies, and created impediments to authorized information sharing. The fact that these agency-specific policies are often hidden from public view has only aggravated these issues. To address these problems, this order establishes a program for managing this information, hereinafter described as Controlled Unclassified Information, that emphasizes the openness and uniformity of Government-wide practice..."

DHS Singles Out EFF’s FOIA Requests for Unprecedented Extra Layer of Review: "The Identity Project notes on its blog today that the Department of Homeland Security singled out EFF, along with other activist groups and media representatives such as the ACLU, EPIC, Human Rights Watch, AP, etc, for an extra layer of review on its FOIA requests. Records posted online by the DHS in response to one of the Identity Project’s FOIA requests show that the agency passed certain requests through extra levels of screening. According to a policy memo from DHS’s Chief FOIA Officer and Chief Privacy Officer, Mary Ellen Callahan, DHS components were required to report “significant FOIA activities” in weekly reports to the Privacy Office, which the Privacy Office then integrated into its weekly report to the White House Liason. Included among these designated "significant FOIA activities" were requests from any members of "an activist group, watchdog organization, special interest group, etc." and “requested documents [that] will garner media attention or [are] receiving media attention."

News release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against three agencies of the Department of Justice (DOJ) today, demanding records about problems or limitations that hamper electronic surveillance and potentially justify or undermine the Administration's new calls for expanded surveillance powers. The issue has been in the headlines for more than a month, kicked off by a New York Times report that the government was seeking to require "back doors" in all communications systems -- from email and webmail to Skype, Facebook and even Xboxes -- to ease its ability to spy on Americans. The head of the FBI publicly claimed that these "back doors" are needed because advances in technology are eroding agents' ability to intercept information. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the DOJ Criminal Division to see if that claim is backed up by specific incidents where these agencies encountered obstacles in conducting electronic surveillance."

EFF: "As noted in our first post, EFF recently received new documents via our FOIA lawsuit on social network surveillance, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, that reveal two ways the government has been tracking people online: Citizenship and Immigration’s surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the DHS’s use of a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration. This is the second of two posts describing these documents and some of their implications. In addition to learning about surveillance of citizenship petitioners, EFF also learned that leading up to President Obama’s January 2009 inauguration, DHS established a Social Networking Monitoring Center (SNMC) to monitor social networking sites for “items of interest.” In a set of slides [PDF] outlining the effort, DHS discusses both the massive collection and use of social network information as well as the privacy principles it sought to employ when doing so."

LLRX.com: FOIA Facts - Mid-Term FOIA Grade for the Obama Administration - Scott A. Hodes provides perspective, and an overall grade, to how the administration has done during the first half of its first term in regard to FOIA.

"The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) October 4, 2010 charged the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency of serious legal and procedural violations in its withholding of performance data about how the agency is enforcing the immigration laws. The deficiencies, detailed in a letter TRAC sent the agency {October 4, 2010], involve ICE's violation of long standing provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the agency's own administrative rules and the stated policies of Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama in the handling of a request from TRAC for anonymous alien-by-alien statistical data about the arrests, detentions, charges and removal activities of the agency. The agency's actions — spelled out in a three-page September 22 letter to TRAC — have the effect of denying the American people concrete information about an important and controversial aspect of a key responsibility of the federal government: what is it doing and not doing to enforce the nation's immigration laws. Among the anonymous statistical data that ICE previously released but now said were "unavailable" were the city or state where the alien's apprehension took place, the facility where the alien is currently being detained, the nature of the formal removal charges, the details of any criminal charges and the alien's marital status. Under the FOIA, all federal agencies are required to provide specific reasons — such as national security or privacy — when they withhold records from requestors. But in the September 22 letter, FOIA Director Catrina M. Pavlik-Kennan, did not cite any of the possible exemptions to justify her decision not to provide a large segment of the data requested in May by TRAC."

FOIA at the Mid-term: Obstacles to Transparency Remain - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), September 30, 2010

The Freedom of Information Act and Nondisclosure Provisions in Other Federal Laws, Gina Stevens, Legislative Attorney, September 13, 2010

News release: "[August 11, 2010] Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan filed suit against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, CREW v. Fed. Election Comm’n (D.D.C.). The suit seeks to end the FEC’s practice of summarily dismissing complaints without explanation, leaving complainants insufficient information to sue the agency for failing to enforce campaign finance laws."

Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports, "In an open government lawsuit against the United States Marshals Service, EPIC has obtained more than one hundred images of undressed individuals entering federal courthouses. The images, which are routinely captured by the federal agency, prove that body scanning devices store and record images of individuals stripped naked. The 100 images are a small sample of more than 35,000 at issue in the EPIC lawsuit. EPIC has pursued a but the DHS refuses to release the images it has obtained. EPIC has also filed suit to stop the deployment of the machines in US airports. For more information, see EPIC Body Scanners, EPIC - EPIC v. DOJ (Marshall Service FOIA)

Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports, via EPIC new the organization has filed an open government lawsuit against the United States Marshals Service, EPIC has obtained more than one hundred images of undressed individuals entering federal courthouses. The images, which are routinely captured by the federal agency, prove that body scanning devices store and record images of individuals stripped naked. The 100 images are a small sample of more than 35,000 at issue in the EPIC lawsuit. EPIC has pursued a but the DHS refuses to release the images it has obtained. EPIC has also filed suit to stop the deployment of the machines in US airports. For more information, see EPIC Body Scanners and EPIC - EPIC v. DOJ (Marshall Service FOIA).

News release: "The National Archives National Declassification Center (NDC) has issued its first status report, covering the reporting period of January 1- June 30, 2010. During this time, nearly 8 million pages of material were processed and made available to the public. The creation of the NDC is specified in the Executive Order on Classified National Security Information signed by President Obama on December 29, 2009. The NDC is charged with streamlining declassification processes, facilitating quality assurance measures, and implementing standard training for declassification reviewers. "By streamlining the declassification process, the NDC is ushering in a new day in the world of access, allowing the National Archives to make more records available for public scrutiny much more quickly," said Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero. "I’m pleased the NDC is off to such a great start."

Department of Defense Open Government Plan Version 1.1, June 25, 2010

News release: "Senator Chuck Grassley released a staff report of the Committee on Finance on the practice of medical ghostwriting and is urging the National Institutes of Health to incorporate its findings in new, final disclosure guidelines. The committee staff report is based on a two-year review of the role that pharmaceutical and medical device companies play in developing articles for publication in medical journals. Grassley has expressed concern about the lack of transparency when industry pays third parties to write articles for medical journals which are then marketed to research and other physicians for their signatures."

FOIA Facts - Ideas for Faster FOIA Processing: Scott A. Hodes notes that in the current Congress there are bills pending that would create a commission to come up with ideas for faster FOIA processing. He contends that by taking those ideas, along with a few days of congressional oversight hearings to solicit other opinions, Congress would have ample information to create an actual bill that would implement faster FOIA processing now rather than wait for a "commission" to come up with these same ideas.

EPIC: "The Senate unanimously passed the Faster FOIA Act of 2010, introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-TX), that will establish a 16-member commission to determine methods for reducing delays in processing FOIA requests. Government reports reveal substantial delays in disclosing records subject to the open government law. The legislation seeks to improve the processing of FOIA requests. EPIC frequently uses the FOIA to obtain information about government programs that impact privacy rights."

Case Study: How Open data saved Canada $3.2 Billion - 14 April 2010 | David Eaves [via Susannah Fox, Pew Internet]

News release, PEER: "A ranking of agencies’ Open Government Plans compiled in an independent audit reveals the strongest and weakest agency plans, with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the top of the list and the Department of Justice (DOJ) at the bottom. Significantly, the audit found that key agencies assigned to oversee government openness efforts, particularly the President’s own Office of Management & Budget and DOJ, failed to produce strong Open Government Plans themselves. The audit was organized by OpenTheGovernment.org and conducted by volunteers from nonprofit public interest groups, including Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which have experience working with the agencies and evaluating their information policies. The Obama administration’s December 8, 2009, Open Government Directive (OGD) required executive agencies to develop and post Open Government Plans by April 7, 2010. The OGD specified elements related to transparency, participation, and collaboration that must be included in the plans. The audit rated the extent to which agencies met the administration's standards as spelled out in the OGD and allowed bonus points for actions that went beyond the OGD minimum."

Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports, this news release: "EPIC and a broad coalition of organizations sent a formal petition to the Department of Homeland Security to demand that the agency suspend the airport body scanner program. The petition states that the "uniquely intrusive search" is unreasonable and violates the Constitution. The petition further states the program fails to comply with several federal laws, including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedures Act. The petitioners also argue that the machines are ineffective and that there are better, less costly security technology. The petitioners contend that the TSA has routinely misled the pubic about the ability of the devices to store and transmit detailed images of travelers' naked bodies. In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC has already obtained technical documents, vendor contracts, and hundreds of traveler complaints."

News release: "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced draft guidance that would expand transparency and disclosure when the agency grants a conflict of interest waiver to permit an individual’s participation at an FDA advisory committee meeting. The draft guidance would expand the information disclosed about waivers prior to committee meetings. Specifically, the FDA proposes to post online the name of the company or institution associated with the financial interest along with the type of conflict of interest. Scientific advisory committees provide expert advice on significant scientific, technical, and policy matters to assist in the FDA’s mission to protect and promote the public health. The committees provide advice on specific regulatory decisions, such as product approvals, and general policy matters, including regulations and guidance."

• Draft Revised Guidance on Transparency and Advisory Committee
  
• Commissioner Hamburg’s Letter to senior FDA officials on proposed guidance
  
• Additional Advisory Committee Guidance Documents

Follow up to Missing White House E-Mails Still Factor in Torture Memo Investigation, this CREW news release: "On Friday, April 16, CREW received an initial response to its Freedom of Information Act request of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) related to the failure of former OLC official John Yoo to preserve any of his emails. In response to CREW’s request for record keeping guidance issued to OLC staff, OLC produced two memos, both of which require OLC staff to retain all emails “that are important to understanding a decision of the Office.” There can be no question Mr. Yoo’s failure to preserve any emails directly contravenes OLC’s record keeping guidance. Click here to read CREW's FOIA request."

"The U.S. Department of State provided these thirty five Self Study Guides in response to a FOIA request. This series of study guides, each covering a country or geographic area, were prepared for the use of USAID staff assigned to temporary duty in those countries. The guides are designed to allow individuals to familiarize themselves with the country or area in which they will be posted. These guides range in date from 2000 - 2006." [via governmentattic.org FOIA request]

"Today, U.S. departments and agencies are releasing their Open Government Plans -- another historic milestone in President Obama's campaign to change Washington. For too many years, Washington has resisted the oversight of the American public, resulting in difficulties in finding information, taxpayer dollars disappearing without a trace, and lobbyists wielding undue influence. For Americans, business as usual in Washington has reinforced the belief that the government benefits the special interests and the well-connected at the expense of the American people. No more. Since coming to office, the President has launched a series of initiatives to let the sunshine in, including posting White House visitor records, disclosing lobbyist contacts regarding stimulus funds, and launching data.gov and recovery.gov. That's why independent groups recently gave the Administration an A grade for transparency. Today we add to that body of accomplishments as the departments and agencies issue Open Government Plans pursuant to the Open Government Directive. The Plans will make operations and data more transparent, and expand opportunities for citizen participation, collaboration, and oversight. These steps will strengthen our democracy and promote accountability, efficiency and effectiveness across the government. Here are a few highlights:

• Department of Health and Human Services' Community Health Data Initiative
  
• Department of Energy's Open Energy Information Initiative
  
• Department of Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative
  
• Department of Housing and Urban Development's Homelessness Prevention Resources Initiative

FOIA Post: "On March 16, 2010, during Sunshine Week, the White House issued both a Presidential Statement and a Memorandum on the FOIA. First, President Obama issued a statement on the FOIA. In his Statement, the President applauded the work that has been done so far to increase transparency. He also recommitted his administration “to be the most open and transparent ever.” After highlighting some of the transparency initiatives the White House has undertaken, the President concluded by stating that “our work is not done” and that “[w]e will continue to work toward an unmatched level of transparency, participation, and accountability across the entire Administration.” On that same day, Rahm Emanuel, White House Chief of Staff, and Bob Bauer, Counsel to the President, issued a Memorandum to the Heads of Departments and Agencies on the Freedom of Information Act. The Memorandum highlights the successful work that has been done by agencies “to make the government more open and accountable to the American people.” The White House also expressed appreciation to agencies for their efforts in implementing the President’s Memorandum on the FOIA and confidence that agency Chief FOIA Officer Reports will demonstrate the progress achieved thus far. At the same time, the White House points out that “more work remains to be done, and such work requires persistent effort.” The White House requests department and agency heads to take action in two specific areas “to ensure full implementation of the President’s Memorandum on FOIA.” The Memorandum closes by noting that agencies may already be taking these and other steps as part of their drafting of their Open Government Plans, which are being developed as a result of the Open Government Directive, available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/memoranda_2010/m10-06.pdf."

Bloomberg: "The Federal Reserve Board must disclose documents identifying financial firms that might have collapsed without the largest U.S. government bailout ever, a federal appeals court said. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled today that the Fed must release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion U.S. loan program launched primarily after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The ruling upholds a decision of a lower-court judge, who in August ordered that the information be released."

News release: "[On March 15, 2010] Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced bipartisan legislation to make further improvements to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the nation’s premier open government law. Leahy is a longtime leader on FOIA issues, and has led efforts to make the federal government more open and transparent to the people it represents. This week marks the sixth annual Sunshine Week, a national observance of the importance of an open and transparent government. Leahy partnered with Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) to author the Faster FOIA Act, which will establish an advisory panel to examine agency backlogs in processing FOIA requests. Under the legislation, the panel, named the Commission on Freedom of Information Act Processing Delays, will be required to provide to Congress recommendations for legislative and administrative action to enhance agency responses to FOIA requests. The panel will be required to identify methods to reduce delays in the processing of FOIA requests, and will be charged with examining whether the system for charging fees and granting fee waivers under FOIA should be reformed in order to reduce delays in processing fee requests."

News release: "Despite President Barack Obama's and Attorney General Eric Holder's 2009 memoranda calling for reform in government agencies' administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the latest government-wide FOIA Audit released today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University found:

• Ancient requests--as old as 18 years--still persist in the FOIA system.
• A minority of agencies have responded to the Obama and Holder Memos with concrete changes in their FOIA practices.
• Only four out of 28 agencies reporting--including Holder's own Justice Department--show releases up and denials down under the FOIA.

The Audit, which is based on data obtained from government agencies through FOIA requests filed by the Archive in September 2009, found that federal agencies had a wide range of responses to the Obama and Holder Memos. Some agencies (13 out of 90) implemented concrete changes in practice as a result of the memos; some (14 out of 90) have made changes in staff training; and still others (11 out of 90) have merely circulated and discussed the memos. The remaining agencies (52) either told the Archive that they have no records that demonstrate how they implemented the Obama and Holder Memos or did not respond at all to the FOIA request."

Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports - "In response to an EPIC Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) released more documents about body scanners in US airports. The documents include many complaints from travelers who went through the devices. Travelers reported that they were not told about the pat down alternative or that they were going to be subject to a body scan by TSA officials. Travelers also expressed concern about radiation risks to pregnant women and the image capture of young children without clothes. EPIC has previously obtained whole body imaging vendor contracts, operational requirements, and procurement specifications from TSA. EPIC and Ralph Nader have urged President Obama to suspend the program until an independent review is completed."

LLRX.com - FOIA Facts: Why the Wait? Requesters who are new to using the FOIA statute often complain that they have filed a request within the last month but haven't receive their documents yet. FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes explains that the congressional budgeting process does not specifically provide FOIA operations within an agency a set line item amount. Thus, FOIA Offices usually have limited resources from within their own agencies to fulfill requests.

New York Times: "In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its 92-page report on the investigation into anthrax-laced letters that left five dead in 2001. The report describes evidence pointing to Bruce E. Ivins, a biodefense expert who killed himself in 2008. Included here is the F.B.I.'s summary report, as well as selected exhibits. Related Article."

