America Expands Its Freedom of Information Act (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous reader writes: As America headed into its "Independence Day weekend," the U.S. Congress passed -- and President Obama signed -- the "FOIA Improvements Act of 2016". It now establishes a "presumption of disclosure" by law, and will even allow the disclosure of "deliberative process" records after 25 years, meaning those records from the Reagan (and prior) administrations should now become open, according to the Washington Post. In addition, the law also creates a comprehensive new "online request portal" for requesting records from all agencies, and even requires those agencies to make digital copies available for any records requested three or more times.

"By updating FOIA for the digital age, our law puts more government information than ever before online in a format familiar and accessible to the American people," said Senator Leahy, who sponsored the legislation. On the 50th anniversary of America's original Freedom of Information Act, Leahy added that "a government of, by, and for the people cannot be one that is hidden from them... "
It's the law's 50th anniversary, and Leahy imagined a world 50 years in the future, when the next generation "will look back at this moment and gauge our commitment to the founding principles of our democracy. Let them see that we continued striving for a 'more perfect union' by strengthening the pillar of transparency that holds our government accountable to "We the People.' "

Comments

Oh, the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

And the President signed the law on the same day that the State Department said they needed an additional 27 months to release emails between Department of State employees and the Clinton Foundation. Nothing to see here, move on....

Re:Oh, the irony

[Sarten-X]

Never mind that the investigation started explicitly because of a FOIA request...

Re: Oh, the irony

[Bing Tsher E]

The FOIA was the whole reason why Hillaty put up a private email server. She wanted her email traffic to not be on a government server and thus subject to the FOIA.

This whole thing is attempt by Obama to salvage a legacy. The Obama administration has prosecuted more whistle blowers than any other in history.

Re:Obama. What a joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

The president with the worst history of blanket denial of FOIA requests, running the most opaque government in our lifetime, signs a law "improving" the FOIA system. What a joke! If he and his executive branch didn't respect it before, they wont respect it now.

I didn't like Obama either time he ran for president and I still don't like him. I felt like his worldview was completely wrong, and would cause overall harm to the country. However, his promise of transparency was the one thing about him that made me say, "if he actually follows through on this, we as the people will stand a decent chance of fixing our government for the first time in modern history because we'll know what they are really doing." Of course, I also thought, "we'll see how long it lasts if he gets elected." One key element of Obama's promise was that every piece of legislation would be posted to the Congress' website after passage by both houses before he would sign it in order allow for public comment. I believe it was supposed to be a minimum of five days. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened once even going back to the first piece of legislation he signed. It certainly didn't happen with the Affordable Care Act, and the way he has been using Executive Orders (some of them secret) to get around Congress one could reasonably conclude that Obama never intended to be transparent, but only said that to appeal to the younger libertarian and classical liberal crowd.

In fact, I would say the best description of Obama is, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." There are plenty of things I dislike about Trump in this election cycle, but whatever you think of him, he certainly won't be "same as the old boss." Hillary, on the other hand, well...