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Making FOIA-Requested Data Public: Too Much Transparency For Journalists?
schwit1 writes: From The Washington Post's Lisa Rein comes news that the federal government is launching a six-month pilot program with seven agencies to post online documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. That means that information requested (whether by a journalist, nonprofit group or corporation) asks for the records under FOIA, it's not the just the requester who will get to see the results, but also the public at large.
What's the problem with that? For journalists whose province is the scoop, it could mean less incentive to go through the process of asking for the record in the first place. Washington Post Investigations Editor Jeff Leen says in the story that public posting could therefore "affect long-term investigations built on a number of FOIA requests over time." An excerpt offers a similar defense of documents being released only to the requesting party:
"FOIA terrorist" Jason Leopold has big issues with the approach. "It would absolutely hurt journalists' ability to report on documents they obtained through a FOIA request if the government agency is going to immediately make records available to the public," writes the Vice News reporter via e-mail. Leopold has already experienced the burn of joint release, he says, after requesting information on Guantanamo Bay. The documents were posted on the U.S. Southern Command's Web site. "I lost the ability to exclusively report on the material even though I put in all of the work filing the requests," he notes.
Another reason FOIA requesters might be annoyed by a general-release policy: filing FOIA requests isn't free.
Once the information has been collected and vetted to make sure it's eligible to be released under the FOIA, it should absolutely be released to the public. The government has no duty to protects a requester business model.
Guess this means those those journalists didn't really care about exposing the corruption/injustice/what have you in their story as much as they like getting the credit and praise for doing the exposing. This is why i don't like Vice; they can do a really good job of reporting and exposing bad people to be sure, but they rarely bother to offer up a solution or shy away from making simple poverty porn for more page views.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
FOIA is about releasing information held by public agencies to the public. We all "own" it, we have a right to see it, and if we ask, we can.
That's the public "we". Putting in a FOIA request doesn't make that information "yours" and a business model that depends on you adding an additional layer of secrecy is fundamentally flawed. The public has no interest in helping to maintain your flawed business model.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You will not be able to get the scoop because of the way regulations are now. Boo hoo. That means your job is at the whim of some pencil pusher anyway. You are going to have to find a better way to do your job.
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."
[Irony: Slashdot quote was "There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." -- John von Neumann]
ALL information,all documents,all emails that would be subject to FOIA requests should be put on the web as they are produced. We should not have to ask for the information, it should already be there.
So we have a scheme where data owned by the govenrment *can* be public, but isn't until someone has to pay, then it becomes free to all. Why was it not public in the first place?
I'm not overly sympathetic toward people wanted to hoard FOIA data for themselves (the 'Freedom' portion should trump those concerns), but I am disappointed that a paid process is still in front of access to data that should be public from the start.
All of the Snowden leaked documents were made public. How many people slogged through all 200,000 - 1.7 million of them to find all those little details of all the spying they did?
I didn't.
The journalists who reported on it did. And it took many of them to find all of the NSA absues and illegal activities. More the merrier.
And how many folks are going to monitor the website?
What I'm saying is that a reporter requests some document, many folks won't even know the reason why, may not even notice, wont bother slogging through it, and even if they do look at it, they may get something out of it that the original requester didn't.
IOW, no big deal and there's no reason for a 7 day head start.
Do a timed release. Once the FOIA request is completed, the requester gets X months of exclusivity to publish, and then it gets released publicly. This preserves the inventive for the journalists, while at the same time ensuring that even FOIA requests that don't produce something sexy enough to publish still become public access at the end of the exclusivity period.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Take a look at Wisconsin: an attempt to make the state's laws as restrictive as the FOIA was met with huge backlash and a unanimous vote in the Republican-led Senate against it.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/w...
Why not just dump the FOIA and let people electronically read what they want whenever? Think of it like "body cameras for politicians."
The "most transparent administration EVAH!!!!" has just found a way to provide a DISINCENTIVE that will help slow down news organizations investigating government.
Because FOIA requests are time-consuming and expensive to file and pursue.
And to think, the unthinking Slasdot echo chamber said if we voted for Romney we'd get an out-of-control power-mad government run by a shallow narcissist. I voted for Romney anyway, and guess what? The Slashdot echo chamber was right - we not only have an out-of-control, power-mad government, the shallow narcissist is about to get bent over by Iran on their way to getting nukes, as he folds like a cheap tent in a hurricane.
There's exactly two kinds of people who file such a thing: Idealists who strive for freedom of information and journalists hoping for a cool exclusive story.
Idealists usually lack the money and time to pursue this interest with zeal. And Journalists will now no longer get the money and time from their superiors for something that benefits their competitions as much as themselves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Maybe the solution is not to give the journalist exclusivity but to reduce or eliminate the filing expense?