New York Times: "Some big companies, like Hearst and The Associated Press, have been quietly ramping up their legal efforts, by doing more of the work in-house — and saving costs by not hiring outside lawyers — and being more aggressive in states where they can recoup legal fees and at the federal level, which also allows plaintiffs in such access cases to sue for legal fees when they win. At Hearst, the company’s top lawyer says it has never had more First Amendment lawsuits in courtrooms around the country than it does now. At The A.P., a cooperative owned by its member newspapers, in-house lawyers say they are becoming more aggressive on a number of fronts. In 2009, the agency was party to 40 lawsuits, moderately up from four years ago, when the number of lawsuits was in the low 30s, according to Dave Tomlin, associate general counsel for The A.P....But The A.P. has been vastly more assertive in appealing denied Freedom of Information Act, or F.O.I.A., requests from the federal government under the Obama administration, which came to power promising to operate a more open government and alter what some media lawyers complained was a trend toward more government secrecy in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Central Intelligence Agency Freedom of Information Act Annual Report Fiscal Year 2009. Released February 1, 2010.

Mail collection boxes on street corners, and those located in shopping and business districts throughout our country have methodically, silently, vanished over the course of the past decade. The large blue, free standing mailboxes many of us grew up using regularly to assist in the delivery of written correspondence, and of course birthday cards, are all but unknown to many. Perhaps the deluge of snow here in suburban Maryland has me waxing poetic about Americana, but there are indeed ramifications related to this occurrence. Does the disappearance of the mailboxes subtly herald the triumph of "connecting" and "networking"? The electronic "replacements": e-cards, e-mail, e-books, and e-time, along with texting, tweeting and a variety of other mobile techie apps. Back to ground, the facts indicate 100,000 collection boxes are gone, and this database, released via FOIA request, lists those that remain - just in time for Valentine's Day. So try and find one, and maybe mail a card - with thanks from those of us who still enjoy sending and receiving them (especially ones that are home made).

World Trade Center 9/11 Photos: A Fresh But Painful Look at Sept. 11 Tragedy

Executive Order - Original Classification Authority, December 29, 2009: designating specific officials to classify information originally as "Top Secret" or "Secret"

Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports, this news: On December 17, 2009, EPIC filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice concerning the use of devices that capture images of individuals stripped naked. The Transportation Security Administration has confirmed the Whole Body Imaging machines are being used in at least one Virginia federal court by the US Marshall Service. EPIC submitted a FOIA request for information about these devices including the contracts with the manufacturer of the machines, and information about technical specifications and training materials. The Marshall Service failed to respond adequately to the request. EPIC filed suit, said that the agency had not performed a sufficient search and should disclose the documents requested."

Via FAS: "The President's Memorandum of May 27, 2009 on Classified Information and Controlled Unclassified Information, directed a Task Force, led by the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General, to review the Controlled Unclassified Information (“CUI”) Framework established in 2008 for the management of Sensitive but Unclassified1 (“SBU”) terrorism-related information. The Task Force undertook a 90-day study of the CUI Framework, the current regimes for managing SBU information in the Executive Branch, and, by extension, the sharing of that information with our non-federal information-sharing partners. The Task Force concluded that Executive Branch performance suffers immensely from interagency inconsistency in SBU policies, frequent uncertainty in interagency settings as to exactly what policies apply to given SBU information, and the inconsistent application of similar policies across agencies. Additionally, the absence of effective training, oversight, and accountability at many agencies results in a tendency to over-protect information, greatly diminishing government transparency."

• The Open Government Directive
• The Open Government Progress Report to the American People

  "The directive, sent to the head of every federal department and agency today, instructs the agencies to take specific actions to open their operations to the public. The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration are at the heart of this directive. Transparency promotes accountability. Participation allows members of the public to contribute ideas and expertise to government initiatives. Collaboration improves the effectiveness of government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the federal government, across levels of government, and between the government and private institutions." Peter Orszag is the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

News release: "Building upon last month’s historic release of nearly 500 White House visitor records, today the White House releases more than 1,600 records of visits to the White House in response to another month’s worth of requests. You can view all the records in a searchable database in our Disclosures section. We announced earlier that in December the White House would -- for the first time in history -- begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As part of that initiative, we also offered to look back at the records created before the announcement of the policy and answer specific requests for visitor records created earlier in the year."

Protectionism Online: Internet Censorship and International Trade Law, ECIPE [European Centre for International Political Economy] Working Paper No. 12/2009, By Brian Hindley, Hosuk Lee-Makiyama

News release: "We previously announced that the White House in December of this year would -- for the first time in history -- begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As part of that initiative, we also offered to look back at the records created before the announcement of the policy and answer specific requests for visitor records created earlier in the year. So far we’ve processed 110 disclosure requests from September that yielded nearly 500 visitor records. All of these are now available on the White House website in accessible, searchable format for anyone to browse or download. Consistent with our earlier announcement that we will only release records 90 days or older, this first batch covers the period of time between January 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. Future batches will be posted on an ongoing basis."

New York Times: "In September 2008, the Bush administration changed domestic intelligence-gathering rules. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's interpretation of those rules was recently made public when the bureau released a redacted copy of its "Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide" in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit. The new rules have given F.B.I. agents the most power in national security matters that they have had since the post-Watergate era."

Follow up to previous postings on Investigation of Plame CIA Leak, this October 1, 2009 news release: "U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered the release of records of former Vice President Cheney’s interview with the FBI in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak investigation. Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), CREW had sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking release of the records. Judge Sullivan agreed with CREW that because the investigation is now over the Department of Justice (DOJ) cannot withhold all documents based on an exemption that protects law enforcement records from disclosure. Judge Sullivan rejected DOJ’s argument that future White House officials would be unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement inquiries if these records were released."

EPIC: "...the Department of Justice announced a new policy that limits the government’s use of the state secrets privilege. The state secrets privilege is a rule of evidence intended to prevent genuine matters of national security from being disclosed in open court. However, recently it has been misused by both the Bush and Obama administrations in order to derail litigation completely. For instance, in 2007 EPIC filed a “friend-of-the-court” brief in a warrantless wiretapping case, Hepting v. United States, in which the government argued that the case should be dismissed because it would reveal “state secrets.” Under the new policy, the privilege will be invoked only "to the extent necessary to protect against the risk of significant harm to national security." The Attorney General will also have to approve each determination. The State Secret Protection Act of 2009, legislation with a similar purpose, is now pending in Congress. For more information, see EPIC Open Government."

"The 7th International Right to Know Day on 28th of September 2009 will mark a year of historic advances for the right of access to information and will be celebrated by the Freedom of Information Advocate’s Network which has around 200 organisations in 75 countries who are calling for universal respect for the public’s right to know. The aim of Right to Know Day is to raise awareness of every individual's right of access to government-held information: the right to know how elected officials are exercising power and how taxpayers' money is being spent. Freedom of information advocates have used the day to share ideas, strategies, and success stories about the development of freedom of information laws and the goals of open government."

Review of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, Securities and Exchange Commission Office of Inspector General, September 25, 2009.

• September 11, 2009 - Pension Sponsorship and Participation: Summary of Recent Trends
• September 08, 2009 - Electric Power Storage
• August 31, 2009 - Access to Government Information In the United States
• August 27, 2009 - FY2010 National Defense Authorization Act: Selected Military Personnel Policy Issues
• August 27, 2009 - Mexico's Free Trade Agreements
• August 26, 2009 - Energy and Water Development: FY2010 Appropriations

Boston.com: "Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s administration, prompted by public records requests from the Globe, has acknowledged that city employees were routinely deleting e-mails, a potential violation of the state public records law. The acknowledgement came after the Globe filed several requests for e-mails sent and received by Menino’s Cabinet chief of policy and planning, Michael J. Kineavy. He is one of Menino’s most powerful and trusted advisers, intimately involved in nearly everything at City Hall, but a search of city computers found just 18 e-mails he had sent or received between Oct. 1, 2008, and March 31 of this year. The unusually low figure prompted administration officials to question him about what happened to the rest of the e-mails he was presumably sending and receiving during that period. Kineavy, who is also one of the mayor’s chief political advisers and a strategist on Menino’s reelection campaigns since 1993, told them that he deletes all his e-mails on a daily basis, in such a way that they are not saved on city backup computers, administration officials said."

The Apps for America Winners [via Abi Morgan]:

• DataMasher: "DataMasher helps citizens have a little fun with those data by creating mashups to visualize them in different ways and see how states compare on important issues. Users can combine different data sets in interesting ways and create their own custom rankings of the states."
  
• GovPulse: "govpulse was built to open the doors of government to the people they work for. By making such documents as the Federal Register searchable, more accessible and easier to digest, govepulse seeks to encourage every citizen to become more involved in the workings of their government and make their voice heard on the things that matter to them, from the smallest to the largest issues."
  
• ThisWeKnow: "Our long-term vision for ThisWeKnow is to model the entire data.gov catalog and make it available to the public using Semantic Web standards as a large-scale online database. ThisWeKnow will provide citizens with a single destination where they can search and browse all the information the government collects. It will also provide other application developers with a powerful standards-based API for accessing the data."

"The 2009 Secrecy Report Card chronicles slight decreases in secrecy across a wide spectrum of indicators in the last year of the Bush-Cheney Administration. The report, released today by a coalition of more than 70 open government advocates, also provides a six-month overview of the Obama Administration’s promise and practice on openness issues, and a section on financial transparency during the economic crisis...While very few quantitative indicators of secrecy exist yet to compare the Obama Administration to its predecessor, the Special Section on the Obama Administration uses qualitative examples to discuss the Administration’s openness promising policies and, in some instances, discouraging practice. Among the issues discussed are: the Open Government Directive, Classified Information, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), signing statements, use of state secrets, and more."

White Hosue Policy: "The President has decided to increase governmental transparency by implementing a voluntary disclosure policy governing White House visitor access records. The White House will release, on a monthly basis, all previously unreleased WAVES and ACR access records that are 90 to 120 days old. For example, records created in January 2010 will be released at the end of April 2010. The short time lag will allow the White House to continue to conduct business, while still providing the American people with an unprecedented amount of information about their government. No previous White House has ever adopted such a policy. The voluntary disclosure policy will apply to records created after September 15, 2009, and the first release of records (covering the month of September) will occur at the end of the year, on or about December 31, 2009. We expect that each monthly release will include tens of thousands of electronic records. Since the White House considers these records to be subject to the Presidential Records Act, it will continue to preserve them accordingly."
Bush Administration

Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:" The string of FOIA lawsuits for release of records of the government's emergency lending programs finally saw its first victory Monday. The Federal Reserve Board must release to Bloomberg News records identifying the financial firms it loaned bailout funds to as well as the assets or amounts put up as collateral, the news agency reported. Chief Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan federal court issued the first ruling requiring disclosure in a handful of suits in New York federal court brought separately by Bloomberg, Fox News and the New York Times. Bloomberg reported that she rejected the argument that the records were exempt from release under FOIA because they might harm the competitive advantage of the borrowers."

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 283: "The Central Intelligence Agency participated in every aspect of the wars in Indochina, political and military, according to newly declassified CIA histories. The six volumes of formerly secret histories (the Agency's belated response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados) document CIA activities in South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in unprecedented detail. The histories contain a great deal of new material and shed light on aspects of the CIA's work that were not well known or were poorly understood."

News release: "The [redacted] documents [below] were released through FOIA litigation by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International USA, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law seeking disclosure of information concerning “disappeared” detainees, including “ghost” and unregistered prisoners. The original FOIA requests were filed with several U.S. government agencies including the Departments of Justice and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency...CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo for the last seven years – sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA “ghost detainee” there. CCR represents current and former detainees who were tortured and abused at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and in the secret CIA detention program."

• 3 June 2005 - CIA Doc Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against Al-Qa'ida
  
• 13 July 2004 - CIA Khlaid Shaykh Muhammad - Preeminent Source on Al-Qa'ida
  
• Related postings on detention and torture

"In response to an EPIC Freedom of Information Act Request, the Government Services Administration released several contracts between the federal government and web 2.0 companies, including agreements with Blip.tv, Blist, Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), and MySpace. EPIC also obtained amendments to agreements with Facebook, Slideshare.net, Vimeo.com, and AddThis.com. The contracts do not address the privacy obligations of social media companies. The GSA letter to EPIC explained that “no specific Web 2.0 guidance currently exists,” but provided EPIC with Training Slides that raise privacy issues. The GSA Agreement with Google actually states that, “to the extent any rules or guidelines exist prohibiting the use of persistent cookies in connection with Provider Content applies to Google, Provider expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google.” Some of the agreements also permit companies to track users of government web sites for advertising purposes."

"Herdict is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Herdict is a portmanteau of 'herd' and 'verdict' and seeks to show the verdict of the users (the herd). Herdict Web seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict. The brainchild of Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Herdict Web is a natural progression from the OpenNet Initiative. Whereas OpenNet views Internet filtering through an academic lens, Herdict uses crowdsourcing to learn about and present a real time view of the experiences of users around the globe."

"The following body of research, conducted by the Department of Transportation and completed in 2003, has not been made public until now. The documents pertain to the safety of using wireless communication devices while driving. The New York Times obtained the research from the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, two consumer advocacy groups that earlier this year acquired more than 250 pages of undisclosed material through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit." See also Related Article.

"Pentagon classification authorities are treating classified historical documents as if they contain today's secrets, rather than decades-old information that has not been secret for years. Today the National Security Archive posted multiple versions of the same documents—on issues ranging from the 1973 October War to anti-ballistic missiles, strategic arms control, and U.S. policy toward China—that are already declassified and in the public domain. What earlier declassification reviewers released in full, sometimes years ago, Pentagon reviewers have more recently excised, sometimes massively. The overclassification highlighted by these examples poses a major problem that should be addressed by the ongoing review of national security information policy that President Obama ordered on May 27, 2009. New presumptions against classification that may be added to an executive order on national security information will not, in isolation, end overclassification. Rigorous oversight, accompanied by improved training and consequences for improper classification are essential."

News release, July 8, 2009: "Today, OMB Watch published a report that explores the impacts of secrecy labeling practices within the federal government. The report, Controlled Unclassified Information: Recommendations for Information Control Reform, shines a light on how government withholds unclassified information from the American people and offers recommendations on how to balance the need to protect sensitive materials with the duty to disclose information to the public...The report walks the reader through some of the aspects of secrecy labeling and explains technical terms such as sensitive but unclassified (SBU) information and controlled unclassified information (CUI)."

News release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice [on June 24, 2009], demanding the public release of the surveillance guidelines that govern investigations of Americans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI's Domestic Investigative Operational Guidelines went into effect in December of 2008 and detail the Bureau's procedures and standards for implementing the Attorney General's Guidelines on approved surveillance strategies...The FBI's general counsel has acknowledged that "the expansion of techniques available [to the Bureau] has raised privacy and civil liberties concerns." Investigations can include the electronic collection of information from online sources and computer databases, as well as the use of grand jury subpoenas to obtain telephone and email subscriber information. Other recent policy changes allow the FBI to engage in free-ranging investigation of Internet sites, libraries, and religious institutions." [Darlene Fichter]

News release: "The CIA informed the American Civil Liberties Union that it would delay by one week its release of a reprocessed version of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report on the CIA's interrogation and detention program [The heavily redacted version of the report released last year is available here.] The CIA turned over a heavily redacted version of the report in May 2008 as part of an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but on May 28, 2009, informed the court that it would review the same report with a view toward disclosing more information.In a letter to the ACLU, the government said it "will need additional time to make a final determination as to what additional information, if any, may be disclosed from the report."

Secrecy News: "The rise of “the wall” between intelligence and law enforcement personnel that impeded the sharing of information within the U.S. government prior to September 11, 2001 was critically examined in a detailed monograph (pdf) that was prepared in 2004 for the 9/11 Commission. It is the only one of four staff monographs that had not previously been released. It was finally declassified and disclosed earlier this month. In April 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified (pdf) that the failure to properly share threat information in the summer of 2001 could be attributed to Justice Department policy memoranda that were issued in 1995 by the Clinton Administration. That is an erroneous oversimplification, the staff monograph contends: “A review of the facts… demonstrates that the Attorney General’s testimony did not fairly and accurately reflect” the meaning or relevance of those 1995 policy documents. For one thing, those policies did not even apply to CIA and NSA information, which could have been shared with law enforcement without any procedural obstacles."

