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FBI Will Revert To Using Fax Machines, Snail Mail For FOIA Requests (dailydot.com)
blottsie writes: Starting next month, the FBI will no longer accept Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests via email. Instead, the U.S. agency will largely require requests be made via fax machine or the U.S. Postal Service. [The FBI will also accept a small number of requests via an online portal, "provided users agree to a terms-of-service agreement and are willing to provide the FBI with personal information, including a phone number and physical address."] The Daily Dot reports: "It's a huge step backwards for the FBI to switch from a proven, ubiquitous, user-friendly technology like email to a portal that has consistently shown problems, ranging from restricting how often citizens can access their right to government oversight to legitimate privacy concerns," says Michael Morisy, co-founder of MuckRock, a nonprofit that has helped people file over 28,271 public records requests at more than 6,690 state, federal, and local agencies. "Given that email has worked well for millions of requests over the years, this seems like a move designed to reduce participation and transparency, and we hope that the FBI will reverse course," Morisy added.
Snowden is correct that the enemy is within.
Maybe next time don't nominate a proven criminal under multiple FBI investigations of you don't want the FBI involved. Not there fault the Democratic candidate couldn't pass a background check for Wal-Mart if they were anyone but a member of a political dynasty.
Faxes are considered legal documents. Emails are a very gray area. Japan is one place where faxes are still serious business machines for this very issue. Physical signatures with point to point delivery and receipt verification are often required to close a legal business transaction. Emails don't provide that proof.
The best weapon of a bad government is secrecy, and like most, ours has a history of behaving badly when the curtain is drawn.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If Clinton had been a "proven criminal" she'd have been convicted of something. As it was even congressional investigations by a Republican Congress couldn't pin anything on her. The FBI investigations were because people kept making allegations about her, allegations that in many cases the FBI was obliged to investigate.
I could probably ruin your life by having a group of us continually, for 25 years, make up allegations against you, accusing you of murdering anyone who you have a connection with who's died, pretending that anything that goes wrong that you have a vague relationship to was caused by deliberate actions on your part, looking for cases where standard practices in your industry change over eight years and highlighting cases where you didn't go along, and so on. Eventually you'd end up under multiple investigations.
Clinton was never a great candidate. She believed too strongly she needed the blessing of those in power to gain power, and she was too much of a hawk on issues related to war. But she wasn't the criminal mastermind her critics pretended she was.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
...is why so many Americans have come to have such a low regard for federal workers, and that in turn is what made Trump's pledge to shrink federal government and "drain the swamp" resonate so strongly with voters.
I seem to remember reading this story a year or two ago. Maybe a year ago they announced ahead of time that they would stop accepting FOIA emails in q1 2017? Maybe it was a different federal agency that made the same announcement?
Consider this possibility. If the FBI didn't have so much internal festering decay and oozing slime that needed some disinfecting sunlight then the FBI might not get so many FOIA requests. Just sayin'
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
That fact it never went to trial means she was never cleared. Its pretty plain to most people that she most likely violated federal laws for handling classified documents; but because it never went to trial we can't say she was proven guilty. It remains technically speaking an open question.
How serious an infraction it was, and how likely prosecution would have been successful, what the likely sentences could have been are all questions and largely matters of opinion for which you will find different ones offered by many qualified people who have experiences in those matters.
The Clintons were simply party to many scandals over two long a period to be trust worthy. Some of that perception has to do with a concerted partisan effort to to tie them to things, but its also true most of us even most other politicians don't lead such colorful lives.
She was not a good candidate! That should have been obvious to the big money contributors, it should have obvious to the other politicians that were going to have to back her candidacy, and it should have been obvious to the party. Next you have all the evidence that the DNC deliberately scudded the Sanders campaign, a man who did not have all of Clinton's liabilities.
I can think of only two reasons to go forward with HRC in the begging (IE when the RNC field was still 12+ people of varied quality)
1) Usually the incumbent party looses the White House after a two term presidency. So she was always secretly a throw away candidate, it was consider by many to be her turn, and backing her got her out of the way so she would not be around for a 202[04] election they more likely could win.
2) She really had enough friends and dirt on people to force them to cooperate.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Responding to FOIA requests is not trivial or inexpensive. If this process change reduces nuisance requests so much the better.
And then, there's Benghazi. Clear case of treason, and no Democrat is interested.
If it was such a clear case of treason, wouldn't you expect that a Republican-controlled Congress would figure that out during their investigation?
