36. Do freedom of information laws make a difference?
Although these laws require that the government give the public access to documents upon request (with many exemptions), to what extent does the government find ways around them by hiding, reclassifying and delaying the release of information it doesn’t want public?
If these laws didn’t exist, would the government still be somewhat transparent because a lack of transparency would look bad politically?
Is information obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and other freedom of information laws critical to the value of POLITICO’s journalism? Is that information more critical to media organizations that focus on policy and politics? If those requests aren’t granted in a timely manner, is there a point when that information loses value? When do media organizations have grounds to sue the government to obtain access to information?
AP sues State Department, seeking access to Clinton records
By The Associated Press (Steve Peoples)
March 11, 2015
The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.
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State Department spokesman Alec Gerlach declined to comment. He had previously cited the department’s heavy annual load of FOIA requests — 19,000 last year — in saying that the department “does its best to meet its FOIA responsibilities.” He said the department takes requests “first in, first out,” but noted that timing depends on “the complexity of the request.”
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“State’s failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s governmental emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP’s requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires,” says AP’s legal filing.
A Claim of No Classified Emails in a Place That Classifies Routinely
By Scott Shane (New York Times)
March 11, 2015
Anyone who has tried to pry information from the federal government may have been surprised on Tuesday by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertion that in all her emails in four years as secretary of state, she never strayed into the classified realm.
After all, a consensus among Republicans and Democrats for many years has been that the government routinely overclassifies information, reflexively stamping “secret” on mountains of documents with marginally sensitive content. The government classified more than 80 million documents in 2013, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, which publishes an annual count.
“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference on Tuesday at the United Nations. “I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”
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But [Steven] Aftergood, [director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists] also noted that as secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was the top classification authority for the entire State Department, with broad discretion to determine which department documents were classified and which were not. “There’s zero chance that she’ll be charged with unauthorized retention of classified information, because she decides what’s classified,” he said.
Obama’s not-so-public schedule
By Josh Gerstein, with Tarini Parti and Tomer Ovadia (POLITICO)
September 12, 2012
Obama has pledged to run the most transparent administration in history, yet the published schedule offers only a narrow window into his activities, a POLITICO review found.
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There is no legal requirement to put out a White House schedule. The president’s complete daily schedule can’t be obtained directly under the Freedom of Information Act, since the White House is exempt from that law.
Survey Finds Action on Information Requests Can Take Years
By Scott Shane (New York Times)
July 2, 2007
The Freedom of Information Act requires a federal agency to provide an initial response to a request within 20 days and to provide the documents in a timely manner. But the oldest pending request uncovered in a new survey of 87 agencies and departments has been awaiting a response for 20 years, and 16 requesters have been waiting more than 15 years for results.
The survey, to be released on Monday, is the latest proof of a fact well-known to historians and journalists who regularly seek government documents: Agencies often take months or years to respond to requests for information under the law, known as FOIA, which went into effect on July 4, 1967.
What’s not in the Senate torture report
By Josh Gerstein (POLITICO)
December 9, 2014
Some of the most revealing information from the Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday is what’s not there.
The 528-page summary had 7 percent of its words blacked out, obscuring the titles of CIA staffers and dates of critical events.
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The result is a report that states what happened but defies many attempts to establish a chain of responsibility.
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The White House claimed the redactions were necessary to protect the safety of individuals and preserve relationships with allies. But the result, according to some Democratic senators and other critics, is an unnecessary level of obfuscation.
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) didn’t complain publicly about the redactions Tuesday, but did describe a “lengthy negotiation” with the White House and the CIA over deletions from the report.
CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career’
By Washington Post (Greg Miller)
July 4, 2014
His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files.
It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that he concluded were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.
To get them released, Scudder submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act — a step that any citizen can take, but one that is highly unusual for a CIA employee. Four years later, the CIA has released some of those articles and withheld others. It also has forced Scudder out.
His request set in motion a harrowing sequence. He was confronted by supervisors and accused of mishandling classified information while assembling his FOIA request. His house was raided by the FBI and his family’s computers seized. Stripped of his job and his security clearance, Scudder said he agreed to retire last year after being told that if he refused, he risked losing much of his pension.
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“I submitted a FOIA and it basically destroyed my entire career,” Scudder said. “What was this whole exercise for?”