New on LLRX.com - FOIA Facts: The Detainee Photo Issue - Is it What it Seems? - Scott A. Hodes comments on the Obama administrations' decision to continue to fight the release of detainee photos.

News release: "United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) policy permits officials to search the laptops and other electronic devices of travelers without suspicion of wrongdoing, according to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed the FOIA request with CBP, a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to learn how CBP's suspicionless search policy, first made public in July 2008, is impacting the constitutional rights of international travelers."

News release: "Acting Archivist of the United States Adrienne Thomas announced today the appointment of Miriam Nisbet as the director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) within the National Archives and Records Administration. OGIS, an organization newly established under the OPEN Government Act of 2007, will provide policy guidance and mediation services for FOIA activities government-wide."

News releases, National Security Archive [includes links to full text of referenced documents]: "Now that President Obama has announced a review of U.S. secrecy policy, critics of secrecy policy and declassification requesters alike can only hope that those who carry it out understand the serious failings of the secrecy system as it currently exists. One of the absurdities of the system is that historical national security information, even information 60 years old, is subject to standards that are nearly as tough as those applied to recently-produced information. A group of documents recently declassified by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel and a CIA history that ISCAP could not release illustrate the problems raised by current standards, overly strict interpretations of those standards, and legal obstacles blocking the declassification of historical intelligence information...Recently, in response to appeals from the National Security Archive, ISCAP reversed several Central Intelligence Agency initial denials of documents from the 1960s and 1970s. While ISCAP withheld material it regards as sensitive secrets, it nevertheless found that much of the information denied by the CIA could be declassified without harm to national security."

Follow up to previous postings on missing White House emails during Bush administrations, today's news release: "Today, in Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) v. Office of Administration, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an opinion upholding the district court's conclusion that the Office of Administration (OA) is not an agency and therefore is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). CREW brought this lawsuit under the FOIA to uncover documents related to OA's response to the discovery that millions of emails had gone missing from White House servers. Although OA had a history of responding to FOIA requests – in fact the office’s own website included regulations for filing FOIA requests with OA – after CREW sued OA suddenly claimed it was not an agency and was not required to produce any of the requested documents. The district court sided with the Bush administration, finding that OA was not an agency because it performed only administrative support functions and did not exercise substantial independent authority. In today's ruling, the D.C. Circuit agreed with that decision."

News release: "The Office of Information Policy is planning to publish the 2009 edition of the Department of Justice Guide to the Freedom of Information Act through the Government Printing Office (GPO) in June. The 2009 Guide will contain detailed discussions of the FOIA’s exemptions, as well as its procedural requirements, and FOIA litigation considerations. The 2009 Guide will also discuss proactive disclosures, FOIA fees and fee waivers, exclusions, discretionary disclosures and waiver, FOIA attorney fees, and reverse FOIA cases...The Office of Information Policy will send one courtesy copy of the Guide to the Chief FOIA Officer and principal FOIA contact at each agency."

News release: "Citizens for Responsibility of Ethics in Washington (CREW), along with 36 other organizations, has sent a letter to the White House urging that the White House's Office of Administration (OA) once again become an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as had been the case in previous administrations."

White House news release: "The President’s 2010 Budget seeks to usher in a new era of responsibility – an era in which we not only do what we must to save and create new jobs and lift our economy out of recession, but in which we also lay a new foundation for long-term growth and prosperity. Making long overdue investments and reforms in education so that every child can compete in the global economy, undertaking health care reform so that we can control costs while boosting coverage and quality, and investing in renewable sources of energy so that we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil – these all are key pillars of this new foundation. Another is fiscal discipline. We cannot put our nation on a course for long-term growth with uncontrollable deficits and debt, and we no longer can afford to tolerate investments in programs that are outdated, duplicative, ineffective, or wasteful. That’s why the Budget includes a separate volume, Terminations, Reductions, and Savings. In this volume, the Administration identifies 121 terminations, reductions, or other areas of savings which will save nearly $17 billion next year alone. About half of the savings for next fiscal year are from defense programs, and half are from non-defense programs. This volume is a progress report on the President’s effort to have his Administration go through the budget line by line to identify which programs work and which do not."
The President’s Budget

• Presidential Transmittal Letter
  
• Terminations, Reductions, and Savings
  
• Appendix - Detailed Budget Estimates by Agency
  Budget Overview
  
• Fact Sheets on Key Issues
  
• State Fact Sheets

FOIA Facts: DOJ AG Issues New Guidelines Establishing a System for Improving Transparency: Scott A. Hodes highlights the areas of this new DOJ guidance that are of the most interest to the FOIA community.

DOJ Office of Information Policy FOIA Post - Creating a New Era of Open Government: "On his first full day in office, January 21, 2009, President Obama issued a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The President directed that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails."...The President directed the Attorney General to issue FOIA Guidelines for the heads of executive departments and agencies "reaffirming the commitment to accountability and transparency." On March 19, 2009, during Sunshine Week, Attorney General Eric Holder issued those Guidelines. The Attorney General highlighted that the FOIA "reflects our nation’s fundamental commitment to open government" and that his Guidelines are "meant to underscore that commitment and to ensure that it is realized in practice."...The FOIA Guidelines stress that the FOIA is to be administered with the presumption of openness called for by the President. This presumption means that information should not be withheld "simply because [an agency] may do so legally." Moreover, the Attorney General has directed that whenever full disclosure of a record is not possible, agencies "must consider whether [they] can make partial disclosure." The Attorney General also "strongly encourage[s] agencies to make discretionary disclosures of information."

"Despite reforms enacted by Congress and an order from the last administration to do a better job, federal agencies continue to give those seeking information a frustrating and oftentimes unsatisfying experience, an analysis of federal agency FOIA reports shows. Backlogs persist despite fewer FOIA requests, agencies continue to miss the statutory response deadline in a majority of cases, and agencies said they rejected a highest percentage of requests since performance reporting began, according a quantitative review by the Sunshine in Government Initiative of federal agency FOIA reports."

"Today, EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding disclosure of records detailing airport scanners that take naked pictures of American travelers. Security experts describe the "whole body imaging" scanners as virtual strip searches. The Transportation Security Administration plans to make the scans mandatory at all airport security checkpoints, despite prior assurances that whole body imaging would be optional. EPIC's request seeks documents concerning the agency's ability to store and transmit detailed images of naked U.S. citizens. For more information, see EPIC's Whole Body Imaging page and EPIC's FOIA Litigation Manual."

News release (includes links to declassified documents): "As a special tribunal in Peru pronounced former president Alberto Fujimori guilty of human rights atrocities, the National Security Archive today posted key declassified U.S. documents that were submitted as evidence in the court proceedings. The declassified records contain intelligence gathered by U.S. officials from Peruvian sources on the secret creation of “assassination teams” as part of Fujimori’s counterterrorism operations, the role of the Peruvian security forces in human rights atrocities and Fujimori’s participation in protecting the military from investigation."

"The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 12958, as amended, require the declassification of nonexempt historically-valuable records 25 years old or older. By 31 December 2006 all agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to be historically valuable (designated as "permanent" by the agency and the National Archives) and exclusively containing their equities. As the deadline pertains to CIA, it covers the span of relevant documents originally dating from the establishment of the CIA after WWII through 1981.

CIA has deployed an electronic full-text searchable system it has named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), which has been operational since 2000 and is located at NARA II in College Park Maryland. On this Agency site, researchers can now use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded onto CREST through 2008. Data for the remaining years up to the present (CREST deliveries have been ongoing) will be placed on this site at later dates.

Search the CREST web database here. Note: it does not contain actual images of the documents as the regular Electronic Reading Room search does. Rather, it contains details on the files to speed FOIA requests.

News release: "In celebration of Sunshine Week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched a sophisticated search tool that allows the public to closely examine thousands of pages of documents the organization has pried loose from secretive government agencies. The documents relate to a wide range of cutting-edge technology issues and government policies that affect civil liberties and personal privacy.

EFF's document collection -- obtained through requests and litigation under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) -- casts light on several controversial government initiatives, including the FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse and DCS 3000 surveillance program, and the Department of Homeland Security's Automated Targeting System and ADVISE data-mining project. The documents also provide details on Justice Department collection of communications routing data, Pentagon monitoring of soldiers' blogs, mismatches in the Terrorist Screening Center's watchlist, and FBI misuse of its national security letter subpoena authority.

The new search capability enables visitors to EFF's website to conduct keyword searches across the universe of government documents obtained by EFF, maximizing the value of the material."

Follow up to March 19, 2009 - New Attorney General Guidelines on FOIA Released - CJR: "In a bit of Congressional commemoration, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and John Cornyn, his Texan Republican colleague, have introduced S. 612, new legislation that would require any new b(3) exemptions to specifically reference the Freedom of Information Act, so that these exemptions would be easier to spot. The senators have frequently collaborated on legislation designed to improve FOIA, and this is the third consecutive Sunshine Week in which Cornyn and Leahy have introduced this legislation. In 2007, it passed the Senate unanimously...Because the law only applies to future b(3) exemptions that Congress might write, it does nothing to address those already in the US Code. Like Title 7, Chapter 77, Sec 4608, Subsection G, Paragraph 1, which protects certain information about honeybee handlers, or Title 7, Chapter 80, Section 4908, Subsection c, which does something similar for watermelon producers and handlers submitting information quantifying the size of their business in order to participate in the National Watermelon Promotion Board."

Sunshine Week 2009 Survey of State Govt. Info. Online, Published: March 14, 2009, Last Updated: March 18, 2009

• Freedom of Information Act: DHS Has Taken Steps to Enhance Its Program, but Opportunities Exist to Improve Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness, GAO-09-260, March 20, 2009: "DHS has taken steps to enhance its FOIA program. DHS developed an improvement plan that focused on eliminating its backlog of overdue requests, implementing enhanced training requirements, and deploying more advanced technology. Further, the DHS Privacy Office has initiated actions to ensure policy compliance and provide oversight of FOIA operations throughout the department's component agencies, including developing a department wide handbook, monitoring monthly data processing statistics, and instituting relevant training for employees. As a result, DHS has reported reducing its backlog by about 24 percent since implementing its plan. However, opportunities exist for DHS to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of FOIA processing across the department."
• Seafood Fraud: FDA Program Changes and Better Collaboration among Key Federal Agencies Could Improve Detection and Prevention, GAO-09-258, February 19, 2009: "In 2007, Americans consumed almost 5 billion pounds of seafood. Most seafood buyers, at many levels--importers, distributors, supermarkets, restaurants, and individual consumers--assume that the seafood they buy is what the seller claims it is. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes seafood products are mislabeled for financial gain--an activity called seafood fraud."

National Security Archive: "Attorney General Eric Holder today released new guidelines for federal agencies on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that reinforce the presumption of disclosure articulated by President Obama in his day one Memorandum on FOIA, issued January 21, 2009. Attorney General Holder’s memorandum provides practical guidance for implementing the presumption of disclosure, including by encouraging discretionary releases of records and releasing portions of records even when other portions are being withheld. It states that the Department of Justice will only defend withholdings in court when there is a reasonably foreseeable risk of harm to an interest protected by one of the FOIA exemptions or the law requires the information to be withheld. It states that this policy will be applied to pending litigation “if practicable” and “where there is a substantial likelihood that application of the guidance would result in a material disclosure of additional information.”

• Summaries of New Decisions -- February 2009(posted 03/12/2009)
• Summaries of New Decisions -- January 2009 (posted 03/12/2009)
• Summaries of New Decisions -- December 2008 (posted 03/12/2009)
• Office of Information Policy (OIP) (posted 03/11/2009)

News release: "The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) today asked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to reverse its decision withholding government organizational information on the grounds that the release would violate the privacy of individual employees. TRAC's appeal to OPM concerned a February 23 ruling by Gary A. Lukowski, the manager of OPM's Workforce Information and Planning Group, that contended the release of the requested information about how an agency is organized into units and subunits "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." In its appeal, TRAC said it was impossible for the requested structural information to invade personal privacy because "these records contain no information about any individual." TRAC also noted that the OPM action directly contradicted President Obama's January 21 Transparency and Open Government memorandum pledging his administration to "an unprecedented level of openness."

News release: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today won the fifth annual Rosemary Award for the worst Freedom of Information Act performance by a federal agency. The FBI’s reports to Congress show that the Bureau is unable to find any records in response to two-thirds of its incoming FOIA requests on average over the past four years, when the other major government agencies averaged only a 13% “no records” response to public requests...During fiscal year 2008, the FBI gave “no records” responses to 57% of the requests it processed, more than any other major agency. The Bureau only provided documents (most redacted) in less than 14% of cases—the lowest percentage of requests granted among the major agencies in the federal government. In 2007, the FBI responded with “no records” in 70% of its FOIA requests. In 2006, “no records” peaked at 74%; and in 2005, at 66%—the four-year average."

News release: "According to a letter filed by the government in court today, the CIA acknowledged it destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations. The admission comes in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking records of the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of prisoners in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all the requested records. That motion is still pending."

National Security Archive: "Today Secretary of Defense Robert Gates lifted a blanket ban on news media coverage of the honor guard ceremonies that mark the return of military casualties from abroad. The new policy will permit media coverage of the ceremonies, during which caskets draped with American flags are brought home from war, after consultation with the families of the fallen. The Obama administration’s move restores press access to the honor ceremonies, which had been the practice from World War II through the Panama invasion of 1989. During the lead-up to the Gulf War in 1991, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney instituted the ban. The news media lost a first amendment challenge to the ban, but Professor Ralph Begleiter and the National Security Archive forced the release of hundreds of images taken by military photographers under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 2005."

Via Michael Ravnitzky: "Bloomberg News asked the Federal Reserve Board to disclose the securities that the central bank is accepting from banks on behalf of taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion in loans to the banks, according to a November 2008 Bloomberg news report by Mark Pittman. Bloomberg News [subsequently] sued the Federal Reserve to [obtain] the documents. The Bloomberg lawsuit is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan)...The Government Attic website has posted documents from the Federal Reserve relating to a request by Bloomberg News for information on collateral put up for bank bailouts. The relevant material is a few pages into the document posted here titled: Contents of the administrative tracking/processing file for each FOIA request and FOIA Appeal received at the Federal Reserve Board from Bloomberg News Service during calendar years 2007 and 2008 - [21-February 2008].

"The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently declassified and posted lengthy, formerly Top Secret oral history interviews with four of its most prominent personnel: Arthur J. Levenson, Dr. Solomon Kullback, Oliver R. Kirby, and Benson K. Buffham." [The Memory Hole]

"FOX Business Network has won a victory against the Treasury Department in its Freedom of Information Act request for details about the government’s bailout plan. Judge Richard J. Holwell of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said in a decision Friday that the government is directed to comply with FOX Business’s request under the FOIA “within 30 days and to produce a Vaughn index with 45 days.”

FOIA Facts: President Obama’s FOIA Memorandum and When Change Will Actually Occur - Scott A. Hodes notes the Obama administration's immediate focus on FOIA, but reminds us that changing the ship of government requires numerous steps and constant vigilance to ensure change remains consistent and constant.

Central Intelligence Agency Freedom of Information Act Annual Report
Fiscal Year 2008

"A new National Priorities Project (NPP) analysis highlights a significant gap in the Army's 2008 quantity and quality goals...This analysis is based on data obtained from the Department of Defense (Army Recruiting Command) through a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the National Priorities Project. The Department of Defense provided the data for every non-prior service, active-duty Army accession by ZIP Code with race, ethnicity, gender, birth date, citizenship, educational attainment and score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) for Fiscal Year 2008. Demographic data used in the study were purchased from Claritas, a leading marketing and demographic data company. Population estimates from the Census Bureau were also used. To access the data by state, county, or zip code, go to the NPP Database."

