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Getting NASA To Comply With Simple FOIA Requests Is a Nightmare (vice.com)
From a report on Motherboard: Freedom of Information Act requests are used by journalists, private citizens, and government watchdogs to acquire public documents from government agencies. FOIAing NASA, however, can be an exercise in futility. In one recent case, Motherboard requested all emails from a specific NASA email address with a specific subject line. Other government agencies have completed similar requests with no problems. NASA, however, said it was "unclear what specific NASA records you are requesting." Possibly the only way to be more specific is to knock on NASA's door and show them a printout of what an email is. JPat Brown, executive editor of public records platform MuckRock, explained similarly frustrating experiences with NASA. "Even in cases where we've requested specific contracts by name and number, NASA has claimed that our request was too broad, and added insult to injury with a form letter rejection that includes the sentence 'we are not required to hunt for needles in bureaucratic haystacks,'" Brown told Motherboard in an email. Brown added that NASA has refused to process records unless presented with a requester's home address, something that is not included in the relevant code; and makes it more difficult for requests to obtain 'media' status.
NASA, like many federal agencies, is in violation of the law, Not just the intent of the law, but the law itself. As I posted in a previous "article" here today, where if the EFF?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Listen, they're not going to show you proof that the moon landings were "staged."
CAP === 'category'
FOIAing NASA, however, can be an exercise in futility
What kind of FOIAing moron uses FOIA as a verb?
Some local govt's require the requester to pay for the cost of searching. This reduces frivolous requests, but also favors wealthy requesters.
Table-ized A.I.
Funny how in USA everybody want total visibility on every single insignificant act made by a civil servant and justify this is insane money burning crap by "being sure all money is well spent". This is the typical thing that cost a lot and prevent any work to be done efficiently.
IANAL/IANAJ.
This is insanely common in the US, not just with NASA. I've submitted maybe 120 requests over the past few years across the US and maybe half of those even received a response. Of those that did receive a response, there was an asinine amount of pushback. To make matters worse, the escalation process is difficult, time consuming and not condusive to good or timely journalism. Rejections often make no sense or show that the person responding to the request don't have a clear understanding of FOIA. It's a sad state of affairs.
That said, the more articles like this, the better. FOIA is incredibly powerful and needs to be used more. It's surprisingly accessible to non-journalists. I highly, highly recommend folks from here submit a few requests for anything they're interested in. It's a very open window into the affairs of our government and the problems it has. Just..... be patient with it.
Here [1] is an exceptionally well written report on FOIA.
On paper, public record laws in the United States are weaker than those of most other nations and continue to fall further behind. In an international ranking of the world’s 111 national freedom of information laws, U.S. FOIA rates 57th, behind such countries as Uganda, Kyrgyzstan and Russia (Mexico’s law is rated No. 1).15 Access to information in the United States remains fraught with the same problems noted more than 50 years ago, before the U.S. FOIA was passed in 1966.16
To make matters worse, public record laws are not worth anything if a nation’s leaders have the power to decide a law does not mean what it says. In interviews with 60 journalists in Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, Lindita Camaj, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, found that agencies have used freedom of information statutes to justify delaying or ignoring requests and to target critical media and give favorable media knightfoundation.org | @knightfdn FORECASTING FREEDOM OF INFORMATION | Context 6 / 52 preferential treatment. “This research suggests that governments can use FOI laws to punish, intimidate, manipulate news media, and control the news agenda—turning the FOI concept on its head.”
[1] https://www.knightfoundation.org/reports/forecasting-freedom-of-information
Last time I checked, FOIA requests were not exactly rocket science.
#DeleteFacebook
Like most any other government agency, they don't want anybody digging up any dirt so they find any reason to reject any request.
Any questions?
Never chalk up to conspiracy what can simply be attributed to stupidity.
People responding to this article so far all demonstrate 1 common attribute: None of you have any earthly clue of what it's like to work for the United States Government. Did it ever occur to you how much it costs to staff an agency as large as NASA with fleebs who do nothing but answer every tom dick and harry's request for the Roswell reports? You don't understand that when republican nincompoops cut funding to the bone (because "TRUMP TOLD ME ALL GUBB'MINT IS BAD"), these positions are the first to go.
SImply put, your requests aren't being answered because there is nobody sitting there at the desk to answer the phone. Why not? Because that person was fired by republicans. And even if there were a desk, with an actual phone on it, with a connection that works because somebody paid the bill on time, there wouldn't be any pencils or paper to write down what the caller is asking for.
People, I am NOT kidding you when I say that your government -- thanks largely to the efforts of cheapskate republicans -- operates on less than a shoestring. You might not believe that of NASA, but it's true. NASA's budget is a minuscule drop in the bucket compared to what it would actually take to fully staff the place and man all stations with competent and trained personnel to perform every function according to the law of our land, *AND* have enough left over to, you know, launch a rocket every now and then. If this was not true, we would still be sending guys and gals to the moon and back and to Mars, and to Saturn and Venus and God only knows where else, and Alex Jones could have his shitty little life, with his shitty little youtube channel, sitting by a 12' high stack of papers that he got via FOIA, telling us it was all fake.
I know one agency that is so strapped for cash that the local unit can barely even buy copy machine paper. You thought I was joking about the pencils but I'm not - these guys can't even put office supplies in their budget.
