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DoJ Answers FOIA Request After Six Years With No Real Information
An anonymous reader writes "In response to a Freedom of Information Act request about Google's 2007 complaint against Windows Vista search interference, the Department of Justice has after six years released 114 partially redacted pages and 60 full pages of material. Yet these 'responsive documents' consist of public news articles and email boilerplate. All the substantive information has been blacked out."
You can see right through them.
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, "Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found them too monotonous.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22*
It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta' do it.
News Flash:
"A recent study has determined that Democrat administrations in Washington are just as bad as their Republican counterparts. There's just as much lying, corruption, scandal, debt, malfeasance and general stupidity. In fact, other than their respective logos, there appears to be no difference at all.
Film at 11."
The only thing worst than government secrets is badly regulated government transparency so you can no longer legitimately complain about a lack of transparency but only about quality of service.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Why is anyone surprised at the amount that was redacted? There are two things to keep in mind.
1) Anything pertaining to the explicit monitoring of Microsoft's compliance would be considered "on-going" and would be redacted by the DOJ
2) Anything related to Google (i.e. the so called innocent party) can be redacted at Google's request prior to release of a document, provided that Google lawyers can come up with a potential harm scenario.
3) Anything related to Microsoft (i.e. the guilty party) can be redacted at Microsoft's request prior to release of a document, provided that Microsoft lawyers can come up with a reasonable scenario that shows significant harm.
Given the amount of money firms like Google and Microsoft spend on lawyers, the FOIA requester should consider himself lucky because I'm sure hitmen would be much cheaper and you wouldn't feel as dirty when you paid them.
"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." - Barack Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It must have been a National Security issue.
a pittance for the common man. much as cloistered monks of the dark ages, we the peasants arent meant to understand their knowledge. We merely consume their decrees and avoid asking questions.
in reality actual freedom of real information is virtually patented by the wikileaks group. the knowledge they provide is indispensable in tracking and understanding the policies and procedures of how our government works. this knowledge has sparked revolution, incited protest, and called for real policy and leadership change. it has become consequently forbidden and persecuted.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There are a lot of checks and balances to make sure that all those that donate money to one cause or another, are taken care of. And that takes time.
Were you expecting anything different?
I blame George Bush
In my family, there are a few die hard Baby Boomer ex-hippie Democrats. They live in Berkeley, BTW.
They were so exited about Obama and I admit, I was too because the old rich White guys haven't done anything for me either so I thought. "Maybe this guy will shake things up."
My Gen X cynicism has kicked in and it's the same old same old.
My Baby Boomer Berkley relatives? They think Obama sucks. now - But STILL better than ANY Republican.
They are searching for the next Great Liberal Hope.
Of course, the Dems will fuck it up and the Reps will get a second wind in '16 - assuming they smarten up and drop the whole "Social Values" horse shit.
Reps: Smaller Government, lower taxes, less regulations - where it's warranted, and less government in our private lives will get you into the Whitehouse again - see. Barry Goldwater's writings for ideas. His time has come postmortem.
Any law that does not prescribe personal sanctions for non-compliance isn't worth the paper it is written on.
In practice a FOIA is supposed to be simple... pay a fee, request the information, and in a reasonable amount of time for the department to do due diligence you get the information. Apparently though from my Dad's experience working for their union (he was a secretary for their union for helicopter pilots) the Air Force foisted what seemed like (and still does) unreasonable health requirements for their training staff, that were not required of other government contracted helicopter flights. They filed a FOIA with the Air Force for the information and the Air Force promptly dragged their feet, for months and months until it was time for the regulation to go into effect. The union was forced to take legal action against the Air Force, and it was only at the hearing to request a stay on the policy that the AF submitted any reason or rationale for the policy, giving the union no time to respond.
Without any legal ammo, a FOIA request can be easily stalled by whatever government department.
Unfortunately for us citizens of the U.S.A., the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) serves exactly the same purpose that the White House Petitions page "We the People" serves: no purpose other than to coddle the masses and trick them into believing that they are being listened to...
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Then they respond to us with "cute little children, we promise not to build any death stars,... really..." rather than even bother to answer substantively to any questions about real matters. It's just another bureaucratic layer they can point to and say: "look, the process is this, why don't you just follow the outlined process, and wait your time, and we'll get back to you. don't call us, we'll call you."