News release: "On his first full day in office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda heralding what he called a "new era of openness." Announcing a Presidential Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act to reestablish a presumption of disclosure for information requested under FOIA, President Obama said that "every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known."

President Obama also issued an executive order reversing changes made by President George W. Bush to the Presidential Records Act (PRA), stating he would hold himself and his own records "to a new standard of openness." The PRA order permits only the incumbent president (and not former presidents' heirs or designees or former vice presidents) to assert constitutional privileges to withhold information, and would provide for review by the Attorney General and the White House Counsel before a president could claim privilege over his or her records.

Finally, President Obama also today issued a Presidential Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government which recognizes that "[o]penness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." It directs the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Chief Technology Officer, and the Administrator of the General Services Administration to develop an Open Government Directive within 120 days to implement the memo."

U.S. Department of Justice Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2008: Backlogs of FOIA Requests and Administrative Appeals as of end of fiscal years - 4364.

News release: "The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is publicly releasing for the first time the final version of a white paper created by the National Procurement Fraud Task Force Legislation Committee recommending ways to reduce procurement fraud. The June 9, 2008, white paper titled "Procurement Fraud: Legislative and Regulatory Reform Proposals," consists of recommendations that would "significantly aid the Federal Government in preventing, detecting and prosecuting procurement fraud," according to its authors. The Legislation Committee co-chairs are Brian Miller, Inspector General for the General Services Administration, and Richard Skinner, Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security. The draft white paper was originally dated July 9, 2007, but it went through an intense year-long vetting process."

FOIA Facts: New FOIA Provisions Take Effect - Scott A. Hodes discusses two sections (Section 6 and 7) of the OPEN Government Act of 2007 that just went into effect, and the problems that will be encountered by requesters trying to use them to their advantage.

The Georgetown Hoya: "A Georgetown group investigating the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has recently filed suit against several government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, to obtain documents relating to Pearl’s death. The approximately 30 students and former student members of the Pearl Project have spent over a year trying to determine who killed Pearl in Pakistan in 2002...As part of the investigation, the Pearl Project filed Freedom of Information Act requests with eight federal agencies, requesting documents pertaining to the case and to key suspects. However, all eight agencies have, according to the lawsuit, refused to grant access to the documents for a variety of reasons."

News release: "Rep. Dave Obey (D-WI), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI), incoming Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced three significant changes to further increase transparency and reduce funding levels for earmarks, building on reforms brought about in the last Congress...new reforms to begin with the 2010 bills include:

• Posting Requests Online: To offer more opportunity for public scrutiny of member requests, members will be required to post information on their earmark requests on their Web sites at the time the request is made explaining the purpose of the earmark and why it is a valuable use of taxpayer funds.
  
• Early Public Disclosure: To increase public scrutiny of committee decisions, earmark disclosure tables will be made publically available the same day as the House or Senate Subcommittee rather than Full Committee reports their bill or 24
  hours before Full Committee consideration of appropriations legislation that has not been marked up by a Senate Subcommittee.
  
• Further Cuts: Earmarks will be further reduced to 50% of the 2006 level for non-project-based accounts." [Note: "President-elect Barack Obama said today in a meeting with members of his budget team that he will ban earmarks from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that will soon go before Congress. The President-elect also said he expects his administration to inherit a budget deficit of up to $1 trillion."]

Editorial - Exit Stonewalling: "...E-mail messages that have gone suspiciously missing are estimated to number in the millions. These could illuminate some of the administration’s darker moments, including the lead-up to the Iraq war, when intelligence was distorted, the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. torture interrogations, and the vindictive outing of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson. The deep-sixed history also includes improper business conducted by more than 50 White House appointees via e-mail at the Republican Party headquarters. Historians and archivists are suing the administration. We should be grateful for their efforts. Entire days of e-mail records have turned up conveniently blank at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney."

News release: "Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Bart Stupak (D-MI), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, today released a Committee on Energy and Commerce Majority Staff report detailing the findings of the Committee’s bipartisan investigation relating to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)...The report, titled Deception and Distrust: The Federal Communications Commission Under Chairman Kevin J. Martin, is the culmination of a bipartisan investigation into the FCC’s regulatory processes and management practices that was formally launched on January 8, 2008."

News release: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has unanimously approved measures that will shine more light than ever before on the municipal securities market by tapping the power of the Internet. For the first time, investors will have a free, one-stop way to find municipal bond information online to help them make investment decisions...The rule amendments approved by the SEC designate the MSRB as the central repository for ongoing disclosures by municipal issuers. Under a separate MSRB rule change, its Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) system would make these disclosures available to investors in the same manner that the SEC’s EDGAR system does for corporate disclosures...EMMA will operate as a consolidated, online portal where investors can instantly access, for free, all of the key information produced by municipal bond issuers about their bonds. Offering documents, real-time trade prices, and education resources already are available on EMMA."

"Public Citizen launched the Public Interest FOIA Clinic, an online resource that will help nonprofit organizations obtain federal government documents. The FOIA Clinic will help ensure that agencies live up to a high standard for openness and accountability set by the Freedom of Information Act and that public interest organizations can receive the information they need to further their work. Through the Public Interest FOIA Clinic, the Public Citizen Litigation Group - a division of Public Citizen - will provide a range of direct litigation assistance to public interest organizations, from initial advice about requesting documents to pro bono representation in litigating the denial of a request. Litigation assistance is particularly essential to the many public interest organizations that have substantive expertise in their field but lack substantial FOIA litigation experience."

“Seat at the Table” Transparency Policy: "As an extension of the unprecedented ethics guidelines already in place for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, we take another significant step towards transparency of our efforts for the American people. Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the Transition and the Administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a “seat at the table” and that we receive the benefit of their feedback. Accordingly, any documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be posted on our website for people to review and comment on. In addition to presenting ideas as individuals at www.change.gov, the American people deserve a “seat at the table” as we receive input from organizations and make decisions. In the interest of protecting the personal privacy of individuals, this policy does not apply to personnel matters and hiring recommendations."

• See also this Pew Internet post, Joining the Discussion at Change.gov: "While [change.gov]...is still a work in progress, the Obama team has clearly opted to err on the side of encouraging debate and interaction and sort out the details as they go along. That much is apparent from the recent online discussion of health care, which has so far garnered more than 4,000 user comments and a video reply from new HHS Secretary Daschle (the administration has since opened a similar discussion for the economy)."
  
• Related postings on the Obama transition

Google's gatekeepers, by Jeffrey Rosen, IHT: "For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil-liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of October, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy.

Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong [Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google] and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good - even a corporation whose informal motto is "Don't be evil"?"

Guide to Researching the Department of Energy's Records. Topics include: Introduction/Overview of DOE and Its Records, Locating Records--By Originating Agencies and Offices, Locating Records--Repositories, Reading Rooms, and Document Collections, Locating Records--Online Resources, Finding Guides, and Other Research Tools, and Accessing Records--Points to Ponder, Potential Roadblocks, Possible Alternatives.

"The Privacy Act Issuances contain descriptions of Federal agency systems of records maintained on individuals and rules agencies follow to assist individuals who request information about their records. The two sources of Privacy Act Notices are: the Privacy Act Issuances (Compilations 1995-Forward) and the Federal Register which has updates to the most recent Compilation."

• OIP Guidance: New Requirement To Route Misdirected FOIA Requests (posted 11/18/2008)
• OIP Guidance: New Limitations on Assessing Fees (posted 11/18/2008)
• OIP Guidance: New Limitations on Tolling the FOIA's Response Time (posted 11/18/2008)
• OIP Guidance: Assigning Tracking Numbers and Providing Status Information for Requests (posted 11/18/2008

FOIA Facts: Sources for FOIA Training - Scott A. Hodes comments on the limited availability of training in this critical area, and identifies providers in the private and public sectors.

OMB Watch: "...more than 240 individuals and organizations [Participants included good government groups, professional associations, traditional reporters, bloggers, unions, representatives of the philanthropic community, technology experts, and members of academia. In an unprecedented manner, the project brought together conservatives, libertarians, and progressives. These recommendations are a demonstration that government transparency is neither a left nor a right issue. It's an American issue] called on President-elect Barack Obama and the 111th Congress to act on a series of government openness recommendations. The recommendations are included in a report from the 21st Century Right to Know Project, titled Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda: Recommendations to President-elect Obama and Congress.

Seventy recommendations urge the new president and the incoming Congress to act quickly on a number of key government openness issues while encouraging a more systemic, longer-term approach to a variety of other transparency problems that plague the federal government. Recommendations needing urgent attention are grouped into a "First 100 Days" chapter. Others are sorted into three additional chapters: National Security and Secrecy; Usability of Information; and Creating a Government Environment for Transparency."

News release: "The Obama administration can act quickly after taking office in January to reverse the secrecy trend of the last eight years and restore openness in the executive branch, according to a set of new proposals posted online today by the National Security Archive. More than 60 organizations joined the recommendations, which call on President-elect Obama to restore efficiency and openness to the Freedom of Information Act process, reform the classification system to reduce overclassification and facilitate greater declassification, and ensure that presidential records are handled in accordance with the law and Congress’ intent."

"Nearly 180 organizations representing the business, education and scientific communities have urged the next president to appoint a White House science adviser by January 20—Inauguration Day—and give the adviser cabinet rank."

News release: "In a striking rebuke to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia yesterday rejected the CIA's view that it - and not journalists - has the right to determine which Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are newsworthy. Reconsidering its earlier decision deferring to the CIA's written assurances that the agency would cease illegally denying the National Security Archive's news media status, the court ordered the CIA to treat the Archive as a representative of the news media for all of its pending and future non-commercial requests. Finding that the CIA "has twice made highly misleading representations to the Archive, as well as to [the] Court," the court explained that the CIA's position "is truly hard to take seriously" and enjoined the CIA from illegally denying the Archive's news media status."

ISOO Notices: "On September 30, 2008, the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office advised Federal agencies that ISOO would begin to issue ISOO Notices covering aspects of the classification, safeguarding, and declassification programs administered under Executive Order 12958, as amended and its implementing directive, 32 C.F.R. 2001. These ISOO Notices will seek to improve the classified national security information programs of Federal agencies by disseminating and providing consistent guidance to Federal agencies."

"In EPIC v. DOJ, EPIC, the ACLU, and the National Security Archive are seeking government documents regarding the President's warrantless wiretapping program. Today, a federal court ordered the Department of Justice to provide for inspection copies of legal memos authored by government lawyers. The opinions, prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, provided the legal basis for the President to wiretap US citizens in the United States without court approval. EPIC began the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in December 2005, after the New York Times first reported the details of the wiretap program. For more information, see EPIC's EPIC v. DOJ page. (Oct. 31)"

DOJ Office of Information and Privacy (OIP) Guidance: Segregating and Marking Documents for Release in Accordanc with The Open Government Act

Processed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests - "The George Bush Library is in the process of updating and adding to the list of finding aids on this page" [which currently includes documents from 1998 to 2005].

News release: "Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) issued a subpoena Tuesday compelling Attorney General Michael Mukasey to provide testimony and related documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee about legal analysis and advice from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) related to the Bush administration’s terrorism policies, including detention and interrogation policies and practices."

"The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today issued a report card grading 15 federal agencies on their policies controlling communication between staff scientists and the news media and the public. The report found significant inconsistencies and confusion among agency media policies and their implementation. Some agency policies encourage free speech, but the agencies stifle communication. Other policies are weak, but in practice the agencies allow scientists to speak freely. And although overall many agency policies are deficient, UCS has seen some positive changes in recent years.

• Download the full report
  
• View methodology and primary documents
  
• View additional information on selected agencies
  
• Enlarged version of the summary chart

TRAC news release: "...the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday turned over to TRAC thousands of pages of agency statistics on audits of all types, including individual, corporate, partnership and S corporation audits. A strongly worded June 13, 2008 ruling issued by Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington mandated that the data requested under the Freedom of Information Act be turned over to TRAC, as specified in two court orders issued against the agency in 2006. However, rather than release the information as directed by the Court, the IRS instead filed a motion for a stay pending an appeal to the Ninth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals.

In denying this motion for a stay, Judge Pechman wrote that "Defendant has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its appeal, and [...] enforcement of the Court's June 13, 2008 order will not cause irreparable harm to any party or increase the burden on the IRS and does not impact the public interest."

Despite this ruling, and despite explicit instructions from the Court directing the IRS to immediately comply with the instructions set forth in the June 13, 2008 order, the IRS submitted a second motion for a stay. The denial of this second motion for a stay included the observation that the "Defendant has repeatedly defied this Court's orders" and instructed the IRS yet again to comply with the June 13, 2008 order.

Scott L. Nelson, TRAC's lead attorney in this case, detailed in an October 6 letter to the Ninth Circuit why the Court should not expedite consideration of the IRS' appeal. The next day, the IRS abandoned its request for an expedited ruling, and turned over the requested data to TRAC. The IRS has not however withdrawn its motion for a stay."

CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room: "The automatic declassification provisions of Executive Order 12958, as amended, require the declassification of nonexempt historically-valuable records 25 years old or older. By 31 December 2006 all agencies were to have completed the review of all hardcopy documents determined to be historically valuable (designated as "permanent" by the agency and the National Archives) and exclusively containing their equities. As the deadline pertains to CIA, it covers the span of relevant documents originally dating from the establishment of the CIA after WWII through 1981.

CIA has deployed an electronic full-text searchable system it has named CREST (the CIA Records Search Tool), which has been operational since 2000 and is located at NARA II in College Park Maryland. On this Agency site, researchers can now use an on-line CREST Finding Aid to research the availability of CIA documents declassified and loaded onto CREST through 2002. Data for the remaining years up to the present (CREST deliveries have been ongoing) will be placed on this site at later dates.

Search the CREST web database here. Note: it does not contain actual images of the documents as the regular Electronic Reading Room search does. Rather, it contains details on the files to speed FOIA requests."

Internet Archive: "The FBI's entire main (Headquarters) file on Martin Luther King, Jr. All 121 parts - 16,600+ pages - posted online for the first time, by The Memory Hole. The 121 parts have been put into 12 zip files. To access them, click here."

CNNMoney.com: "The federal government would provide as much as $700 billion in a far-reaching plan to rescue the nation's troubled financial system, according to a draft of the proposed bill obtained by CNN. The legislation is still being negotiated and elements of the bill could still change. The core of the bill is based on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's request for authority to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions so banks can resume lending and so the credit markets, now virtually frozen, can begin to operate more normally."

• Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: "Significant bipartisan work has built consensus around dramatic improvements to the original Bush-Paulson plan to stabilize American financial markets—including requiring a plan to ensure the taxpayer is repaid in full. Read the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (SUBJECT TO FURTHER TECHNICAL REVISIONS - 110 pages, PDF)
  
• Summary of the Draft Proposal To Rescue U.S. Financial Markets, Office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- Sept. 28, 2008, via WSJ.com
  
• Full text of the draft bill via WSJ.com
  
• WSJ.com: Success of Rescue Depends On Lending From China, Mideast: "The U.S. is turning to foreign governments and overseas investors to buy much of the $700 billion in Treasury debt that would be sold to finance the bailout."
  
• Bill Allison, Sunlight Foundation, September 28, 2008: "Mark Tapscott of the D.C. Examiner posts a comparison of what was in the original plan submitted by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and what congressional negotiators have arrived at now."
  
• Advocates Demand Congress Put Bailout Details on Internet: "[Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation] wants legislators to make any and all of the iterations of the legislation available electronically -- all the way until it is ready to be voted on on the floor of both congressional chambers."
  
• Related postings on financial system

Overview of all 88 FOIA Countries (15 pages, PDF) by Roger Vleugels.

"Welcome to TobaccoWiki, the online research project to which anyone can contribute. We need your help to mine the millions of pages of previously-secret, internal tobacco industry documents now posted on the Internet. The purpose of Tobaccowiki is to make it easier to find information about tobacco industry behavior, and to reveal what has been learned about the industry through its documents. Like Wikipedia, the collaborative, online, free encyclopedia, Tobaccowiki is also a collaborative project. We need you to help us search through the tobacco industry documents now available online and enter information here about what you find. We welcome participation from everyone: students, journalists, smokers and non-smokers, food service workers, public health workers, tobacco control advocates, musicians, scientists, researchers and just plain curious folks. Everyone is invited to join in this project to facilitate access to information in the tobacco industry documents."

