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Current Headlines
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Richmond Times Dispatch: Freedom of Information exemptions |
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Freedom of Information exemptions
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.PrintView.-content-articles-RTD-2008-03-17-0073.html
Monday, Mar 17, 2008 - 12:09 AM
Virginia's FOI Act exempts working papers and correspondence of the governor from public disclosure but allows the governor to release the material at his discretion, said Alan Gernhardt, staff attorney for the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council.
Gordon Hickey, a spokesman for Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, said Friday that Kaine uses e-mail.
"I don't know what would be accomplished by doing this," Hickey said after being asked to provide e-mails from Feb. 6, as The Associated Press asked five other governor's offices to do. "We'd have to look at all the e-mails and decide. We'll take a look," he said.
The AP filed public-records requests for a single day's worth of e-mails from governors in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania and California, and got little meaningful information in return.
New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell responded that they don't use e-mail.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's office rejected the AP's request, citing a state Supreme Court decision that exempted the office's records from public disclosure.
Florida and Pennsylvania provided the AP with copies of constituent and junk e-mails sent to the governor's office. Corzine's office said no records existed for Feb. 6, the date for which AP requested e-mails.
-- Tyler Whitley
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Richmond Times-Dispatch: Governments limit e-mail accessibility |
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Governments limit e-mail accessibility
States' rules let them decide which ones they will turn over
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news/politics/general_assembly.PrintView.-content-articles-RTD-2008-03-17-0072.html
Monday, Mar 17, 2008 - 12:09 AM Updated: 03:15 PM
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
While e-mail and text messaging are hugely popular ways to communicate, governments at all levels are often unwilling to let the public see the e-mails of elected officials.
Officially, e-mails in all but a handful of states are treated like paper documents and subject to Freedom of Information requests. But most of these states have rules allowing them to choose which e-mails to turn over, and most decide on their own when e-mail records are deleted.
Open-records advocates contend that by keeping electronic communications private, states are giving their elected officials an avenue to operate in secret -- they use taxpayer-funded computers to send and receive e-mail but with little or no obligation to make such communications public.
An Associated Press survey -- conducted in conjunction with Sunshine Week, a nationwide effort to draw attention to the public's right to know -- found e-mails for governors in at least seven states are officially exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
But even in the other states, access to e-mail is limited, at best. Public records guardians decide which e-mails they'll turn over and which ones they won't. The requests for e-mails often end up in court or in dispute.
Here are a few of the disputes over public access to these electronic communications:
In New Jersey: Gov. Jon S. Corzine is fighting in court to keep secret his e-mails with ex-girlfriend Carla Katz, who is the leader of a powerful union representing thousands of state workers.
In Michigan: The Detroit Free Press sought access to text messages sent between Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his then-chief of staff, Christine Beatty. So far, the city has denied the request, but the paper got 14,000 text messages on Beatty's city-issued pager from 2002 and 2003 through other measures it hasn't specified that unleashed a sexually charged text-messaging scandal.
In Texas: A Texas district attorney resigned after dozens of pornographic, racist and political e-mails that were on his office computer were released by a federal judge. Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal's e-mails included campaign strategy and love notes to his secretary.
In California: San Francisco officials refused to release text messages to and from Mayor Gavin Newsom after a freighter spilled fuel into San Francisco Bay in November.
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Washington Examiner: Audit: Bush Barely Trims FOIA Backlog |
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Politics
Audit: Bush Barely Trims FOIA Backlog
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, The Associated Press
2008-03-16 22:44:05.0
Current rank: # 8,454 of 9,095
http://www.examiner.com/printa-1282371~Audit:_Bush_Barely_Trims_FOIA_Backlog.html
WASHINGTON -
Despite ordering improvements more than two years ago, President Bush has barely made a dent in the huge backlog of unanswered requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
At the same time, an audit by the National Security Archive found that Bush has provided citizens someone to talk to about how long it is going to take to get the government records they want or to be turned down.
The archive, a private research group at The George Washington University, released its seventh audit Sunday of the 1967 law that gives people the power to request information from federal government files. The audit of 90 government agencies found mixed results from Bush's executive order on Dec. 14, 2005, to agencies to clear the backlog and be more responsive to requesters.
"Behind its ambitious facade, the order lacked both carrot and stick," the audit said, because it provided no additional money to do the job and no way to force agencies to set substantial goals or step up their efforts if they fell short.