If you want to have nice things, you have to pay for them. This is a foreign concept to republicans. If you want a government that actually does what it was created to do, then vote democrat.
Space is fake. Earth is flat.
There, no FOIA necessary.
"Simple FOIA Request?" There's no such thing.
I've worked with a few Federal agencies and watched how much time is spent on FOIA requests. It takes a lot of effort to get some of the data together and along with the approval process, i.e., "Will this compromise any ongoing operations? Does it need redaction based on PII and other rules? Where is the data?" Then there's the approval of the response which always has to be reviewed by Lawyers, discussed in triplicate and then dispatched to the requester. Some agencies have huge departments just dedicated to handling FOIA requests and even with that I've seen them impact day to day operations where front line management has to deal with data collection and validation as well.
To a point, FOIA is a great law and I think it's definitely opened up the inner workings of gov't. A lot of this would go away if the gov't was more transparent to begin with especially in matters not dealing in PII/4th amendment issues (Tax Returns for individuals) or national security. I do think some FOIA requests are fishing expeditions and in all cases the costs should be paid for by the requester. It's also not applied uniformly across all agencies and while the National Park Service may respond quickly, the DoD or DOJ may take years or in the case of the IRS or State Department might get derailed altogether.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Hack NASA and get your stinky email. NASA has the record to have the most un-secure systems that a government agency can have. They have a record of being hacked from a 14 year old boy who wanted to pick up chicks saying "Hey baby, I hacked into NASA" (using "password" as password") to a more sophisticated a hacker manipulated the trajectory of a non non-tripulated plane.
I think NASA is just... ...spacing out.
I've dealt with several offices in NASA before, and to be honest, in my opinion, they tend to cooperate with each other like male beta fighting fish in the same glass of water. Often I would attribute failure to comply with something like a FoIA request to such issues, but after reading the article, it really looks like somebody is being stonewalled.
Note, it might not just be the writer, it may be a global stonewall everyone thing going on.
The National Archives was charged with providing FOIA Advocacy across the rest of the federal government. I know, because I helped design their processes and policies. One of my friends is a lawyer who works for OGIS as an advocate for citizens filling FOIA request. If you are getting stonewalled, check with these advocates. They work across all agencies all the time. They know how to pry loose the stones, so to speak. At the same time, be mindful that it is easy to make an overly broad or invasive request. As soon as you start asking for "All" of something... Also, you usually won't be able to pry out a couple categories of private information... Personally Identifiable Information (odd things can fall into this), Proprietary Information (It's not the government's to give), Pre-Decisional deliberations, or anything with any kind of clearance.
Why should anybody care what NASA has been doing since the 60's?
We can all say this is *Crazy* but it also most certainly true that if NASA has observed or had contact with ET's (or unknown technology) then Nasa must record and safeguard this data. In this way the National security apparatus is directly at odds with laws like FOA.
Having been the IT guy assigned to help people fulfill these roles. First off, I would assume the request got mangled and by time it reached the person that needed to do the work, it is probably confused if not unintelligible. See, they talk to their lawyers, their lawyers talk to NASA's lawyers who talk to the administration who send the request down to lower administration who send it to who they think need to do the work who eventually talks to somebody who knows what email is. All the way, there is a big game of telephone as each group redefines the request in their particular language while concealing what they think needs to be concealed for legal and privacy reasons. Take the summary for example. "all emails from a specific NASA email address" Is that sent from or received from? By time the instructions gets to the person that is supposed to do the work, no telling what they are actually asking for. Even if you're the admin over the person that uses that email, sent emails can reside on on the local machine only and possibly not any server depending on how things are set up. How much due dilligence needs to be taken? What about that one computer that crashed and they lost all their sent mail? What if multiple people use that email? Hell, even if it's a simple request and makes it to somebody, they might not know how to do the search. Perhaps they sent nice instructions for searching on Outlook on a PC with instructions stating "use these instructions exactly" but the person in question uses Mail App on a Mac? That has happened too.
And to run it and make it freely available. It's not in the budget now, so you need to find the cash from someone's pocket, and you're demanding it...
Are you willing to pay? For the system to be designed, implemented, staffed and maintained, including the cost of bandwidth and hosting?
Were done by Shrub and Cheney, and when the records were under a court order asking for them, so actually criminal rather than merely suspicious.
tldr; Motherboard made several poorly worded FOIA requests, did not actually request records, or was not requesting it from an IG
Record Definition:
"Records include all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine-readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them (44 U.S.C. 3301)". from https://www.archives.gov/recor...
Asking for someone's email, the budget for a simple calendar or graphic, or trying to fish for information doesn't meet that criteria.
Together with ACLU, EFF are busy #RESIST(ing) the imaginary "Nazism"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What did you expect from the department of LIES? As we all know, Nasa is Hebrew for "to deceive".
Clearly they have so many SECRETS and LIES that they can't risk getting out to the general public.
Now excuse me while I go and finish my thesis on the impenetrable deadly Van Halen belt.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Nice to see Slashdot using all capital letters for 'NASA', unlike the U.K. press, which consists of journalists so stupid that they have taken to redefining our grammar by writing 'Nasa', 'Aids', etc. so that you have to think twice every time you read them.
Adam Steltzner is a fraud:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-kUH942awQ
when people start comments in the subject box.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
did there, dude.
All because a black man was president once in over 200 years. They threw away the whole thing.