News release: "More than 50 years after the historic but controversial execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of atomic espionage, the U.S. government this Thursday, September 11, is expected to make public long shrouded grand jury testimony from its prosecution of the Rosenbergs, which will be the subject of a press briefing on September 11, 2008.

Several noted Cold War scholars will provide expert analysis of the newly public documents at the briefing, organized by the National Security Archive, the independent nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University, which successfully led a coalition of historians in demands that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) unseal Rosenberg trial grand-jury records. The Archive, along with the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Archivists, and New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, filed a petition in January 2008 seeking the release of grand jury records from the 1951 indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, arguing that public interest outweighed privacy and national security concerns."

DOJ FOIA Post: "In light of Section 9 [Section 9 amends 5 U.S.C. § 552(f), the definitions provision of the FOIA, by including in the definition of “record” any information “maintained for an agency by an entity under Government contract, for the purposes of records management.” This provision makes clear that records, in the possession of Government contractors for purposes of records management, are considered agency records for purposes of the FOIA] of the OPEN Government Act, it is important for agencies to ensure that their searches for records in response to FOIA requests include any potentially responsive agency records that may be in the possession of an entity under contract with the agency for purposes of records management. Any agency employing such a government contractor to manage or store its records must institute appropriate procedures to allow it to search for and identify agency records that may be responsive to a FOIA request that are in the possession of that records management-contractor. Given that the clear intent of this provision is to clarify that the location of the agency records in the hands of the contractor for records management purposes does not remove the records from the scope of the FOIA, such records must be capable of being searched in response to FOIA requests. If responsive agency records are located in the possession of the records management-contractor, they should be forwarded to the appropriate FOIA office within the agency for processing. Such records must be identified and handled by the agency just as if they had been in the possession of the agency in the first instance."

"OpenTheGovernment.org’s fifth annual report, Secrecy Report Card 2008, shows both a continued expansion of government secrecy across a broad array of agencies and actions and some movement toward more openness and accountability, particularly in the Congress. The public has a right to know what its government is doing to preserve health, safety, and the public weal. Information created by or for the federal government belongs to the American public and should be open (except in strictly limited and specified contexts)...The government spent $195 maintaining the secrets already on the books for every one dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2007, a 5% increase in one year. At the same time, fewer pages were declassified than in 2006, even though the government spent the same amount of money on declassification. The intelligence agencies, which account for a large segment of the declassification numbers, are excluded from the total reported figures."

ACLU news release: "A federal judge [U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York] has ordered the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to turn over three memos that authorized the extremely harsh treatment of prisoners in CIA custody or explain by October 3 why these memos can lawfully be withheld. The American Civil Liberties Union called for the immediate release of the May 2005 OLC memos as part of its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit requesting information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody overseas...In another development in the same case, the ACLU obtained Department of Defense (DOD) documents about the treatment of detainees in Iraq. The documents, from the military's Criminal Investigation Division, are from two investigations."

"Gannett News Service compiled 2002 data from the National Center for Education Statistics on more than 9,000 public library systems nationwide. To make a five-year comparison, GNS also obtained 2006 data from each state and the District of Columbia that were not available from NCES.

The federal government requires states to report library information in a number of categories. GNS focused on four key yardsticks: visits, circulation (number of items checked out), operating expenses and number of public computers with Internet access.

"Each year, more than 1 billion people visit libraries to borrow books or videos, log onto the Internet or participate in various community programs." Link to databases and related resources on the right sidebar of this page

• Library spending across the U.S.
• Public library systems with the highest circulation per capita
• Public library systems with the most Internet-capable public computers per capita
• Public library systems with the largest operating expenses per capita

FOIA Facts: Expanding the FOIA - Scott A. Hodes highlights the recent introduction of legislation that would eliminate the FOIA shield for the Smithsonian Institute, and the continued lack of transparency when dealing with other federal agencies.

News release: "The Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC) announced today that their anti-censorship software tools are ready to help journalists and tourists during the Olympics, to circumvent China's Internet blockade. The software, which is available free of charge, can be downloaded onto a hard drive or USB drive to safely and effectively overcome the Internet censorship in China.

In the run-up to Olympics, Beijing tightened control over media and Internet. Overseas web sites that have keywords on Beijing's blacklist are blocked and cannot be visited from China without any "anti-censorship" tools. The decision to block access to these websites is in contravention to Beijing's earlier promises to grant unrestricted Internet access to foreign reporters during the Games, and will seriously impede reporters' ability to do their work in Beijing. Although web restrictions were relaxed to some degree on Friday, it is unclear how long these conditions will last.

In order to overcome these Internet restrictions and gain free access to the Internet in China, the GIFC recommends that journalists and tourists download the free software packages by its partners. All Internet traffic through the tools is encrypted and can successfully bypass the Internet blockades in repressive nations around the world."

News release: "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is seeking suggestions from the public on how it can increase its level of openness related to security at nuclear power plants and certain other facilities while still protecting sensitive information. A summary of the feedback will be posted on the NRC’s Web site, provided to the Commission and considered in the development of new openness policies.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Commission implemented a new policy of withholding certain information. Some information previously available to the public was withheld and new information, such as certain orders to NRC licensees on security measures, was designated as classified, safeguards information or sensitive unclassified information and withheld from the public.

In 2007, the NRC began redacting and releasing many of the safety documents previously withheld, and the agency is interested in taking additional action regarding security-related inspection and license performance information. Under consideration are several approaches, including adding more detail to an annual report to Congress on security oversight and to the cover letters for security inspection reports, and by making more information available on the NRC Web site."

Related postings on Disappearing Docs. From Gov't Websites

Via The Memory Hole, "On a subpage of their Freedom of Info Act website, the Defense Department today has posted 127 pages of documents concerning embedded media. The file may be downloaded here: DOD FOIA Reading Room."

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse: "New reports on the nation's 200-plus immigration judges are now available. The reports, covering how the judges decided asylum matters in the FY 2002 to FY 2007 period, are based on tens of thousands of very detailed records obtained and analyzed by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act. The source was the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency within the Justice Department. The reports provide biographic information about the judges, breakdowns on the proportion
of asylum matters they decline, and how their records compare with other judges in the base city and for the nation as a whole. Also available are data on the nationality of those requesting asylum and the percent who were represented by counsel."

"Chairman Henry A. Waxman and 18 other committee chairs introduced legislation to strengthen the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and restore GAO’s authority to pursue litigation if documents are improperly withheld from the agency. One key provision of the Government Accountability Office Improvement Act of 2008 (H.R. 6388) repudiates the district court decision in Walker v. Cheney and reaffirms GAO’s authority to go to court when agencies or the White House refuse to provide access to records. Other provisions of this bill give GAO authority to interview federal employees and administer oaths. The bill also affirms GAO’s right to obtain records from three agencies that have sometimes thwarted GAO oversight by denying access to documents: the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Trade Commission."

• FOIA Facts: My Proposals for the FOIA: Following up on the passage earlier this year of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, FOIA expert Scott A. Hodes make two proposals absent from the law, but which would help FOIA requesters. — Published June 29, 2008
• 60 Gadgets in 60 Minutes - Three techie gurus (Barbara Fullerton, Ed Vawter, and Dina Dreifuerst) take you on a whirlwind, freewheeling virtual trip of the latest, greatest, fun, fanciful, must have gadgets available now and in the near future. — Published June 24, 2008
• Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide - Sabrina I. Pacifici's revised and updated pathfinder focuses on leveraging selected reliable, focused, free and low cost sites and sources to effectively profile and monitor companies, markets, countries, people, and issues. This guide is a "best of list" of web and database products, services and tools, as well links to reliable sources produced by governments, academia, NGOs, the media and various publishers. — Published June 1, 2008

• DOJ Office of Information and Privacy - Guidance on Preparing Backlog Reduction Plans (posted 06/27/2008): "This memorandum provides guidance for preparing Backlog Reduction Plans. All agencies with backlogs which have not made progress in reducing those backlogs over the last two years are required to prepare Backlog Reduction Plans by September 8, 2008. Each agency Chief FOIA Officer must, in turn, notify the Department of Justice and OMB by October 6, 2008, that he/she has approved their agency's Backlog Reduction Plan."
• Guidance on Submitting Certification of Agency Compliance with FOIA's Reading Room Requirements (posted 06/27/2008): "This memorandum provides guidance for providing certification to the Department of Justice and OMB by October 31, 2008 that your agency's FOIA Reading Room is in compliance with the FOIA. All agency Chief FOIA Officers must provide this certification."

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) posted the PDF version: [Y-RR-FWS-0007-2007] Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) — Progress Evaluation of the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Endangered Species Program, that was released on June 25, 2008. This statement appears on the cover page, “Portions of this report have been redacted pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(5) of the Freedom of Information Act.”

"Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Waxman sent a letter today requesting that President Bush declassify provisions in the “Joint MNF-I/U.S. Embassy-Baghdad Campaign Plan” that refer to U.S. military bases in Iraq and the timeline for their existence, as well as a GAO report issued today regarding this Joint Campaign Plan."

Statewatch Analysis, June 2008 - Proposal on access to documents:
Article-by-Article commentary, Steve Peers, Professor of Law, University of Essex

News release: "The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) has released its Report to the President for Fiscal Year 2007...The Report profiles data about the Government-wide security classification program during Fiscal Year 2007."

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse [TRAC] Report: "Federal immigration prosecutions in March 2008 continued their recent and highly unusual surge, apparently reaching an all-time high, according to timely data from the Justice Department. The total of 9,350 such prosecutions was up by almost 50% from the previous month and 73% from the previous year.

The dramatic changes in the number of defendants charged with immigration-related charges are based on case-by-case information obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for United states Attorneys."

"The World Information Access 2008 Report presents important trends in the distribution of information and communication technologies around the world. The 2008 WIA Report explores information access by looking at trends in the blogger arrests worldwide, diversity in the ownership of media assets in the 15 largest media markets in the Muslim world, and the ideological diversity of political content online in 74 countries with large Muslim populations." Howard, Philip N, and World Information Access Project. World Information Access Report - 2008. 3. Seattle: University of Washington, 2008.

Follow up - related postings on missing White House emails, today's news: News release: "Today, D.C. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an opinion in CREW v. Office of Administration, finding that the Office of Administration (OA) is not an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In May 2007, CREW sued OA for records regarding missing White House e-mail and the office’s assessment of the scope of the problem. After initially agreeing to provide records, OA changed course and claimed it was not an agency and, therefore, had no obligation to comply with the FOIA. OA made this claim despite the fact that even the White House’s own website described OA as an agency and included regulations for processing FOIA requests."

EPIC: In a unanimous decision, the US Supreme Court upheld the right of individuals to request documents under the Freedom of Information Act, even if similar documents were previously requested by others. The Court rejected the Federal Aviation Administration's contention that it may ignore requests if the agency previously received identical requests from different requesters. The Court also rejected the agency's "virtual representation" claim, that a FOIA requester can be "virtually represented" by a previous requester who sought similar records. The Court based its decision on America's "deep-rooted historic tradition that everyone should have his own day in court."

Attorney General's Report to the President on Executive Order 13,392, "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information" (posted 06/10/2008)

May 23, 2008: "...the National Security Archive publishes its third installment of the diary of one of the main supporters of Mikhail Gorbachev and strongest proponents of glasnost during the perestroika period in the Soviet Union — Anatoly Sergeevich Chernyaev. This section of the diary, covering two key years of history, is being published in English here for the first time.

By 1987 Chernyaev has become a member of Gorbachev’s inner circle, a close adviser the General Secretary relies on for drafting his speeches, writing his book on perestroika, and often for baring his soul and sharing doubts and concerns about the speed and the direction that the reform is taking. Even though Chernyaev’s position focuses his responsibilities on foreign policy, the diary shows how deeply involved he was in developing the ideas of perestroika in philosophical terms, and in applying them to Soviet domestic political structures and ideology. He is especially vocal in his encouragement of openness and freedom of the press.

Department of Justice Issues New Annual FOIA Report Guidance: "In the wake of the OPEN Government Act of 2007, which amended the reporting requirements for agency Annual FOIA Reports, the Department of Justice, in consultation with the Office of Management and Budget, has revised both the content and the format of the Report and its corresponding guidelines. The revised guidelines, posted today, reflect the new statutory mandate. They also include new reporting requirements, including data on agency backlogs, which are an extension of the goals set forth in Executive Order 13,392, and are in furtherance of best practices in FOIA administration. The guidance also clarifies existing reporting requirements and further defines the type of requests to include in the Annual FOIA Report."
• 2008 Guidelines for Agency Preparation of Annual FOIA Reports

Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT): Global Internet Freedom Should Be Top Human Rights and Foreign Policy Priority - "The Congress and Administration should make global Internet freedom a top human rights and foreign policy priority, CDT said today in testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. The government should closely monitor and report on global Internet freedom and factor progress in this area into criteria for development assistance and conditions for trade agreements. CDT also called for greater cooperation between the U.S. government and the technology industry to better manage human rights risks associated with offering Internet services in repressive countries."

• Press release: "The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has launched a consultation process within the European Network of Ombudsmen on access to information contained in databases. This follows a complaint from a Danish journalist about the refusal of the European Commission to disclose data on beneficiaries of EU agricultural subsidies. The Commission justified its refusal on grounds of confidentiality. Furthermore, it argued that the EU's rules on access to documents apply to databases only if the data can be easily retrieved."
• To read the Statement setting out the Network's aims, please go to: http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/liaison/en/statement.htm
• The letter launching the consultation process is available under: http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/letters/en/20080319-1.htm

"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."

"Today Chairman Waxman wrote [Letter to Fred Fielding] to request information from the White House Office of Administration about reports that millions of e-mails that may have been lost from the White House e-mail system."

Via FAS, Department of State Declassification Plan 2004 Update and FY05-07 Projections, 13 pages, PDF. "prepared pursuant to...Executive Order 12958 [Classified National Security Information, as Amended]...The Order and Directive required executive branch agencies to institutionalize the declassification of permanent, classified records and establish an implementation date of December 31, 2006 for the introduction of automatic declassification whether or not records had been reviewed for declassification prior to becoming 25 years old."

The Defense Freedom of Information Policy Office (DFOIPO) is responsible for the formulation and implementation of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) policy guidance for the Department of Defense (DoD)

"Still Waiting After All These Years, a new analysis of Freedom of Information Act performance by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, shows that service continues to frustrate requesters, despite a presidential directive ordering agencies to improve agency response. Over the past nine years that agencies have been reporting performance data, the number of FOIA requests processed has fallen 20%, the number of FOIA personnel is down 10%, the backlog has tripled, and the cost of handling a request is up 79%. (8/8/07)"

Press release: "The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is launching an effort to contact up to 2.2 million applicants for federal disaster assistance to inform them that a federal appellate court ruling requires FEMA to release certain personally identifiable information. This information would normally be protected under the Privacy Act and the exemption for personal privacy under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)...The order affects up to 2.2 million persons in eight states who applied for federal assistance in connection with disasters that include hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne in Florida in 2004 and 27 additional Presidentially declared disasters."

Press release, Sen. Patrick Leahy: "...As the first major reform to FOIA in more than a decade, the OPEN Government Act would help to reverse these troubling trends and help to begin to restore the public’s trust in their government. This bill [S. 849] also improves transparency in the Federal Government’s FOIA process by: Restoring meaningful deadlines for agency action under FOIA; Imposing real consequences on federal agencies for missing FOIA’s 20-day statutory deadline; Clarifying that FOIA applies to government records held by outside private contractors; Establishing a FOIA hotline service for all federal agencies; and Creating a FOIA Ombudsman to provide FOIA requestors and federal agencies with a meaningful alternative to costly litigation."

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): An Overview - Ms. Susan Cornell, Freedom of Information Officer and Chief FOIA Liaison, NIH

"On January 8, 2007, the Central Intelligence Agency submitted a proposed rule for public comment on Freedom of Information Act processing fees to the Federal Register. The CIA has reviewed and carefully considered all of the comments that were submitted in response to our proposal. As a result of that review, the CIA hereby issues its final rule on FOIA processing fees...