"Many of the same old scofflaw agencies are still shirking their responsibilities to the public," said Tom Blanton, director of the archive, whose FOIA audits are funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The archive found that unanswered requests government-wide dropped just over 2 percent, from 217,000 to 212,000, from the end of 2005 to the end of 2007.
Of those agencies with backlogs, 31 percent even saw pending requests rise during the two years, including some agencies that significantly reduced very old unanswered requests but saw gains wiped out by a surge of new requests.
Some agencies did well:
-The Energy Department focused on requests more than a year old and instituted biweekly reports from its field offices to top headquarters FOIA officials. It cut the agency-wide backlog from 1,162 requests to 438.
-The CIA set up a task force to tackle the oldest requests. Requests more than five years old were cut 25 percent in 2006 and 74 percent in 2007.
-The Health and Human Services Department added staff but an unexpected increase in new requests prevented it from achieving its planned 5 percent reduction in 2006. It did achieve a 24 percent reduction during 2007.
The Homeland Security Department set an ambitious goal of eliminating its entire backlog by the end of 2007, but instead saw it grow from 82,544 to 83,661 requests.
The FBI failed to meet its reduction goals for 2006 and 2007 and twice pushed them back a year.
The audit particularly criticized the Treasury Department for trying to "wait out the requester." Treasury sent letters to requesters requiring them to reaffirm their interest in the data within 15 business days.
The archive, a major FOIA requester, received such letters from Treasury for 42 outstanding requests. In 27 cases, Treasury sent a second letter after the archive responded it was still interested. For 10 requests all over a decade old, Treasury said the files had been transferred to the National Archives and a new request would have to be submitted there.
Treasury closed 718 requests over two years because the requester no longer wanted the documents or because Treasury's letters went unanswered or were returned because of outdated addresses.
"That many agencies have made significant improvements without additional funding is a real credit to the professionals who work there," said Melanie Poustay of the Justice Department. She heads the Office of Information and Privacy, which advises all government agencies how to obey FOIA and suggests improvements in the FOIA plans Bush ordered each agency to prepare.
"Obviously, though, backlog reduction is an area that continued to need attention," she said.
The audit praised Bush for requiring each agency to set up an FOIA Service Center that people can call to track the progress of their requests; an FOIA Public Liaison to take complaints about the service center; and a chief FOIA officer to manage agency efforts.
The archive sent FOIA requests to all 90 agencies. At 51 of 53 agencies that did not respond in the required 20 days, the archive was able by calling service centers or public liaisons to confirm its requests had been received and sometimes learn where they were in processing. Most FOIA officers they reached "were courteous and helpful."
But not at the CIA and Transportation Department. Multiple calls to the service centers and public liaisons at those two agencies went unanswered. The CIA had no voicemail to take a message; voicemail messages left at the Transportation Department were not returned.
Poustay said the audit revealed "great strides agencies have made in improving customer service." She said her office emphasizes to all agencies the value of direct dialogue between requesters and FOIA officers. "We have seen firsthand how helpful that is to the process."
FOIA amendments enacted last year, after the Bush administration tried to delay them to give its efforts more time, require agencies to establish telephone or Internet service allowing requesters to learn electronically the status and estimated completion date of their requests.
---
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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The News Virginian: Poll: More people seeing federal government as secretive |
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Poll: More people seeing federal government as secretive
The Associated Press
News Virginian
Monday, March 17, 2008
http://newsvirginian.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Common%2FMGArticle%2FPrintVersion&c=MGArticle&cid=1173354989954&image=wnv80x60.gif&oasDN=newsvirginian.com
Nearly nine in 10 Americans say it’s important to know presidential and congressional candidates’ positions on open government, but three out of four view the federal government as secretive, according to a survey released Sunday.
Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University conducted the survey in conjunction with Sunshine Week, a nationwide effort by media organizations to draw attention to the public’s right to know.
The survey found a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who believe the federal government is very or somewhat secretive, from 62 percent of those surveyed in 2006 to 74 percent in 2008. That’s a sobering jump, said David Westphal, Washington editor for McClatchy Newspapers and co-chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee.
“On the other hand, it’s gratifying to see that almost 90 percent believe a candidate’s position on open government is an important issue when they make their Election Day choices,” he said.
