FCC Is Not Complying With Freedom of Information Act Requests, Alleges Lawsuit (arstechnica.com)

burtosis writes: The FCC is being sued for failure to turn over documents related to "correspondence, e-mails, telephone call logs, calendar entries, meeting agendas," between chairman Ajit or his staff and ISPs. Given the FCCs recent transparency issues, which appear to be directly ignoring the vast majority of feedback from Americans that are pro net neutrality, a nonprofit group called American Oversight is trying to force the real conversations the FCC is holding into public view. They are also asking for any communications with the media, Congress, and congressional staff. Two extensions for missed deadlines have been given, but the third extension was denied on July 24th. The FCC also ignored a FOiA request by Ars for the DDoS attack during the public comment period on net neutrality. With the current administration's attitude toward transparency and catering only to the largest corporate donors, will the American people have any meaningful influence in how the country is run anymore?

Comments

Opacity: The American Tradition

[geekmux]

"With the current administration's attitude toward transparency and catering only to the largest corporate donors, will the American people have any meaningful influence in how the country is run anymore?"

Uh, current administration?

Can someone tell me when the last time any administration was completely transparent and somehow didn't cater to their largest corporate donors? For fucks sake, this has been going on so long it's now considered an American tradition. Not even you great grandfather remembers a time when this wasn't true.

The American People became irrelevant long ago.

Re:Opacity: The American Tradition

[JoshuaZ]

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all had serious transparency issues and trouble paying attention to public feedback. However, neither Bush nor Obama was by and large that bad, and the current administration is so bad it makes the previous ones look like paragons of transparency and responsiveness.

Re:Opacity: The American Tradition

[bobbied]

I guess it depends on your political prospective.

I saw Bush as somewhat opaque, but not unpleasantly or unreasonably so. Clinton was documented as a liar and was very misleading and opaque when push came to shove politically. But Obama was the textbook definition of opaque for 8 full years.

I don't think Trump is opaque in the least, which is actually partly responsible for his PR problems. What you see is what you get with Trump, warts and all. He tweets out ill-advised stuff based on his feelings at the time and forces his PR folks to work overtime *explaining* how he's really towing the administration's stated position. We are actually getting a glimpse of how Trump thinks and how his administration is working (or not working depending on your view). This is transparency to a fault if you ask me.

Now, I suppose if you think there was some kind of improper relationship with the Russians during the campaign he's trying to hide, and you admit that there is no direct evidence to support this claim, you MIGHT consider Trump's continued denials as being opaque. But you realize that this is only true if it turns out his denials are false...

However, we are off topic here because the FCC people involved here are not Trump appointees, but long standing civil servants. As such, they don't reflect on Trump's OR Obama's administrations.

Re:Government in General

[beelsebob]

The solution is simple: just don't record in meeting minutes or any fashion whatsoever the things you don't want the public to know about.

That seems like a strange "solution"

What you're saying is "the way to avoid committing a crime, is to commit a crime".

Re:When...

[jandrese]

Tom Wheeler's FCC was much better about communicating with the public. The feedback mechanisms that Pai is ignoring were set up by that FCC.

Re:Government in General

[Gr8Apes]

then [Hillary] didn't just turn them all over when they were requested

Except she did turn over everything relevant. Since there were intermingled emails, turning over everything was not necessary, no matter how it was painted or looked like. This doesn't mean her email use wasn't a huge error in judgement.

Like my company's default E-mail retention policy of 14 days. Crazy as it sounds, they do this for liability reasons (as well as limiting server space). Record retention policies are usually about limiting legal liability in the case of a lawsuit. "Oh, you want the E-mail from 30 days ago with that court order? Sorry, we only have 14 days worth due to our records retention policy..."

I'm not sure how that would fly should you actually go to court. You're required to keep certain types of documents for far longer than 14 days, whether they are in email or not.