Press release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today final Fiscal Year (FY) 2007 Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) awards totaling $1.7 billion, including a total of almost $411 million to the nation’s six urban areas at highest risk of a terrorist attack: New York City/Northern New Jersey; the National Capital Region; Los Angeles/Long Beach; the California Bay Area; Houston; and Chicago."

"Each year Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) gathers relevant statistical data regarding each agency's security classification program. ISOO analyzes this data in its 2006 Annual Report to the President."

Press release: "Throughout the 1960s and most of the 1970s, while the U.S. government conducted its space reconnaissance program under a veil of absolute secrecy, officials debated whether information about the program (including the "fact of" its existence and certain photographs) should be disclosed to other elements of the government, public, allies, and even the Soviet Union, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and archival research and posted today by the National Security Archive.

The documents published today show that some officials argued that even with a program as sensitive as satellite reconnaissance, greater openness, both within and outside the government, could help a variety of U.S. policy objectives. A certain degree of transparency, these officials believed, would legitimize space reconnaissance (by removing the stigma of espionage), allow more extensive use of satellite imagery for both national security and civilian purposes, and preserve the credibility of the classification system. As the documents demonstrate, other officials naturally raised objections, often citing the likely unfavorable reactions from the Soviet Union and other nations as well as operational security concerns.

Compiled by National Security Archive Senior Fellow Dr. Jeffrey T. Richelson, the documents in this briefing book include National Security Action Memoranda, national intelligence estimates, and other sensitive internal records produced by the White House, the CIA, the United States Intelligence Board, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Defense, and the Air Force."

EFF press release: "...The FBI's use of NSLs was expanded under the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001, allowing federal agents to gather private
records about anyone's domestic phone calls, emails, and financial transactions without any court approval -- as long as an FBI agent claims that the information could be related to a terrorism or espionage investigation. EFF submitted a FOIA request about the reported misuse of NSLs in March, and when no documents were forthcoming, EFF sued the FBI for their immediate release. Last month, a judge held that the FBI was required to release records related to the inspector general's report beginning on July 5, with more documents to be disclosed every 30 days. In all, 1138 pages of NSL records were released to EFF late last week in the first batch of documents complying with the court's order."

Commentary - John Moss and the battle for freedom of information, 41 years later: "How one modest but stubborn congressman overcame the many entrenched obstacles to win the American people access to information about the activities of their government," by Michael R. Lemov.

Press release: "The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has wrongfully withheld data documenting years of toxic exposures to workers and its own inspectors, according to a federal court ruling posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result, the world’s largest compendium of measurements of occupational exposures to toxic substances - more than 2 million analyses conducted during some 75,000 OSHA workplace inspections since 1979 - should now be available to researchers and policymakers. Each year, an estimated 40,000 U.S. workers die prematurely because of exposures to toxic substances on the job."

The Knight Open Government Survey conducted by the National Security Archive, George Washington University: 40 Years of FOIA, 20 Years of Delay - Oldest Pending FOIA Requests Date Back to the 1980s, July 2, 2007 (39 pages, PDF).

"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 agencies submit to the President's Management Council an Updated Status Report concerning any deficiency reported by the agency in its Fiscal Year 2006 annual FOIA report. This Updated Status Report must describe the specific steps already taken, or which the agency has committed to take in the future, to remedy any deficiency the agency has encountered in implementing its FOIA Improvement Plan. Set out [in this release] is the text of the guidance distributed by the Office of Information and Privacy to all Chief FOIA Officers concerning the content of the Updated Status Reports. These reports are required to be submitted first in draft form to the Office of Information and Privacy by July 18, 2007. Each agency, through its Chief FOIA Officer, must then submit the final report to the Chair of the President's Management Council by August 1, 2007."

Press release: "Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a new report, The Best Laid Plans: The Story of How the Government Ignored Its Own Gulf Coast Hurricane Plans, detailing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) plan to respond to a hurricane of Katrina’s magnitude and its subsequent failure to implement that plan...The Best Laid Plans is based on the 7,500 records DHS provided in response to CREW’s lawsuit."

Document links:

Facelift for the FOI Law, by Deborah Howell: "Without access to records, people cannot hold government accountable. One of the most important avenues for that on the federal level is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), now in the midst, I hope, of reform."

Via the Pogo Blog: "The 1966 Freedom of Information Act gives the American public access to FBI files on everything from businesses to the famous deceased, a privilege that is equally as beneficial as it is underused. The new websites, Get Grandpa’s FBI File, [and Get Daddy's FBI file] hopes to shatter this apathy toward requesting FBI files, a process better known in the political world as “FOIA’ing” a file, by serving as the middle man between Joe Schmo and the FBI."

The site asks:

Attorney General's Report to the President on Executive Order 13,392 (June 1, 2007). This report is now available electronically on the Department of Justice's FOIA Web site here. The accessible version which is in compliance with Section 508 of the Disabilities Act is available here. (posted 6/8/07; supplemented 6/20/07).

Press release: "The CIA recently delivered more than 420,000 additional pages of redacted declassified electronic records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility in College Park, Maryland. The declassified CIA records are hosted on the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), which is an electronic search and retrieval system. CREST now includes more than 10 million pages of records declassified under Executive Order 12958."

Attorney General's Report to the President on Executive Order 13,392 (June 1, 2007) [posted 6/8/07 - 118 pages, PDF]

Washington Times: The inspector general for Homeland Security late Friday released new details of what federal air marshals say was a terrorist dry run aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29, 2004. Several portions of the report remain redacted. The release stems from a Freedom of Information request by The Washington Times in April 2006. The Times first reported on July 22 that this and other probes and dry runs were occurring on commercial flights since the September 11 terrorist attacks."

Press release: "The bill provides a privilege in federal court proceedings for reporters to refrain from revealing their confidential sources of information. The privilege is similar in nature to that currently offered by 32 states and the District of Columbia. The ability to assure confidentiality to people who provide information is essential to effective news gathering and reporting on highly sensitive and important issues. Typically, the best information about corruption in government or misdeeds in a private organization will come from someone on the inside who feels a responsibility to bring the information to light. But that person has a lot to lose if his or her identity becomes known. In many cases, the person responsible for the corruption or the misdeeds can punish the source through dismissal or more subtle forms of punitive action if the source’s identity becomes known. And so it is only by assuring anonymity to the source that a reporter can gain access to the information in order to bring it to public scrutiny."

S. 849: A bill to promote accessibility, accountability, and openness in Government by strengthening section 552 of title 5, United States Code (commonly referred to as the Freedom of Information Act), and for other purposes. Sponsor: Sen Leahy, Patrick J. [VT] (introduced 3/13/2007). Related Bills: H.R. 1309, H.R. 1326.

Congressional Testimony, Robert S. Mueller, III, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Statement Before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, April 26, 2007: "...The fiscal 2008 budget for the FBI totals 29,373 positions and $6.4 billion. The net fiscal 2008 program increases total 714 new positions (231 agents, 121 intelligence analysts, and 362 professional support) and $313.8 million. Our fiscal 2008 budget is focused on improving the FBI's capabilities in addressing five key challenges: combating terrorism; preventing the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction; defeating foreign intelligence operations; reducing child exploitation and violent crimes; and strengthening infrastructure and information technology."

Press release: "The American Civil Liberties Union today made public hundreds of claims for damages by family members of civilians killed or injured by Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU received the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in June 2006...The files made public today are claims submitted to the U.S. Foreign Claims Commissions by surviving Iraqi and Afghan family members of civilians said to have been killed or injured or to have suffered property damages due to actions by Coalition Forces. The ACLU released a total of 496 files: 479 from Iraq and 17 from Afghanistan. The documents released by the ACLU are available online in a searchable database..."

Follow up to postings on investigations into FBI use of National Security Letters, this press release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked a judge to issue an emergency order requiring the FBI to immediately release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans' personal information. The Department of Justice has already agreed that the records should be disclosed quickly due to the exceptional media attention and the questions the NSL report has raised about the government's integrity. However, despite this recognition, the Bureau has failed to meet the 20-day time limit that Congress set for requests that do not merit fast processing...EFF's FOIA request asks for all FBI records discussing or reporting violations of current law, guidelines, or policies, as well as any communications discussing various potential interpretations of current federal investigative power. EFF also demands copies of the contracts between the FBI and three telephone companies, which were intended to allow the FBI to get rapid access to telephone records."

USDOJ: "The Office of Information and Privacy has completed the latest revision of the Freedom of Information Act Guide, a comprehensive reference volume covering all aspects of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The March 2007 edition of the FOIA Guide contains a newly updated and revised discussion of the procedural requirements of the FOIA, the contours of the FOIA's nine exemptions and three exclusions, as well as the considerations applicable to FOIA litigation. This latest edition of the FOIA Guide also contains an overview of Executive Order 13,392, entitled "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information." This Executive Order was signed by the President on December 14, 2005, and calls upon all agencies to improve their FOIA operations by ensuring that they are "both results-oriented and produce results."

Freedom of Information Act: Processing Trends Show Importance of Improvement Plans, Full Report GAO-07-441, and Highlights, March 30, 2007.

"Redacting the Science of Climate Change [details] the findings of a year-long investigation into political interference at federal climate science agencies. The report demonstrates how policies and practices have increasingly restricted the flow of scientific information emerging from publicly-funded climate change research. This has negatively affected the media’s ability to report objectively on scientific issues, public officials’ capacity to respond with appropriate policies, and full public understanding of environmental concerns."

Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Full Committee hearing to Examine Allegations of Political Interference with Government Climate Change Science (Part II) - [Link to Part 1]. "This hearing examined evidence and allegations of political interference with the work of government climate change scientists under the current Administration."

Documents and Links

Press release: "Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senator Cornyn in reintroducing the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act” (the “OPEN Government Act”). This bill contains commonsense reforms to update and strengthen the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for all Americans...Now in its fourth decade, the Freedom of Information Act remains an indispensable tool in shedding light on bad policies and government abuses. But, today, FOIA also faces challenges like never before. During the past six years, the Bush Administration has allowed lax FOIA enforcement and a near obsession with secrecy to undercut the public’s right to know. As we celebrate Sunshine Week this week, there is urgent need to update and strengthen our FOIA law."

• Statement of Sen. Patrick Leahy, Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee, On Reintroduction Of The Leahy-Cornyn OPEN Government Act


• Section-By-Section Analysis: Openness Promotes Effectiveness In Our National Government Act Of 2007


• One Pager: Leahy-Cornyn Openness Promotes Effectiveness In Our National Government Act Of 2007


• Leahy Op-Ed: A Sunshine Week Forecast: Mostly Cloudy, Thin Rays Of Hope On The Horizon, as distributed by the Vermont Press Association during Sunshine Week 2007


• Leahy-Cornyn Op-Ed: The OPEN Government Act: An Investment In American Democracy


• Text Of Legislation

"Today the House of Representatives passed four good government bills. H.R. 985 enhances protections offered to federal whistleblowers, H.R. 1255 strengthens the Freedom of Information Act, H.R. 1255 makes clear that presidential records belong to the public, and H.R. 1254 requires organizations that raise money for presidential libraries to disclose information about their donors.

Press release: "U.S. Senate legislation to implement unfinished recommendations of the 9/11 commission includes a bipartisan amendment to declassify the Executive Summary of the CIA Inspector General’s Report on 9/11. The CIA report is the only major 9/11 government review that has not been made public, a fact that the Vice Chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Kit Bond (R-MO) and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, have spent more than a year working to correct."

Via FAS: "The steps by which the Justice Department conducts investigations of unauthorized disclosures of classified information ("leaks") were described by then-Attorney General Janet Reno in 2000 testimony before a closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee." [see this committee press release] Ms. Reno's testimony included the following statement: "In addition to the difficulties of identifying leakers, bringing leak prosecutions is highly complex, requiring overcoming defenses such as apparent authority, improper classification, and First Amendment concerns, and prosecutions are likely to result in more leaks in the course of litigation."

Press release: "A nationwide information audit, conducted as a prelude to Sunshine Week, found slightly more than four in 10 of the official gatekeepers willing – if wary – to provide copies of emergency response plans, which federal law makes public. Other local officials, however, reacted to requests with confusion, outright denials and sometimes by calling police to check out the auditors. Many weren’t sure who had the authority to release the reports, or even where the documents were located. More than a third of public officials audited refused to provide access to their local Comprehensive Emergency Response Plan – which is mandated by the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986 as a public document. Another 20 percent provided only partial reports. Those denials stood in stark contrast to the experience of other auditors, many of whom were offered copies of the report in either paper or disc form; 48, or 12 percent, of the 404 communities put the reports online...The 1986 law not only says the plans are public, it also requires the local officials to advertise their availability once a year. In all, 162 news organizations participated as requestors, along with three student newspapers and eight League of Women Voters chapters. This report is built on a database of their experiences and offers a snapshot of the difficulties citizens may face when they request public information that may be considered sensitive."

"Sunshine Week is a national initiative to open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information. Participants include print, broadcast and online news media, civic groups, libraries, non-profits, schools and others interested in the public's right to know. Sunshine Week is led by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation of Miami. Though spearheaded by journalists, Sunshine Week is about the public's right to know what its government is doing, and why. Sunshine Week seeks to enlighten and empower people to play an active role in their government at all levels, and to give them access to information that makes their lives better and their communities stronger. Sunshine Week is a non-partisan initiative whose supporters are conservative, liberal and everything in between."

National Security Archive: "Ten years after Congress enacted the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (E-FOIA), only one in five federal agencies actually complies with the law, according to a new survey released today during Sunshine Week by the National Security Archive. Passed in 1996 and effective in 1997, E-FOIA ordered federal agencies to post key records online, provide citizens with detailed guidance on making information requests, and use new information technology to publish information proactively. The act's intent: Expand public access and reduce the burden of FOIA requests. But most federal agencies do not follow the law, according to the National Security Archive's government-wide audit, File Not Found, conducted with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight Open Government Survey systematically reviewed agency Web sites to cover all 91 federal agencies that have Chief FOIA Officers and the additional 58 agency components each of which handles more than 500 FOIA requests a year. Key findings are:

"On March 5, 2007, Reps. Wm. Lacy Clay, Todd Russell Platts, and Henry A. Waxman introduced H.R. 1309, the Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 2007. This legislation contains a dozen substantive provisions that will increase public access to government information by strengthening the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On March 6, the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives reported this bill favorably to the full committee."

House Subcommittee Hearing: "The State of the [Freedom of Information Act]: Assessing Agency Efforts to Meet FOIA Requirements" - On February 14, 2007, the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in the House of Representatives held a hearing entitled "The State of the FOIA: Assessing Agency Efforts to Meet FOIA Requirements." Testifying on behalf of the executive branch were Melanie Ann Pustay, Acting Director, Office of Information and Privacy, Department of Justice and Linda Koontz, Director, Information Management, Government Accountability Office. Ms. Pustay detailed steps taken by the Department of Justice to ensure Governmentwide compliance with both the FOIA and Executive Order 13,392, "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information." See Statement of Ms. Pustay (February 15, 2007). Ms. Koontz reported on GAO's recent findings concerning agency FOIA Improvement Plans created under the Executive Order. The second panel of witnesses consisted of private sector witnesses from the Sunshine in Government Initiative, American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Security Archive at George Washington University." (posted 3/5/07)

Press release: "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice today, demanding records about secret new court orders that supposedly authorize the government's highly controversial electronic surveillance program that intercepts and analyzes millions of Americans' communications."

