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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.
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.
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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.
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
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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."
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.
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.
The real danger to news agencies is that The Daily Show, National Public Radio's On the Media program and other media critics will be able to see all the documents that the reporters were given, but did not report on.... so, IMHO, this new FOIA policy will really help to expose the biases of many mainstream news agencies.
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'?
Are you willing to increase your taxes paid by 20% just to staff enough people for my "UFO" and "Anal probe" requests in 30 different ways to every single agency i can think of so i can prove all UFO sightings are government conspiracies an all alien anal probes are means to punish and discredit people who are thorns in the side of the government or some crony company they support? Or should something like the department of health and human services spend a good portion of their budget on these rather than their stated missions? I can see it now. FEMA fails to respond to some natural disaster stating their budget was already burned through fielding FOIA requests.
I agree with you in principle, I just look at the practical application of it. Probably unlike you, I do see a need for some secrets to remain in government. I think it's mostly to national defense and comments or advice given but not adopted over political matters. For example, issues like the civil rights act or giving women the vote could have turned out differently if everything we now know was instantly available when it transpired.
This argument reminds me of a few years ago when private weather forecasters were trying to kill off the National Weather Service's websites and public forecasts so that they wouldn't have public competition when presenting NWS data and analysis.