In a certain sense, FOIA requests only result in material that should have been public and therefore readily available in the first place. In that sense, there can be no issue with making the material public on a website. In another sense, there are costs associated with making FOIA requests and so requiring money from one member of the public then giving the same material to all subsequent comers for free is at least a little skewed. There is also that it's easy for the public at large to track what's being requested now. If everything was public already that wasn't a problem since everything is available and so there is no material that stands out because it is newly available.
A reasonable short-term fix is to put the FOIA-answer under embargo for a while (eg. three months), and only after that release it to everyone, giving the requestor time to digest the material first. That seems like a good compromise, but really is the wrong thing, so:
The right solution is for everything to be available all the time, so there is no need for requesting anything under FOIA.
Totally agree with you. This model is similar to scientific data acquired via federally funded research. The data belongs to the public but the researchers who proposed and did the research work get exclusive rights for a reasonable period of time in order to give them incentive to do the work in the first place.
Do a timed release. Once the FOIA request is completed, the requester gets X months of exclusivity to publish, and then it gets released publicly. This preserves the inventive for the journalists, while at the same time ensuring that even FOIA requests that don't produce something sexy enough to publish still become public access at the end of the exclusivity period.
Min
aye this, seems the way to go
Do a timed release. Once the FOIA request is completed, the requester gets X months of exclusivity to publish, and then it gets released publicly.
Exactly this
This gives the journalist time to get his "scoop" and gives the rest of us the ability to check his work. Under the current system journalists can (and do) leave out information that refutes their bias, while reporting only that information that supports their own opinion. The rest of us need to go to the source in order to form our own opinions.
If the concern is 'snooping', what's to stop newspapers, etc, from simply filing monthly FOI requests each month 'for a list of all FOI requests last month'?
Journalists seem to refute much of the opposition to their snooping with "The public has the right to know" ... well, you can't have it only when it suits you..
"The End of Spin."
Information wants to be free.
srs.
This is basically the government adopting the Alavateli model, which has reduced FOIA compliance costs and made FOIAs quicker.
As someone who has been, albeit unwittingly, at the receiving end of a 'FOIA' request (they call it 'WOB' in my country), I say: good. These requests aren't here so that journalists can make a buck. They are here so that the public knows what's going on inside government. So while I was going to have my conversations with some civil servant exposed, I wasn't allowed to know which fucker made the requests. I say: if you wanna be a big boy, you aren't afraid to show who you are. You shitty journalists stand up for yourself.
Sorry about the rant. I just got to my deepest nerves at the time.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Something I never quite understood is why don't agencies just characterize every bit of data produced and make all non-exempted data available online automatically? No more wasting time answering piecemeal FOA requests and doing one-off searches. Let the news agencies conduct their own searches at the expense of their own employees time.
Perhaps not worth the effort for historical/archived data yet going forward how hard is it just make this a standard part of an agencies workflow?
Well, it's whatever amount they need to charge to try to quash the request.
$52,000 for an initial FOIA search that other departments provide free.
Reasonless denial of fee waiver for non-commercial FOIA request by Techdirt for reporting purposes
"Swift's greatest contribution to political thought in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State’, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralize popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria." ref
This is needed for verification of what is reported to be in the docs.
And the government doxxes them?
Won't work. Many times journalists find out damaging information that goes against their "narrative" and they want to bury it instead of reporting on it. If you look into the history of Matt Drudge you will learn he became famous because of this (but it was not a FOIA request). If they request information that fits their "narrative" they will publish it, but if it is opposite to what they expected they want it to remain buried and no one to have it.
The REALLY amusing thing about FOIA requests is Judicial Watch has been able to use it to get information over and over again that Congress cannot get with subpoenas. I find it odd that these departments can ignore Congressional legal requests easier than they can ignore an FOIA request.
Let's think about that.
Say you've got 5000 employees engaged in various kinds of scientific research and building spacecraft to do so. Much of what they produce is exempt from FOIA: for instance, it might be subject to export controls; or maybe it's time card records; or discussions about selection of vendors in a competitive procurement. Someone has to review all that "every bit of data produced" and figure out which bucket it fits in, and that is time consuming. It's also very complex decision making: Do you want to have to look at each of your outgoing emails and try and figure out whether it's FOIA exempt or not (remember, a misclassification might put you in prison: do you want that responsibility). So you have to hire some people to do that sorting.
There's also the sheer volume. A big research lab might have petabytes/day of inbound and outbound network traffic. Is all that supposed to be published somewhere? Are you happy with a raw binary dump with no meta data? Or would you want to have format information and metadata? Well, who's going to pay for producing that, and even if you had a large budget, where will you find the employees to do the work?
It's much more cost effective to do that review in the unlikely event that someone asks for it.
