TheAgitator.com
Stealing Our Sunshine
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Seem like as good a time as any to look at the Bush administration’s continuing efforts to duck Freedom of Information Act requests. Last summer, you might remember that in response to requests for White House emails related to political fundraising, the administration tried to argue that the White House Office of Administration wasn’t subject to FOIA, despite the fact that the office has a compliance officer and had posted on its website guides to FOIA procedures.
In response to that and other complaints about the administration’s paltry FOIA compliance, Congress passed a bill late last year setting up a FOIA ombudsman to serve as a liaison between federal agencies and FOIA petitioners. The ombudsman would report to the National Archives and Records Administration. Bush reluctantly signed the bill late last year, but just weeks later slid a provision into his budget proposal that would move the ombudsman to the Justice Department. The Justice Department represents the administration in FOIA litigation. In fact, the Washington Post reports that the entire administration is still under a DOJ directive from 2001 instructing all federal agencies to lose all legal channels available to duck as many FOIA requests as possible. Bush wants the ombudsman to report to the people doing everything they can to undermine the people the ombudsman is supposed to represent.
The Treasury Department seems to have gotten the memo. The Department is this year’s winner of the "RoseMary Award," presented by the National Security Archive to the least transparent federal agency over the previous year. It’s named after Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s secretary who famously erased 18 1/2 minutes of Watergate tapes. The Treasury apparently routinely unceremoniously destroys FOIA requests after stalling on them for months, sometimes years, at a time. One request is 21 years old.
On the flip side, it look as if the Bush administration is ready to bring back Total Information Awareness, albeit under a new name and slightly different auspices, to get around the minor inconvenience that the original TIA was actually banned by Congress.
Privacy in this administration seems to only apply to people working in their official capacity for the government, while "transparency" only applies to the citizenry.
Not on-topic to this piece, but a quick heads-up to WGN (Chicago) News is reporting this:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-taser-death-webmar20,1,6376793.story
According the the anchors, the man’s relative claims the officers beat him and broke his arms.
And so continues the trend of laws applying to everyone equally… as long as you don’t work in government or as a government enforcer.
On a related note, if you go to the FBIs website and go to the FoIA page to submit a request, it goes nowhere. The “submit” button is broken as is the “Print” button. I haven’t checked it in 3+ months (typing this from a Blackberry in yurup) but it wasn’t working for the 4 months prior to that, and I’m willing to bet that short of publicity/shaming it ain’t getting fixed. Feature, not a bug.
yep, here it is, 6+ months later and still broken – http://foia.fbi.gov/foia_request.htm
(maybe it works in Safari?)
Privacy in this administration seems to only apply to people working in their official capacity for the government, while “transparency” only applies to the citizenry.
Not sure why you put transparency in quotes. The government does not expect citizens to be transparent, if the government expected this, why would they go to all the trouble and cost to create total information awareness? The government expects citizens to hide things from government agencies, that’s why they have to spy on us, and have an ear at every door, and an eye at every keyhole. Nope, each and every one of us is guilty, and nothing can be done to prove you are innocent. You are just a person who has not been caught yet.
mojotron,
This link you provided, http://foia.fbi.gov/foia_request.htm worked in firefox.
It goes beyond this administration, and it’s an abomination.
old, the link itself works, the “Print” & “Submit” buttons do not. Your inquiry goes nowhere and you can’t even print it out for yourself.
mojotron,
Ah, I get you now. You are correct there. Here is the code for those two buttons:
They do not work. I would guess you could print from your browser instead.
Well, the code got eaten in the comment box. But it doesn’t lead anywhere. Just hit view source in your browser.