The survey of 1,012 adults was commissioned by ASNE as part of a yearlong campaign to have candidates for all levels of office discuss their positions on government access issues.
Half of the poll respondents said government at the state level is secretive, while 44 percent viewed it as open. Those who see local government as secretive increased from 34 percent in 2007 to 40 percent in the 2008 survey.
A majority of people also want access to information such as who lawmakers meet with each day (82 percent), police reports about specific crimes in local neighborhoods (71 percent), and permits for concealed handguns (66 percent). About half said they do not object to officials asking people seeking records to identify themselves or explain why they’d like to see the record.
Although only about a quarter of adults believe the federal government has opened their mail or monitored their telephone conversations without a federal warrant, three-quarters believe it has happened to people in the United States and two-thirds say it is very or somewhat likely to have happened to members of the news media.
The survey was conducted by telephone from Feb. 10-28. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
On the Net: http://www.sunshineweek.org/
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Gainesville (Fla.) Sun: Shrouded in secrecy |
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The Gainesville Sun
www.GainesvilleSun.com
http://www.gainesvillesun.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080316/NEWS/803160302/1082&template=printart
Mar 16, 2008
Shrouded in secrecy
By KIRSTEN B. MITCHELL
Sun Washington Bureau
Government information as wide-ranging as the names of people who grow watermelons or olives, tax returns, and the location of endangered plants and large caves is shielded from Americans under at least 140 provisions scattered throughout federal law.
Their use by federal departments to deny access to government information more than doubled between 1999 and 2006, according to data compiled from each department.
The provisions' oft-buried fine print carves out exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, a 42-year-old law that presumes public access to information from government agencies and lays out nine categories of information that the government may keep secret.
One of those nine is a catch-all exemption that requires shielding government records that are specifically exempt from FOIA by federal law. Critics contend that the exemptions erode government transparency.
The exemptions "just have a tendency to chip away at the presumption that information is supposed to be public,'' said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University in Washington.
Dozens more of the catch-all exemptions are being proposed in Congress, tucked into legislation that would do everything from bolstering the safety of the nation's food supply to buttressing security at wastewater treatment plants.
Often, the provisions are slipped into mammoth must-pass spending bills that few, if any, lawmakers read, much less debate. And it's common for the provisions not to even mention FOIA by name.
"It creates a temptation to adopt FOIA exemptions surreptitiously,'' said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and a frequent FOIA user who encounters such exemptions "constantly.''
"In principle, I think there is a place for such exemptions and they can serve the public interest, but what is missing is an effective way to regulate their use. ... Congress has not created a mechanism for oversight,'' he said.
Fourteen federal departments used such exemptions 3,811 times to deny information under FOIA in the year ending Sept. 30, 1999, according to data federal agencies report yearly to the Department of Justice. By 2006, the last year for which complete figures are available, federal agencies cited such exemptions 10,844 times, the data show.
Even when removing the Department of Homeland Security's use of the exemptions 366 times in 2006 - the department did not exist in 1999 - the data still show a more than two-fold increase.
Congress had a chance last fall to change the system by requiring legislation proposing such an exemption to state its intent clearly and explicitly.
But the idea slipped from a FOIA reform bill during last-minute negotiating. President George W. Bush signed the bill into law late last year.
The bill's sponsors, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, reintroduced the proposed fix last week.
"Neither Sen. Cornyn and I would quibble with the notion that some government information is appropriately kept from the public view,'' Leahy said in the Congressional Record. "But in recent years, we have witnessed an alarming number of special FOIA exemptions being offered in legislation - often in very ambiguous terms - to the detriment of the American people's right to know.''
When Congress passed FOIA in 1966, it recognized that the government could keep secret certain records dealing with national defense, trade secrets, law enforcement, and personnel and medical issues, among other topics.
To avoid contradicting existing laws shrouding information, Congress created the special exemptions that play "an important â€òsafety valve' role,'' but "hold much potential for abuse,'' said Daniel J. Metcalfe, who retired last year as director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, which oversees the government's FOIA use. He now directs the Collaboration on Government Secrecy, a nonpartisan project devoted to government openness, at American University in Washington.
The story of how a redundant exemption began as a narrow provision for the Department of Defense and exploded into a tool that 12 of 14 federal departments used last year to withhold information about government contract bids offers a glimpse into the world of government secrecy.
