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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.
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.
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.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
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.
News media requesters, however, are entitled to a reduced assessment only when the request is for the purpose of disseminating information.
and
VII. Fees There is no initial fee required to submit a FOIA request; in fact, in the majority of requests made to DOJ, no fees are ever charged. The FOIA does provide for the charging of certain types of fees in some instances. For purposes of fee assessment only, the FOIA divides requesters into three categories. The first category includes commercial-use requesters, [...] The second category includes educational or noncommercial scientific institutions and representatives of the news media, who are charged only for duplication fees, and who are provided the first one hundred requested pages free of charge
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
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.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.