Press release: "Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA) released a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report [U.S. Attorneys Who Have Served Less than Full Four-year Terms, 1981-2006, February 22, 2007] showing the recent firing of seven U.S. Attorneys is unprecedented. Conyers and Sanchez requested the study, which found that since 1981, during a president's initial term in office of the 486 confirmed U.S. Attorneys appointments, no more than three U.S. Attorneys had beenforced out under similar circumstances. Because the Administration has refused to cooperate with CRS in their examination, they have not yet obtained all the available data on U.S. Attorney firings and their examination is ongoing. However, there is little doubt that the recent batch of dismissals goes well beyond previous experiences...The non-partisan CRS study found that of the 486 U.S. Attorneys confirmed during an initial presidential term, 54 U.S. Attorneys left voluntarily before completing a full four year term since 1981. Of those, 17 left to become federal judges; 15 went back to private law practice; six left to take other Executive branch positions; two left to seek elective office; two left to work in state government; and, one additional left to become a U.S. Magistrate judge. Of the remaining eight attorneys, five resigned or were fired in the midst of scandals, meaning that in sum total, no more than three U.S. Attorneys were forced out under similar circumstances to the present."

Press release: "Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has sued the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) today for its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records related to global warming science and policy. CREW filed its FOIA request after media reports -- including a 60 Minutes piece -- and documents gathered by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform revealed that political appointees at CEQ, including former Chief of Staff Philip Cooney, edited various government reports to downplay and obscure scientific findings about global warming."

Related documents:

CBO Testimony - Statement of Allison Percy, Principal Analyst, Future Medical Spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs before the Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Committee on Appropriations, U.S. House of Representatives, February 15, 2007.

Freedom of Information Act: Processing Trends Show Importance of Improvement Plans, GAO-07-491T, and Highlights, February 14, 2007.

PBS.org intro: "Drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures in the print, broadcast and electronic media, and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today's most important news organizations, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media, and the media's reaction, in "News War," a special four-part series."

National Security Archive: "The CIA's proposed new rule on Freedom of Information Act processing fees is likely to discourage FOIA requesters while imposing new administrative burdens both on the Agency and the public, according to formal comments filed with the CIA [February 7, 2007] by the National Security Archive of George Washington University. The Archive's general counsel, Meredith Fuchs, commented that, "Significant time, money, and other resources were spent by the CIA on fee disputes last year. One of those disputes involved the CIA's refusal to abide by a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judicial decision about the Archive's fee status. Given that the Agency recouped only $4,732.80 in fees in FY 2006, those disputes served mainly to delay and obstruct FOIA requests. The Archive recommended that the Agency change its proposed rule to: (1) eliminate the unnecessary and improper definitions of FOIA requester categories; (2) eliminate the requirement that all requesters make open-ended, written fee commitments because many FOIA requests can be processed without the requester incurring any fees and the CIA proposal would discourage requesters and add to the Agency's administrative processing time; (3) eliminate the illegal provision mandating prepayment of fees before the CIA will honor form or format requests; (4) revise the proposed duplication fees provisions so that requesters pay only those "direct costs" actually incurred in the processing of the individual request, whether for paper or electronic duplication; and (5) revise the public interest fee waiver provisions to follow the letter and intent of the FOIA to promote dissemination of information in the public interest."

"138 new documents were added to the site on February 5, 2007. Additional recent releases may be found here." [Note: all but four of the documents date back to the 1990s.]

Press release: "The Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT), which is jointly chaired by Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, and Josette Sheeran, Under Secretary for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, will host its first conference on Global Internet Freedom on January 30, 2007 in Washington, D.C. This event is a follow-up to the State Department's unveiling of the GIFT global strategy to monitor and respond to threats to Internet freedom held December 20, 2006. The presenters and attendees will include U.S. government officials and representatives of corporations, socially responsible investment (SRI) firms, and non-governmental organizations."

"A new First Amendment Center report examines the rising conflicts between the federal government and the press over matters of secrecy, leaks and threats to prosecute journalists for espionage or treason for reporting classified information. Government Secrecy vs. Freedom of the Press (77 pages, PDF), by Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, is one in a series of First Reports by the center exploring crucial First Amendment topics. Included in the report is an analysis of the 1918 Espionage Act by Stephen I. Vladeck of the University of Miami School of Law."

U.S. Department of Justice, Freedom Of Information Act Report For Fiscal Year 2006

WTOP Radio: "More than 450,000 active and retired federal employees did not voluntarily comply with federal income tax requirements for the 2005 tax year, according to documents obtained by WTOP through the Freedom of Information Act."

Press release: "The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) announces the availability of a new book, Researching Japanese War Crimes Records: Introductory Essays (PDF), and an electronic records guide that will help researchers locate and use the thousands of newly declassified and previously declassified files in the National Archives related to the war in the Pacific."

Press release, January 10, 2007: "Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for its failure to adequately respond to CREW's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents related to the destruction of Secret Service visitor record logs. On September 27, 2006, CREW filed a FOIA request with NARA asking for communications with the Secret Service in which NARA ordered the Secret Service to stop destroying White House visitor logs. The Secret Service maintains the logs until they are transferred to the White House. CREW filed suit because NARA has refused to provide these records."

Press release: "Imagine a library filled with a million books, each 270 pages long. That's how many historic FBI pages we declassified on December 31, in line with an executive order that now applies to the Bureau. "It's unprecedented," says David Hardy, chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section in our Records Management Division. "To historians and researchers interested in the FBI, it may be remembered as the 'Great Declassification of 06." The 270 million pages of records cover a span of time stretching from the 1920s until 1981 and just about every kind of FBI investigation, including sensitive cases involving domestic security and more routine ones like organized crime and kidnappings...“Just because the files are officially declassified doesn’t mean they are automatically ready for public review. We have a lot of work to do before that happens," explains Hardy. Such as: Scouring for—and then redacting—information that would compromise personal privacy or would expose a government informant, identify a sensitive technique, or violate a treaty or agreement with another country...And how can you access them? Make a request to the National Archives or to us through our Freedom of Information Act website."

Documents prepared by the FBI (1,561 pages) in 1986 detailing Justice Rehnquist's decade long prescription drug pain treatment were obtained by AP through FOIA requests, and released today as follows:

Summary: "The Department of State proposes to revise its regulations governing the classification of national security information that is under the control of the Department in order to reflect the provisions of a new executive order on national security information and consequent changes in the Department's procedures since the last revision of the Department's regulations on this subject." [Federal Register: January 3, 2007 (Volume 72, Number 1)][Proposed Rules][Page 59-62]

"77 new documents were added to the site on December 28, 2006. Additional recent releases may be found here."

Press release, December 21, 2006: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice established the Global Internet Freedom Task Force (GIFT) on February 14, 2006 as an internal State Department coordination group to address challenges to freedom of expression and the free flow of information on the Internet. The core aims of the GIFT are to maximize freedom of expression and the free flow of information and ideas, to minimize the success of repressive regimes in censoring and silencing legitimate debate, and to promote access to information and ideas over the Internet. We refer to such freedom of expression on the Internet as "Internet freedom." Since its launch in February 2006, the Task Force has developed a robust global Internet strategy that aims to monitor and respond to threats to Internet freedom and to advance the frontiers of Internet freedom by expanding access to the Internet. In executing this strategy, the State Department is coordinating its efforts with other U.S. government agencies and the National Security and National Economic Councils."

Press release: "USDA will release a massive database today which, for the first time, will mean that payment data will be searchable for every individual in the U.S. who benefits from federal farm and conservation programs. In the past, while payments made to most individuals were available, shareholder data was obscured. Payment data for shareholders in farming corporations, members of agricultural cooperatives, and beneficiaries of estate trusts was obscured because only data on individuals was available from USDA. USDA made totals paid to a farming corporation, agricultural cooperative, estate trust, or Tribe. But section "1614" of the 2002 farm bill requires USDA to make it possible to track all farm and conservation benefits down to the individual, says Farm Service Agency administrator Teresa Lasseter. USDA's Farm Service Agency is releasing the so-called "1614" database today to four organizations - including the Environmental Working Group - that filed Freedom of Information requests." [thanks Mike]

MSNBC: "Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract. The Federal Communications Commission could offer some guidance, but it won't. The agency refuses to make public a detailed database of cell phone provider outages that it has maintained since 2004. A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved."

Follow up to my December 11, 2006 posting, EPA Responds to Protests Over Library Closures, see today's ALA Press release: "American Library Association (ALA) President Leslie Burger responded to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) update Monday on the status of agency libraries. "The teleconference raised more questions than it answered. It is a gross oversimplification to state that everyone benefits when libraries go digital. This is only true when there is a thoughtful digitization plan that ensures valuable information is not lost and public access is retained. We are still waiting for the EPA to disclose its digitization plan and budget," Burger said."

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) press release: "defiance of Congressional requests to immediately halt closures of library collections, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is purging records from its library websites, making them unavailable to both agency scientists and outside researchers, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). At the same time, EPA is taking steps to prevent the re-opening of its shuttered libraries, including the hurried auctioning off of expensive bookcases, cabinets, microfiche readers and other equipment for less than a penny on the dollar...on December 1st, EPA de-linked thousands of documents from the website for the Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) Library, in EPA's Washington D.C. Headquarters."

Boston.com: Dick Cheney's mission to expand -- or 'restore' --the powers of the presidency - "A close look at key moments in Cheney's career...suggests that the newly empowered Democrats in Congress should not expect the White House to cooperate when they demand classified information or attempt to exert oversight in areas such as domestic surveillance or the treatment of terrorism suspects."

AP reports that in response to a FOIA suit filed by the Times Union newspaper, data for fiscal years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 on money directed to earmarked projects has not been posted on the New York State Senate website. [Please note, the files below are very large.]

Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that the NSA wiretapping documents are classified and not subject to FOIA.

Managing Sensitive Information: DOJ Needs a More Complete Staffing Strategy for Managing Classified Information and a Set of Internal Controls for Other Sensitive Information. Full text GAO-07-83, and Highlights, October 20, 2006.

As Director of the Project on Government Secrecy, Steven Aftergood has let the light shine in on the otherwise secret world of "sensitive" government documents, much to the benefit of scholars, researchers, librarians, journalists and interested citizens. This profile of his work by Federal Computer Week is worth a read.

Related news and postings:

Elizabeth Williamson at the Washington Post clearly and concisely documents, through the use of before and after graphics, the impact of redacting text from a DHS report, and its subsequent revelation, years later, as a result of a FOIA request.

"SUMMARY: This documents removes Subpart D, "For Official Use Only" (FOUO) from 32 CFR part 286, "DoD Freedom of Information Act Program Regulations" and reserves that subpart for future use. Removing this from 32 CFR part 286 will eliminate confusion of the authoritative FOUO guidance and who is the authority on FOUO. This removal will alleviate any further uncertainty, avoid duplication of FOUO guidance, and is considered an administrative action." Federal Register: October 27, 2006 (Volume 71, Number 208)] [Rules and Regulations][Page 62940-62941]

Effective October 25, 2006 the public may request records from state and local agencies ["any New York State or municipal department, board, bureau, division, commission, committee, public authority, public corporation, council, office or other governmental entity performing a governmental or proprietary function is subject to the Law"], via email in New York.

Press release: "Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released tips for bloggers who want the inside story on government agencies. The Bloggers' FAQ on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) outlines how to use open government laws to get access to records kept by federal agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA)...The guide walks bloggers through making a FOIA request -- addressing what to ask for, which government offices must
comply, and what you can and cannot obtain through FOIA. It also explains how to put requests on the fast track and get processing fees waived."

In response to a FOIA request filed by the Washington Post seeking the records of persons who visited the Vice President's residence and White House Office, D.C. District Court Judge Ricardo M. Urbina issued a memo opinion granting plaintiff's motion for preliminary injunction (25 pages, PDF).

Press release - Portion of letter addressed to James A. Baker III, Co-Chair Iraq Study Group: "...Over the past several weeks, you have repeatedly said that the Iraq Study Group would not provide an independent assessment on the situation in Iraq until after the November midterm elections. Given the critical need to change course on Iraq, I urge the study group to release its recommendations as soon as possible without any consideration to the political calendar."

New on LLRX.com for October 15, 2006

Press release: "Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales submitted to President Bush today the Department’s report regarding the government-wide administration of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Today's report is the result of the first of three Justice Department reviews required under Executive Order 13392 titled, Improving Agency Disclosure of Information. The executive order, signed by the President on Dec.14, 2005, directs agencies to ensure citizen-centered and results-oriented agency FOIA operations. The order directed federal agencies to develop and implement plans in order to improve the performance of their FOIA programs. The order also established, for the first time ever, a Chief FOIA Officer for every agency, FOIA requester service centers and FOIA public liaisons."

Press release: "One in four veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are filing disability claims, according to records released by the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) under the Freedom of Information Act after nine months of denying their existence and posted today on the National Security Archive Web site."

Protection of Security-Related Information, September 27, 2006.

"As announced earlier through FOIA Post, the Office of Information and Privacy is planning to publish the 2006 edition of the Department of Justice's Freedom of Information Act Guide next month. The 2006 edition of the FOIA Guide is scheduled to be published through the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) in November, with a delivery date most likely in December. The FOIA Guide publication will contain the "Justice Department Guide to the Freedom of Information Act" and the text of the Freedom of Information Act. It will no longer contain the Privacy Act Overview." [Link]

D-2006-123 Program Management of the Objective Individual Combat Weapon Increment I (09/29/2006) View Summary Only (Project D2006-D000AE-0154.000) "This special version of the report has been revised to omit attorney client privilege, predecisional, and source selection sensitive data. The full report is For Official Use Only (FOUO). To request a copy of the full report, file a Freedom of Information Act request."

Protection of Security-Related Information, September 27, 2006 (via FAS, 29 pages, PDF)

The Memory Hole: "This page contains indexes of four periodicals published by the National Security Agency, plus a listing of publications from the NSA's Center for Cryptologic History. These indexes haven't been publicly released until now, and many of the Cryptologic History publications weren't previously known to the public. Researcher Michael Ravnitzky has discovered a huge cache of information about the NSA, intelligence, and cryptography."

Press release: "The Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday unanimously approved a bill aimed at substantially enhancing and expanding the accessibility, accountability, and openness of the federal government. The Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2005, or the OPEN Government Act (S. 394), was authored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, and John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the panel. The bill, introduced in 2005, would make meaningful reforms to federal government information laws, most notably the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 (FOIA)."

Press release: Wyden, Bond, Senators Ask for Review of Classified Information in Senate Intelligence Report, Say Documents Were Overclassified - Request Marks First Time New Board Asked to Review Classification, September 19, 2006: "A bipartisan group of Senators who serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee...asked an independent board that oversees classification of information to review the documents to determine if in fact too much was kept secret in the recently released Senate Intelligence reports. in a letter to the head of the Public Interest Declassification Board, the Senators wrote, "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, on which we serve, recently released two reports addressing prewar intelligence issues regarding Iraq. We believe that portions of these two reports remain unnecessarily classified. We ask that the Board Review these two documents and evaluate whether any of the currently classified portions could be made public without negatively impacting national security."

Press release: "Rep. Henry A. Waxman and Democratic Members of the Committee on Government Reform have developed six proposals to restore honesty and accountability in government...Ban secret meetings with lobbyists and close the revolving door; Restore open government; Clean up federal contracting; Block the appointment of cronies; Take politics out of science; Protect federal whistleblowers."

"Nine Legislative Efforts that Must Be Stopped in 2006 - As Congress mounts its final push before the midterm elections, a number of bills that threaten the bedrock of Internet privacy and civil liberties could either come up for votes or worm their way into larger legislative packages that end up being rushed into law. The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) compiled the Internet Watch List so that lawmakers, journalists and Internet activists can keep close tabs on the dangerous legislative efforts that cannot be allowed to succeed in the so-called "silly season" at the end of the 109th Congress."

Compliance With Freedom of Information Act Requirements Has Increased, August 31, 2006, Reference Number: 2006-10-129

"EFF's FLAG Project aims to expose the government's expanding use of new technologies that invade Americans' privacy. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the project will help protect individual liberties and hold the government accountable."

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) press release: "A federal court has ruled that under the Freedom of Information Act the Justice Department must provide TRAC with additional information about the government's enforcement of the law. The September 8, 2006 ruling by Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia significantly expands the range of data that the DOJ is required to provide TRAC...Judge Friedman's order covers numerous kinds of information, one key category for those interested in white collar crime enforcement concerns the names, file names and docket numbers in criminal cases where the defendant is a corporation or business."