Although government contracts remain available under FOIA, proposals do not, even years after a bid is awarded. Twelve years ago, when Rep. Floyd Spence, R-S.C., introduced the Defense Authorization Act of 1997, there was no mention of FOIA or even its citation in U.S. law.
Three weeks later, the measure emerged from committee with a FOIA exemption for contractor proposals "in possession or control of the Department of Defense.''
Within seven days, the exemption swelled to cover contract proposals "in possession or control of an executive agency.''
Much of the information the provision sought to shroud was already exempt from FOIA under other exemptions, but it was easier for government agencies to cloak an entire bid proposal - even after a winning contract was chosen - rather than redact specific FOIA-exempt information, according to a House report on the bill.
The Senate ratcheted down the provision to apply only to the Department of Defense, and proposed a five-year sunset after which contractor proposals would be subject to FOIA. The idea lost out in negotiations.
Within three months of President Bill Clinton signing the bill into law, four federal departments and agencies used the exemption to deny FOIA requests, including the Department of Energy, which cited it five times, according to Department of Justice records.
The records of those requests and the agency's responses no longer exist, according to the Department of Energy. Bill sponsor Spence died in 2001.
The National Defense Authorization Act of 1997 was used in 2006 to shield information from a Wyoming investigator who sought to learn who bid on a propane furnace used to heat a Forest Service dormitory that caught fire. The law was cited in denying information on who had bid on contracts for wild horse capture in Oregon, and information on bidders in coordinated federal, state and local government shooting of native California carnivores.
At least two dozen bills contain proposed special exemptions to FOIA. No one has an exact count because they are difficult to track. Sometimes the proposals reference FOIA by citing "section 552 of title 5'' of the U.S. Code. Other times, the language is more ambiguous, deeming that information shall be confidential or shall not be disclosed to the public.
The current proposals include exempting from FOIA a congressional advisory commission on world trade disputes, the identities of people who report illegal immigration, and records related to railroad carrier plans to make the nation's rails safer.
An increasing number of such proposed exemptions seek to enhance safety by increasing secrecy, particularly since Sept. 11, 2001, said Fuchs.
"They tend to be the knee-jerk reaction that secrecy equals safety, and they are rarely thought through,'' she said.
One proposed exemption, originally sponsored by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, is buried in the Senate version of the farm bill, but not the House version.
It would exempt information submitted to the government by ranches and other businesses under a proposed mandated national livestock identification system to track animals from birth to slaughter.
"They are trying to exempt everything including a name or a phone number or a street address, so-called phone book information,' said Joe Davis of the Society of Environmental Journalists. "A lot of this stuff is already out there in the public in various forms.''
He noted that corporations don't have privacy rights the way people do.
But the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which supports the proposed FOIA exemption, said the information should be veiled.
"At issue with cattle producers and ranchers who raise all kinds of livestock is that the information, especially sale information, age of animals and when animals might be ready for market is proprietary,'' said Karen Batra, director of public affairs for the association.
"That information could be used for purposes other than it was intended. My neighbor could use that information to see when I am going to market and he could take his animals to market before me and get better prices and have a competitive advantage.''
Even names and addresses should be exempt from FOIA, she said, because "there's an awful lot of anti-agriculture activists out there. You are fearful of people coming onto your property and sabotaging your operation.''
Similar privacy arguments convinced Congress several years ago to give the U.S. Department of Agriculture the power to keep secret the names and addresses of growers and handlers of watermelons and olives.
Not all FOIA-related provisions seek to shroud information.
Rep. Randy Kuhl, R-N.Y., and Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., want the Department of Energy to remove nuclear waste from the Western New York Nuclear Service Center in Ashford, N.Y.
Their bill specifically mentions FOIA and calls for documents related to the project's environmental impact statement be made "available to any member of the public at a public reading room at the Center, for inspection, upon reasonable notice, at reasonable hours and without payment of a fee or charge.''
Rep. Tim Holden, D-Pa., and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., want private prisons and other correctional facilities holding federal prisoners under federal contract to be subject to FOIA.
"The whole idea is to make private prisons as accountable to the public as public prisons,'' said Leslie Phillips, spokesman for the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
About 25,000 federal prisoners are jailed in private facilities at any given time.
Copyright © The Gainesville Sun
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