Terry Anderson: 'When I came home from Lebanon, I was given a generous fellowship at Columbia University by Freedom Forum. So my wife and I could write a book about our experience. We decided to ask under the Freedom of Information Act for any information on my kidnappers that might be held by the various intelligence agencies, the CIA the FBI, the NSA. In all we requested responses from thirteen government agencies. As you know, FOYA sets time limits and parameters for official responses to that kind of request. As well as procedures for appeal, ultimately to a court of law.
After two and a half years of messing about with denials and denials of appeals and outright failures to respond, I finally too advantage of that last provision and filed suit in US district Court in Washington. Included in the legal submission was the initial response from the DEA. Which was made long after its FOYA deadline had expired. But informed me that they could not furnish the information I requested because it would violate the privacy rights of the individuals concerned. However if I was able to get a signed notarized release from my former hosts they would be happy to co-operate.'
Allow reporters to pay a fee that equals the amount of money required to process the FOI request N days earlier than they would otherwise. Then give the reporter a copy N days before making it public. It would probably be expensive, but how badly do they want their scoop?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The perfect is the enemy of the good. In the ideal universe all of this would be public already. But we don't live in that universe, and if we insist that all FOIA requests become available to everyone then overall fewer requests will be made. So the compromise proposed by the AC is the correct response, since it means that we'll have a small delay in the info getting public but it will actually get public.
Government agencies have gamed the system that the FOIA no longer has any teeth. As for the press, most of the big players are so in bed with the political establishment that they filter everything the government doesn't. The networks in particular care about dwindling ratings, not truth.
No need for as many FOIAs nor the infrastructure to support them. Only a fraction of what governments do involves actual state secrets or private data that needs protecting somehow.
You see this shit in other countries too, someone abuses the FOIA systems and it's used as a reason to close them down, or limit them further.
E.g. in Netherlands you can request files from your municipality, and if they don't arrive within a certain amount of time you're entitled to a cash compensation. So now some enterprising people have appeared who put in lots of very difficult requests, with the intent of cashing in on that sweet compensation money
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
Perhaps the associated press should play a part in foia requests by making requests on behalf of member news outlets. Just set aside a fund for paying for the requests.
Oh boohoo reporters... I thought you guys were about reporting on the truth. /snark
I work for government. I work with some pretty contentious issues. I deal with FOI requests all the time. Personally I think it is a good idea for a great number of reasons, provided you have the resources to host and support it.
Firstly is that of bias. Journalists have some, usually depending on who they're working for. However I've found that more FOI requests come from A) Lawyers, and B) Special Interest Groups, both left and right, industry and association. In most cases, there isn't anything overly shocking about the information that the government has. However whoever is getting it will want to twist whatever it is towards their own purposes. In some cases this results in the misrepresentation of facts, or the omission of inconvenient material. However there is nothing government can do, we're obligated by law to provide the information, and can't control how it is used. By making sure that the *whole* information request is released to the public and made available to everyone, anyone curious about the story that was written, or the facts that were released, can look it up and judge for themselves what is actually going on.
Secondly, it is a very small subset of people that request most of the FOI material. As mentioned most of them are a select few with an agenda, or lawyers working on their behalf. What a lot of people do not realize is that government needs to do a awful lot of work for these requests. We have to do them, there are strict time lines (so you have to drop everything else), and have little control over scope. A *LOT* of money is spent fulfilling these requests for a very small select few people and groups. On release, the work is already done, the money spent. You might as well provide the information to the widest group of people as possible for the most benefit.
Lastly, as mentioned most of these requests is one group of people trying to get dirt/leverage over another group of people. Is it fair that one group is being notified and not the other because of who requested the information? In fairness, if an environmental group is looking for information to try and use it to limit industrial development in a particular area, should the folks doing the industrial development also not get access to the same information to use for their counter arguments? Also along the same lines, this would also cut down on the number (hopefully) of like requests from the various groups saving government money from doing multiple FOI requests that have already been completed.
... then it should be made public to all.
The fees are nominal. They aren't exorbitant by any means and reasonable since someone has to take time out of their day (perhaps a good portion of their day!) to search for documents, review them for sensitive and private data (SSNs, account numbers, information that could skew active bidding, etc.) and redact them where necessary.
A single, good reason for making a FOIA request public is transparency and accountability. Many "journalists" have agendas and preconceived notions to which they are seeking supporting data and that data which are not supportive or are counter to the preconceived notions are often omitted, ignored, or kept secret. It is not inconceivable that a FOIA request will be cherry-picked for data, quotes, and out-of-context information that will support a bias and damage the counter-argument. Making the FOIA request data available to all makes those with competing agendas able to see the original contexts of the data.
If a journalist looses a scoop, then they weren't working hard enough. If I'm preparing an expose, and I've already done enough research to know what information to request in a FOIA, then I should be able to produce something before a competitor that didn't know it was going to be made public.