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.

Comments

Re:In violation of the law?

[El Cubano]

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?

It is actually not that surprising. These sorts of things happen for the same reason that you occasionally find caches of undelivered junk mail, permit applications sometimes take too long or get "lost," and someone occasionally gets a ticket for going just one mile over the speed limit: government employees, at all levels, are regular people who hate their jobs as much as anybody else and who sometimes have bad days and take out on the public they are there to serve. It sucks, and it is wrong, but some government jobs suck more than others.

FOIA requests are particularly sucky because most federal agencies have rather poor records retention. All the problems that people talk about related to big data are the same sorts of problems that exist with FOIA. In addition to that, agencies who wish to undertake certain activities and ensure that those activities escape official notice by the public can engage in strategies that result in records being misclassified, improperly destroyed, or even never kept in the first place (Hillary Clinton's home email server was a good example of this). So, if you are the person tasked with going around to a bunch of people and departments who think they are too busy to keep proper records (because none of these records are stored in a central, properly indexed, easy to access repository) then the suck factor will make your every day rather miserable.

That said, nobody forces people to work for the government and if they don't like the job they should quit and let someone else do the job who takes the responsibility seriously enough to it properly. The proper application of lawsuits by the EFF and other watchdogs is sadly a necessary component to ensure that the government remains compliant with the law.

Re:Reimbursement

[Anonymous Coward]

All government agencies should be required to submit ALL their records to an open repository, unless otherwise marked as sensitive or classified.

As a taxpayer, I strongly object to this. I certainly don't want to pay the kind of money that would require.

Don't underestimate the amount of work involved

[Virtucon]

"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.

Re:Moon landings, 1st!

[TheReaperD]

The scary part is there a groups of people who actually believe shit like this, just as much as we believe that water is wet and that most lawyers and politicians should be drowned in a vat of urine.