Obama Administration Withholds FoIA Requests More Often Than Bush's

bonch writes "Agencies under the Obama administration cite security provisions to withhold information more often than they did under the Bush administration. For example, the 'deliberative process' exemption of the Freedom of Information Act was used 70,779 times in 2009, up from the 47,395 of 2008. Amusingly, the Associated Press has been waiting three months for the government to deliver records on its own Open Government Directive."

Comments

Re:Biased much?

[ooshna]

http://www.dailyshow.com/

Re:How this works

[XorNand]

I just wanted to add my two cents... A month or so ago, I filed my first FOIA request. I requested some non-sensitive statistical data from an office associated with the Dept of Defense. Despite the banality of the data I was requesting, because it was related to the military and the shear volume of it (over 10M records), I was expecting some foot dragging. However, I was very pleasantly surprised. The very next day, the FOIA officer emailed me and then followed up with a phone call. She kept me apprised of the status of my request and about three weeks later, the data was FTPed to me. She even found someone to answer some questions I had about the formatting of the files.

I was fully expecting a more adversarial process considering the reputations of FOIA requests. But I learned that FOIA officers seem to care a great deal about facilitating requests. Just wanted to give kudos here where some is due.