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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.
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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.
I'm not overly sympathetic toward people wanted to hoard FOIA data for themselves
No one is hoarding - you are free to get the same information by running the FOIA maze yourself. They are asking that their work and expense in prying information out of the government be rewarded with exclusive access to the answer to their request. Others are free to request the same information separately. Given the toll gate in front of the information, there is demonstrable public value in giving journalists incentive for digging.
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."
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.
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.
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'?
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.