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It's a damn shame that people really believe this is supposed to work rather than just to mollify, pacify, and distract while government's business as usual continues to happen away from our eyes and our heart's wishes.
Talk the talk, and walk a different walk.
It seems to be working for them so far.
Judicial Watch recently had a FOIA request answered after 11 years!
http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/10/government-responds-to-a-records-request-11-years-later/
Serious question here: Why is anything redacted? These are things like emails between Microsoft and government anti-trust lawyers. There is no possible issue of National Security here. So what's the excuse for blacking anything out?
Here's an example from TFA:
"Skip: your Thursday email stated:"
REDACTED
"To which GeneB replied:"
REDACTED
"Skip Stritter wrote:"
REDACTED
That's not information. It's routing data
The FOIA is all just smoke and mirrors. There is no "freedom of information" as long as they continue to redact anything. The gubment only will tell you what they want and nothing more. It is no longer of, by or for the people unless you are a "corporation person" with lots of campaign contributions. Lies and deceit are all I see coming from DC, both parties and the POTUS.
... this is why we need them, to combat the ever increasing secrecy of governments around the world..
Hmmm. I suppose I should redact all of the relevant information if the IRS ever audits me, due to security concerns of course....
The two parties are a good cop/bad cop act. They both must please their bosses by screwing you. The difference is that one is the bad cop and sadly some people are Stockholm Syndrome types and mistake them for the good cop; these people are Republicans. The people who are aware can feel SMUG and secure (and even smarter) knowing they are not being fooled, as they "help out" the good cop so he can help them...
My question is, which one is more stupid? the masochist one or the gullible one?
The good cop can get you a plea where you only get half the punishment (but still are punished) so is that good? From 1 perspective, yes. from another... half time in fuck-me-in-the-ass prison is too much time for a crime you didn't commit.
Rationalizing people caught in the trap will just dismiss people who point out the emperor has no clothes as fools. "Of course politicians lie, that is how one succeeds in politics." Dismissing: perfect, the enemy of good.
What we must learn to do is how to effectively counter these rationalized defenses instead of merely state all the same imperfection arguments that, even when cogent, are lumped into the same old defense mechanisms and dismissed.
How we get out of the trap once we know we are stuck inside it? - that is another problem I don't have an answer for. You don't get out of the interrogation room by yourself. 3rd parties are like protestors that don't make the news unless they are beat down and slandered.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
If Mr. Thomas "Editor-at-Large" Claburn wants to claim he's doing investigative journalism, he has a long way to go before he's in the same league as Edward R. Murrow, I.F. Stone (The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist) I.F. Stone, or Si Hersh. Granted, the issues here don't seem like they have the same importance, but he does have a point.
If states see fit to argue successfully in federal court that their citizen's rights are impinged upon by a multi-national corporation, you might be tempted to believe that it would be in all our best interest to have the opportunity to understand how and why the decision was reached as well as to perform the public service of monitoring the offender's compliance with the orders of the court. We have certainly seen this play out in the context of "sex offenders." Why not corporate monopolists?
The legal standard used for sealing federal court records might provide some direction. Or perhaps it could and should be argued that in any case involving of a company with the size, power and reach of Microsoft, particularly with respect to it's opportunity to do harm in the scope of its control over a product like Windows which has nearly monopolistic market share and ubiquitous effects on the citizenry at large, the public has a right to know and an interest in the outcome of the case as well as the judgment of the court and the terms any settlement.
On the other hand, you might just as well believe, as Mitt Romney does, that Google and Microsoft deserve to be treated just like people... oh, wait... wouldn't that imply that since they have been shown to be utterly disrespectful of any reasonable expectation of privacy, along with your ISP, your POTS and wireless telecomm providers and your local police department, they should be listed and tracked on a serial offenders list? And they should be required to update government with any change of address? (You'll just have to use the NYSE or Lexis/Nexis.)
Sigh... It's too overwhelming. Even global commerce just isn't that important. I mean, how is it that any of the investment banks that nearly brought the world's system of economic exchange to and end can settle any case with the federal government, have the terms of deal sealed and avoid admitting any wrong doing? I guess we'll just never know...
-- Time to put on your critical thinking caps kiddies!! --