Inside Google Book Search Blog: "Starting today, you can visit http://www.google.com/bannedbooks to explore 42 banned or challenged books honored by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as among the Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. You can see which of these novels have been targeted for banning, find out where you can buy or borrow them, and check out what authors and critics have to say by browsing related books."

Follow-up to previous posting, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (S. 2590) unanimously passed the Senate on the evening of September 7. POGO reported "that Sens. Stevens (R-AK) and Byrd (D- WV) lifted their secret holds on the bill."

From the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Information Programs: The Top September 11 Conspiracy Theories "Numerous unfounded conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks continue to circulate, especially on the Internet." [August 28, 2006] This site reviews and rebuts eight such theories.

Related government documents, literature and postings:

OpenTheGovernment.org: "Report Finds Federal Government Still More Secretive in 2005: Government secrecy saw further expansion in 2005 despite growing public concern, according to the Secrecy Report Card 2006."

The Nation: Librarians at the Gates, by Joseph Huff-Hannon [posted online on August 22, 2006]:

FindLaw: "A federal judge scolds the FBI in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for failing to "just Google" the names of people about whom plaintiffs sought audio recordings and other information in their litigation. According to Judge Garland, "Surely, in the Internet age, a "reasonable alternative" for finding out whether a prominent person is dead is to use Google (or any other search engine) to find a report of that person’s death." John Davis v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, August 22, 2006.

Press release: "The Pentagon and the Energy Department have now stamped as national security secrets the long-public numbers of U.S. nuclear missiles during the Cold War, including data from the public reports of the Secretaries of Defense in 1967 and 1971, according to government documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive...Documents posted today by the National Security Archive include:

From Mike Ravnitzky: "Researcher Jim Klotz recently discovered and obtained a useful and comprehensive information resource - a detailed explanation of how military records are retrieved and reviewed for release in response to FOIA requests.

The Memory Hole: "This heavily redacted list shows the closed investigations conducted by the CIA Inspector General from the beginning of 1997 to October 2004. It was obtained by researcher Michael Ravnitzky via FOIA."

Senate Committee on the Judiciary hearing today: FISA for the 21st Century. Link to witness statements.

Freedom of Information Act: Preliminary Analysis of Processing Trends Shows Importance of Improvement Plans, Full-text GAO-06-1022T, and Highlights, July 26, 2006.

Secrecy News: "In a rare victory for public access to intelligence agency records, a federal court yesterday ordered (pdf) the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to process its FY 2006 budget request for release under the Freedom of Information Act. Judge Reggie B. Walton of the D.C. District Court granted a motion filed by the Federation of American Scientists to compel the NRO to comply with the FOIA."

HR 3282, approved 16-15; HR 5766, approved 15-12; Side-by-side comparison of Sunset Commission Bills in the 109th Congress, by OMBWatch.

Follow-up to postings on documents and news related to the terror finance tracking program, this recently published CRS report, posted by FAS: Treasury's Terrorist Finance Program's Access to Information Held by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), July 7, 2006.

ACLU press release today: "The documents, which include the report of Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations, reveal new details in how several systemic failures in the chain of command manifested themselves."

In a follow-up to this July 25, 2004 posting - Depository Libraries Directed to destroy DOJ Pamphlets - this update, via Mike Ravnitzky, from the Forfeiture Endangers American Rights Foundation (FEAR): "In response to our FOIA requests, this week the DOJ released three manuals to us voluntarily -- the 2006 versions of: Selected Asset Forfeiture Statutes, Money Laundering Statutes and Related Materials, and the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Policy Manual. These manuals are hot off the presses -- the two compilations of statutes (both of which include what appears to be a complete collection of every relevant federal statute on the subject -- and some very useful tables and "related material") were published in May 2006."

USAToday.com reported that "the federal government will pay a Texas law school $1 million to do research aimed at rolling back the amount of sensitive data available to the press and public through freedom-of-information requests. Beginning this month, St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio will analyze recent state laws that place previously available information, such as site plans of power plants, beyond the reach of public inquiries."

National Security Archive: "We have posted PDFs of the major items of FOIA's legislative history. We are not aware of any other easily accessible electronic version of these materials and so we hope this will be a resource for all open government advocates. We plan to add additional items, such as hearing records, and improve the site over the next few weeks, but I wanted to let you know it is there, particularly in case you get inquiries from people who may not have easy access to these items elsewhere. For inside the White House documents on the 1966 enactment, take a look here."

National Security Archive: LBJ Refused Ceremony, Undercut Bill with Signing Statement, Censored Moyers' Openness Language on July 4, 1966.

Coalition of Journalists for Open Government: "By far the heaviest use of the Freedom of Information Act comes from the nation's businesses, seeking government records on contracts or for a host of other commercial uses, a new study (8 pages, PDF) by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government shows. Often they work through information brokers to mask their own identity. The review of records of 17 departments and agencies showed media use at six percent." July 3, 2006.

Press release: "A free workshop [June 30, 2006 - Jefferson Room National Archives Building 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC, 20408]sponsored by the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office that is aimed at informing the researcher public and the media of their rights in obtaining the maximum information by requesting a declassification review of classified national security documents. Due to limited space, pre-registration is required. Call 202-357-5250 or email isoo@nara.gov to reserve a place."

"As was indicated in its governmentwide policy guidance issued under Executive Order 13,392 -- see FOIA Post, Executive Order 13,392 Implementation Guidance (posted 4/27/06) (noting, in footnote 2, prospective treatment of improvement plans and annual FOIA reports alike) -- the Office of Information and Privacy has established a special location on its FOIA Web site for the consolidated posting of all agency FOIA improvement plans prepared under the Executive Order. These plans can be accessed through the new "navbar" entitled Agency FOIA Improvement Plans Under EO 13392 that now is contained on OIP's FOIA Web site."

AP: Pentagon Details U.S. Abuse of Detainees - Pentagon Says U.S. Forces Used Unapproved Interrogation Practices on Iraq, Afghan Detainees

DOJ: Documents released in litigation on June 15, 2006

Congressional Oversight of Intelligence is Broken, June 13, 2006.

Press release: "Senator Chuck Grassley today requested more information from FBI Director Robert Mueller about the FBI's handling of a terrorist financing case and the subsequent classification of several portions of an Inspector General report about the botched case...Grassley's letter [included in this press release] also questioned Mueller's use of selective unclassified portions of the Inspector General report during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May."

ABC reports that DOJ has filed suit in NJ District Court (Trenton) seeking an injunction to prevent the NJ attorney general from obtaining records on data that carriers provided in conjunction with the domestic surveillance program.

Press release: "The National Security Archive today filed suit [National Security Archive v. Central Intelligence Agency] in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), challenging the Agency's recent practice of charging Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) fees to journalists pursuing news. The FOIA says that "representatives of the news media" can be charged only copying fees since they help to carry out the mission of the law by disseminating government information; but the CIA last year began claiming authority to assess additional fees if the Agency decides any journalist's request is not newsworthy enough. In adopting this new practice, the CIA reversed its prior 15-year practice of presumptively waiving additional fees for news media representatives, including the National Security Archive."

Press release: "The lawsuit was filed today in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania by the national ACLU and its affiliates in Florida, Georgia, Rhode Island, Maine, Pennsylvania and Washington. The lawsuit charges that the Defense Department is refusing to comply with national Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking records on the ACLU, the American Friends Service Committee, Greenpeace, Veterans for Peace and United for Peace and Justice, as well as 26 local groups and activists."

Washington Post, Public Secrets, by Robert G. Kaiser, Sunday, June 11, 2006.

CIA FOIA Top 25 Search Phrases: "This collection reports the most frequent phrases used to search for documents on this site during the previous month, along with the number of times that search phrase was entered. It does not reflect phrases entered into third-party search engines used to find this site, but rather reflects phrases entered into the search mechanisms on this site." [Metafilter]

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing: Examining DOJ's Investigation of Journalists Who Publish Classified Information: Lessons from the Jack Anderson Case, June 6, 2006.

"The Freedom of Information Act Guide & Privacy Act Overview contains the "Justice Department Guide to the Freedom of Information Act," a detailed discussion of the FOIA's substantive and procedural aspects that has become the primary FOIA reference volume; the "Privacy Act Overview," an overview discussion of the provisions of the Privacy Act of 1974 that is prepared by OIP in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget; and the texts of the two statutes, as amended. It is designed to serve as a single reference volume for both FOIA and Privacy Act matters. The new 2006 edition of the Guide & Overview will replace its current edition, which was published in 2004." [Link]

Michael Ravnitzky's FOIA requests for FBI files on Bacteriological Warfare in the United States, from 1950-1971 [709 redacted pages], are now available in PDF, with further releases forthcoming, according to Russ Kick at the Memory Hole.

This New York Times article describes the obstacles used by the SEC to obstruct public access to corporate records, even if a third party expert is used to facilitate document retrieval using a FOIA request.

"Irrepressible.org will harnass the power of the internet to mobilise people all over the world to take a stand against repression." [Link] "...Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information. The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression. Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress."

POGO: "The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has obtained a version of the May 2005 Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) report on the Boeing Tanker Lease scandal that shows the original report hid the text of Boeing emails and references to Boeing executives from the public. Redactions made by the White House Counsel office still remain in the newly released version...POGO is in the process of filing and administrative appeal to have the remaining redactions made public."

NARA: The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) has released its Report to the President for 2005 (32 pages, PDF). The Report profiles data about the Government-wide security classification program, primarily during Fiscal Year 2005. In his transmittal letter to the President included in the Report, ISOO Director J. William Leonard notes: One of the most notable developments is that the Public Interest Declassification Board is now holding regular sessions. This Board will contribute to the declassification process by identifying records on specific subjects that are of extraordinary public interest. These records will be identified when it is deemed that declassification will not undermine the national security interests of the United States."

Justice Department Probe Foiled, by Shane Harris and Murray Waas, National Journal: "An internal Justice Department inquiry into whether department officials -- including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft -- acted properly in approving and overseeing the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program was stymied because investigators were denied security clearances to do their work. The investigators, however, were only seeking information and documents relating to the National Security Agency's surveillance program that were already in the Justice Department's possession, two senior government officials said in interviews."

Related legal documents, commentary, opinion and postings:

ABC News This Week, May 21, 2006: "Gonzales also defended the NSA wiretapping program, insisting the Justice Department has not been reviewing the "content" in journalists' phone records without a court order. The attorney general reiterated that the rights of a free press cannot trump national security but added, "I understand very much the role the press plays in our society." "...When asked whether journalists should be prosecuted for publishing classified material, Gonzales answered, "It depends on the circumstances...We have an obligation to make sure the people are protected.""

Press release, May 18, 2006: "Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA), Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) today introduced the Free Flow of Information Act (12 pages, PDF), a bill seeking to protect the public's right to information through a free press. This legislation would provide appropriate protections for professional journalists and their employers from having to reveal information that a journalist learned under a promise of confidentiality and in the course of carrying out news-gathering functions."

Special Report 2006: "North Koreans live in the most censored country in the world, a new analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists has found. The world's deepest information void, communist North Korea has no independent journalists, and all radio and television receivers sold in the country are locked to government-specified frequencies. Burma, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, and Libya round out the top five nations on CP's list of the "10 Most Censored Countries."

Press release: "The National Security Archive's background paper on the new databases shows the strengths and weaknesses of the new on-line system as well as sample cables from 1973-1974..."

Press release: Federal Court Finds Air Force Engages in a Pattern or Practice of Violating the FOIA: "A federal court today granted partial summary judgment to the National Security Archive finding that the Air Force has violated the Freedom of Information Act and has engaged in a pattern or practice of violating the FOIA. In a suit brought by the Archive in March 2005, seeking to compel responses to 82 FOIA requests that had been pending between one and eighteen years, the court ordered the Air Force to provide the Archive with detailed information regarding each requested record and its FOIA processing, resolve each request with immediacy of attention and result, notify all agencies to which it has referred requests that it is operating under court order, and appear in court to discuss how to achieve results."

Follow-up to two recent postings, Archivist Statement on Declassification of MOU Between National Archives and U.S. Air Force and NARA Participated In Keeping Gov Docs Secret After Declassification Occured, the following NARA press release, April 17, 2006: "On Thursday, April 13, 2006, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein learned that a second classified Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) relating to the re-review of open records existed. He requested its immediate declassification. This MOU, drawn up by the CIA, was declassified on Friday, April 14, 2006, and is available to the public today. Because this agreement unlike the one with the Air Force was generic and procedural in nature, National Archives staff initially did not view it as part of the reclassification program."

WSJ free feature: SEC Watchdog's Data Request Snags on Fee Fight: "A government watchdog may get the SEC records it wants -- but may have to pay millions of dollars for them." At a cost of $28 per hour for research fees into documents from 26 companies, the SEC claims that a company called SEC Insight could be charged with a fee as high as $2 million to obtain the records it has sought through a FOIA lawsuit.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports today that the papers of political columnist Jack Anderson were bequeathed to George Washington University, but the FBI is blocking their public release pending an agency review to determine if any of the documents contain sensitive or secret information. His family is said to be "outraged."

A Performance Review of FEMA's Disaster Management Activities in Response to Hurricane Katrina (PDF, 218 pages), 04/14/2006.

Follow-up to April 10, 2006 posting, Archivist Statement on Declassification of MOU Between National Archives and U.S. Air Force, this press release today from the National Security Archive: "The National Archives and Records Administration secretly agreed to a covert effort, led by the Air Force, the CIA, and other still-hidden intelligence entities, to remove open-shelf archival records and reclassify them while disguising the results so that researchers would not complain, according to a previously secret Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The secret agreement, made between the Air Force and the National Archives, was declassified pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive and posted on the NARA website yesterday."

Federal Secrecy After September 11 and the Future of the Information Society, Volume 2, Issue 1 (2006), Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society.

OMBWatch: "Nonprofit groups spoke out today against sunset proposals now being pushed by House conservatives. The proposals could create a single unelected commission to review every federal program, and would mandate that all federal programs automatically "sunset"--completely cease--after a fixed period, unless Congress intervened."

"The Sunshine in Government Initiative is a coalition of media groups committed to promoting policies that ensure the government is accessible, accountable and open. Public oversight is the ultimate safeguard of democracy. This is not an issue just for the media. It is the inalienable right of citizens to examine and judge their government; and that right is served when news media act on behalf of the public to gain access to information."

From the National Archives: Central Foreign Policy Files, 1973-1974: This series, popularly known as the "State Department Cables" or the "State Department Telegrams", consist of telegrams, and an index to airgrams, memoranda, correspondence, reports, diplomatic notes, and related material. The 1973 and 1974 digital and fully releasable permanent portion of this series is now accessible through Access to Archival Databases (AAD)."

Press release: "Four years after its launch and more than 1 million hits later, freedominfo.org has a whole new look. But the dual mission of the site remains—a virtual network linking freedom of information (FOI) movements globally and an institutional memory for transparency and access to information rights throughout the world. Freedominfo.org today introduces a new, comprehensive country-by-country section that gives users access to resources about FOI laws in more than 60 countries—including background, legal texts, links to government bodies and organizations, and current news about the FOI movement in the country. As more countries move towards adopting FOI laws everyday, freedominfo.org provides vital tools for researchers, advocates, journalists, government officials, and members of the public to stay informed about the progress of the right to information, around the world and in their own backyards."

From the First Amendment Center, Kevin Goldberg summarizes federal legislation in 2005 that involved FOIA issues, and comments on the status of the proposals.

"Welcome to CenSEARCHip! This is a tool developed by Mark Meiss and Filippo Menczer at the Indiana University School of Informatics in March of 2006 to allow you to explore the differences in the results returned by different countries' versions of the major search engines. We currently work with the Web search and image search functions of four national versions of Google and Yahoo!: the United States, China, France, and Germany."

Press release: "The first-ever government-wide audit of the ways that federal agencies mark and protect information that is unclassified but sensitive for security reasons has found 28 different and uncoordinated policies, none of which include effective oversight or monitoring of how many records are marked and withheld, by whom, or for how long. The audit began in February 2005 with Freedom of Information requests from the National Security Archive at George Washington University, to more than 40 agencies, for copies of their policies and guidelines on "sensitive unclassified information."