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.

Comments

Cry More

[Br00se]

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.

Re:Cry More

[penix1]

You evidently didn't read the last line in TFS. FOIAs aren't free to file. They cost money to prepare and turn over. Add to that the restrictions on time to produce (10 days in my state. No idea what the federal time limit is) as well as the maze that is the legal exemptions on a FOIA request and it gets quite expensive. What news agency is willing to be the first to fork over the money just to have the means to recoup the funds pulled out from under them? I think this idea is brilliant if you want to curb the FOIA requests you receive.

Re:Cry More

[Br00se]

I did read it. And I stand by what I said. They only reason not to publish every public document held by the government is because there are some documents for a variety of reasons need to be held private, at least for a period of time. And yes, it take effort to sort out which is which. However, once that effort has been made, by someone paying to sort it out. The reason for holding it back disappears.

I think that it is more likely, is that with greater access to these pre-vetted documents, more issues of public interest could pursued and exposed. Something missed by a few eyes could be seen by many more.

Re:Cry More

[DarkOx]

I having trouble feeling sorry for the journalists. Yes the scoop is important but we are not selling papers by having young boys shout "EXTRA" from the street corners anymore. Any novel facts uncovered will be repeated by 100s of blogers the moment the story drops anyway. A huge portion of the would have been in the old days readership/viewership will get that news from there anyway. So whats the big deal if the facts usually accompanied by with more chaff than most folks are willing to sort thru drop one more place?

Where journalism is useful is analysis. They still have a leg up there. If you have been working a story you for which you had to file those requests than other facts and sources must have lead you there. You already have a bigger picture view than anyone else. You know what material you are looking for in those documents. The rest of us just have a 1000 pages of US Forestry Service reports and questions, for example.

I don't by a paper to learn the "CIA has over 300 black sites" I buy a paper because I expect an article that will tell me not only are there 300 black sites, but what a black site is, how they are used, some reasons I should be concerned about that and may be reasons I should not be, what the broader implications for international law enforcement and political relationships are, etc. If my interested ended with a few odd facts the only news I would need are Slashdot summaries anyway.

On the flip side this will be a nice resource to have that will make linking to original source materials be they to support a news story, scholarly paper, Internet rant, or whatever much easier. That will be a good thing, but it will mean for the issues your really do care about you'll have direct access to the evidence itself to for your own judgments. I think this could be very valuable.

Shows where the heart is

[HairyNevus]

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.

Re:Shows where the heart is

[HairyNevus]

As an AC pointed out Snowden's raw leaks being made public didn't stop reporters from selling stories on that information. I'm just calling bullshit on this idea that FOIA requests being published publicly automatically...will somehow hurt any reporter's story. If they're worried about another reporter poaching the info and publishing before them, they need to be better at their job. Have all the background written up and ready to go by the time the FOIA is being filed, then pull an all-nighter to finish the story when it comes out. Simple.

Re:FOIA isn't meant to support a business model.

[mysidia]

Yes.... we all own it, BUT the journalists might not request it in the first place, since they have to pay for the request, If they lose the ability to use the results in their business to get the story early.

What I would support is a 7 day exclusivity period that can be requested for an additional fee; where the requestor will get their results of the FOIA requests, But the guaranteed public release will be temporarily delayed after the requestor receives the files and gets a 7 day headstart..

If the journalist cannot find something to report on within their 7 day headstart, then probably there was no "scoop" to get.

Re:FOIA isn't meant to support a business model.

[Alan Shutko]

If journalists stop asking because they could expend all the time, money and labor to dig up the information without being able to get any reward on the expose, then the public will be hurt. Since fewer people will be asking, less information will be released.

A short delay before putting the information public would leave an incentive for journalists to keep investigating, while still making all of the results available to the public.

That should put an end to FOIA requests

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Info should be Releases When Produced

[DG]

Good idea in theory, non sustainable in practice. There's just too much information generated daily; the cost of hosting would be overly high and I bet the UI for navigating it would be horrid.

The current process is nominally OK, less the fact that only one person benefits from the work of retrieving it. Once found, it should be free for all.