Honestly I tend to think the driving force of all the division is what I've come to call "the clicks". They've got to do everything to get the clicks. The media, none of it, even remotely pretends to present things in a fair and impartial light. They spin everything as much as they can and make headlines as inflammatory as possible to try to get the clicks. And whether you want to admit it or not, the media has a huge influence on everybody. They fundamentally set the mood of everything. And since they've decided that the clicks are more important than providing fair level headed articles, and riling people up is the best way to get the clicks, we end up with the atmosphere we have. Everybody is divided based on if they agree or disagree with the headlines.
The part that annoys me the most is how the media seems to staunchly refuse to accept their responsibility in most of this. As far as I can tell, CNN elected Trump, but they'll refuse it staunchly. They spent years covering every little terrorist attack and making things that really weren't that big of a deal all you heard about because it got them the clicks. This created a sense of fear which Trump then played to and took advantage of. And now CNN is pissed that he took advantage of something they created and now rather than covering things fairly, they're playing up how awful everything he does is. Note how they don't cover any of the positives he's done, and only the stuff their reader base will be outraged by. Again. For the clicks.
..and they won't be machine-searchable
Due to the nature of humanity, the rest of us also have things to hide. Some are bad but not illegal, like cheating on a partner, some are benign but still secret, like whether or not you are bluffing in a game of poker, and some and simply personal, like what the person looks like naked.
Things the FBI legitimately needs to hide aren't subject to FOIA requests, so the question is still irrelevant. They're going to withhold the information no matter what the answer is.
They've got to do everything to get the clicks. ~. The part that annoys me the most is how the media seems to staunchly refuse to accept their responsibility in most of this.
It is the reality of the situation. Print media (the ones who used to do investigations and in-depth reporting) is dead. TV news is too short (30 minute programs) and on too long (multiple times a day to 24hrs) to present anything but irrelevant and entertaining one-liner stories.
How did this happen? With print, it was the death of print advertising. Future historians, if they can piece together any records will note that Print died when Craigslist took off. The newspapers failed to see that the print classifieds model was dead and lost that war without a fight. Other print revenue soon followed.
What we are left with is the stupid headline that links to a 30-page slideshow (29x the ads a normal 1-pager would have!). Adblock destroys that model. 30 pages of annoying clicking reduces traffic. Death Spiral continues
Honestly I tend to think the driving force of all the division is what I've come to call "the clicks". They've got to do everything to get the clicks. The media, none of it, even remotely pretends to present things in a fair and impartial light. They spin everything as much as they can and make headlines as inflammatory as possible to try to get the clicks. And whether you want to admit it or not, the media has a huge influence on everybody. They fundamentally set the mood of everything. And since they've decided that the clicks are more important than providing fair level headed articles, and riling people up is the best way to get the clicks, we end up with the atmosphere we have.
If the "atmosphere" we have today is one of bullshit hype and information deemed corrosive at best, then perhaps we need to find a way to stop fucking feeding it. In other words, stop creating and funding revenue streams based on nothing more than "the clicks". Petition to make turning a human into the product illegal. Start to give a shit about privacy again.
Sadly, that will never happen, so our atmosphere will continue to devolve. Capitalism often does not makes sense due to it being perverted by corruption and greed. I can start a tobacco company today and help contribute the the killing of hundreds of thousands of Americans every year (far worse a death toll than anything we're currently rioting in the streets over), but I'll be arrested if I sell marijuana, because it's "harmful".
We we support, is what we ultimately get.
Yes. The media is largely responsible. I remember when CNN was respectable. It was about real news. I watched it deteriorate over decades. They got rid of Headline News. Replaced it with basically gossip and fluff. Stopped doing real analysis. The invasion of the Talking Heads. Sound Bites.
I remember when CNN closed their foreign bureaus. Fired their investigative journalists. At the time, a friend and I wondered how CNN would continue to operate. Now it is clear. Pretend news. Infotainment. It's mostly editorial. Regurgitating government hand outs. The government figured out with 9/11 that it could seize control of the news media with "embedded journalists". They could simultaneously sanitize the war news coverage while also holding the news media hostage to the deliciously addictive handouts of news bits from the government as long as journalists play nice and don't get their access revoked. You can see this today in the white house press briefing room.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
And what if that email request is coming from China or Russia?
Validating the source of the request is perfectly legitimate. It's a shame that they have to take a step backwards, technology-wise, but their reasoning is sound.
Their reasoning is not sound. FOIA responses are public record. Meaning the person who receives the information can turn around and publish it online or print it in the paper.
Do you think a foreign government would be incapable of recruiting an American citizen to make requests and deliver the responses to them? Of course not. But why would they bother? Anything the USG cares so little about that they don't redact from a FOIA response and has any strategic value whatsoever has already probably long been known by competent intel agencies the world over.