Governments Turn Tables By Suing Public Records Requesters (apnews.com)

schwit1 quotes the AP: Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests -- taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.

The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards. Still, the recent trend has alarmed freedom-of-information advocates, who say it's becoming a new way for governments to hide information, delay disclosure and intimidate critics. "This practice essentially says to a records requester, 'File a request at your peril,'" said University of Kansas journalism professor Jonathan Peters, who wrote about the issue for the Columbia Journalism Review in 2015, before several more cases were filed. "These lawsuits are an absurd practice and noxious to open government."

Comments

Opening themselves up to trouble

[HalAtWork]

If this keeps happening they risk being in contempt of the court by filing frivolous lawsuits against legitimate actors.

Re:Opening themselves up to trouble

[Wrath0fb0b]

The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards.

Unless of course the judges are correct that, under current law/caselaw, the records being sought are exempt from disclosure. I mean, to me that really seems like a fact-based inquiry into each set of records and countervailing lawsuit that is the fundamental crux here.

Or to put it another way, I believe the following statements concurrently:

(1) If agencies are filing lawsuits trying to prevent disclosure of documents that clearly covered by the various (Federal, State, local) FOIAs, they should be sanctioned for frivolous lawsuits as the OP suggests.

(2) If the agencies are filing lawsuits trying to prevent the disclosure of documents that are clearly not covered by the relevant FOIA, the court should grant their request and remind the requesters not to file frivolous FOIA requests. As noted/quoted in TFA, they aren't seeking monetary damages, just a ruling telling the filers to go away.

(3) If the sought-after disclosure is neither obviously covered nor exempt from disclosure, then the court should rule on it in the context of those specific facts. I'm sure that there are finer points of FOIA law that either the filers or the agency could reasonably be wrong about and would need to be corrected. That's what the courts are for (I thought).

I'm really surprised that any of these statements would be controversial. I'm not surprised, however, that both sides of the debate would try to lump everything together into an ideological uniformity instead of wanting to delve into the fact-specifics about whether a particular record is covered or exempt under some (probably complicated) law.

Re:Opening themselves up to trouble

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

They don't care - it's taxpayer money. As long as they don't suffer any serious consequences they'll keep doing it. If judges start throwing people in jail for refusing to turn over records then things will change. It's called accountability. Without something like that, this will continue.

Re:Opening themselves up to trouble

[cunina]

That claim is entirely unsubstantiated. The ACLU isn't perfect, but they're not some kind of anarchist menace.

Drain this f&ing swamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump needs to remember the reason he was voted in: put and end to this deep-state bullshit.
Suing the citizen is exactly the kind of shit you get once you start warrantless mass surveillance of the Americans (Bush, Obama), spying on journalists (Obama), sending the IRS after the dissenters (Obama), putting the whistle-blowers to jail (Obama).

Manning, Assange, and Snowden need to be fully exonerated and given a medal of freedom. Obama stooges need to be jailed and tried for seditious subversion of the constitution.

Re:Drain this f&ing swamp

[Opportunist]

And you think that's going to happen? In this or any administration?

Re:Drain this f&ing swamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeh right, deep state, that's the reason Trump is a whiney little bitch that can't do anything but complain about everything. It's all a secret cabal of Obama/Bush loyal Civil Servants conspiring to make him look incompetent/treasonous.

R-i-g-h-t.

Oh and LBGT military, who he banned 4 hours after he was notified that Manasfort house had been raided? Those gay soldiers are all part of this conspiracy too?? r-i-g-h-t.

Why did they not do his budget? That 1 page budget? Was that a) deep state Congress Republicans, or b) it's a one page budget that shows zero grasp of what the vast work the US govt does and the contracts its committed to already? Did the the Republicans throw it out because it was a joke from an clueless idiot, or because they're part of a giant conspiracy to make Trump look bad?

Are NFL players are part of this big deep state conspiracy? Or is he attacking them to distract from Manasfort emails with Putin's men about the large chunk of 'black caviar" he received for his work.

And his $15/month healthcare, did that die because a) it's not real, a fiction, a made up lie told to gullible people who want it to be true, or b) deep-state conspiracy.

And of course the press, don't get me started about the fake news constantly fact checking everything he says. Sooooo deep state.

Keep up the faith A/C. Keep telling yourself you weren't conned by a professional conman.

Re:Drain this f&ing swamp

[Opportunist]

In a system where the only way to get to the top as a politician is to amass a LOT of money and the only way of doing this is to sell yourself to corporations, how can this possibly end without corruption?

I miss the old days

[ArchieBunker]

In the old days corrupt and unruly government officials would be tarred and feathered (or worse) so they knew to behave. Government works for the people not vice versa.

Re:I miss the old days

[drinkypoo]

In the old days corrupt and unruly government officials would be tarred and feathered (or worse) so they knew to behave.

In the old days, inconvenient or unruly citizens would be whipped or beaten (or worse) so they knew to stay in their place.

In the old days, we didn't have antibiotics.

The old days were shit.

Re:I miss the old days

[ArchieBunker]

Did I say we should turn back the clock? I'm saying maybe its time to hold politicians personally responsible for the harm and corruption they cause. Asking the government to investigate itself works about as well as the police doing the same.

Re:I miss the old days

[DNS-and-BIND]

Today things are worse than ever. There is a Nazi in the White House and the world is falling apart at the seams. Pollution, global warming, climate change are all desperate issues that need fixing immediately without any debate. Our problems with police, race and gender inequality, healthcare, income inequality, disregard for the environment, woefully inadequate education system, warmongering and recently insane politics with a president who continues to publically call for his detractors to lose their livelihood totally don't count.

Legal scholar Juan Cole describes Trumpâ(TM)s election this way: "How the U.S. went fascist." Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns terms Trumpâ(TM)s presidency "Hitleresque." Historian Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler," insists that Trumpâ(TM)s tenure so far is based on a "playbook written in German. That playbook is 'Mein Kampf.'"

Re:Good reasons and bad reasons.

[chill]

FOIA requests aren't automatically granted. There are legitimate reasons to deny the requests, or redact the material. The agency who is processing the request can say "no" and cite one of the valid reasons.

Filing lawsuits against the requester is akin to saying "there is no valid reason to deny the request, but I want to anyway". It is disgusting and these types of lawsuits should be summarily dismissed by the court where they are filed.

Re:Good reasons and bad reasons.

[caseih]

As the articles said, these government entities very well could just refuse a request for some reason (such as one of the reasons you suggest). But they aren't doing that; they are filing lawsuits against the requester. That's where the problem is and that's what this whole article is about. This is what is absurd, malicious, and pernicious. And it's getting worse.

It's interesting to see how American institutions, politics, and bureaucracy, are steadily on the decline, both from within and without.

Re:Good reasons and bad reasons.

[drinkypoo]

No, this is not so nefarious as wanting to keep things secret from the public. Suing the requester is a tactical move designed to make sure the government doesn't have to pay the requester's legal fees.

So what you're saying is that this is a means of keeping things secret from the public by making it potentially prohibitively expensive to request the data, even if you have a legal right to do so? Got it. Thanks!

Re:The US

[arth1]

Come over to Europe! We could use a few immigrants that can read and write

That disqualifies a majority of my countrymen right there.