Archive for the 'Transparency'

Yet another example of the Obama administration — you know, the promised “most transparent administration in history” — using legal procedures to fight against actual transparency in court. A court has allowed them to continue to pretend that documents that were already made public are still so secret that they are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The ACLU reports: Read more

Spencer Ackerman has a list of the five worst arguments ever offered by the government to justify keeping its most egregious misdeeds secret. It includes last week’s claim by the NSA that it would violate the privacy of those whose privacy they violated if they were to reveal how many people’s privacy was violated. It also includes this one: Read more

My former colleague Spencer Ackerman got his hands on a deeply ironic letter written by the NSA to two senators, in which the agency claims that they can’t tell them how many people have been targeted for surveillance because that would violate the privacy of those who were targeted. I wish I was kidding. Read more

Remember when President Obama promised, on his very first day in office, to have the most transparent administration in history? The reality has been quite the contrary and here’s yet another example. In response to a FOIA request for Bush-era legal document on the president’s authority to make recess appointments, the DOJ redacted well over 90% of the document. You can view the redacted document here. Read more

In my experience filing many Freedom of Information Act requests, some government agencies are much better than others. Some do their best to comply with the law and provide the information requested; others do everything they can to delay and deny such requests. The mayor of Warren, Jim Fouts, is a great example of the latter. Jeff Wattrick, a longtime Michigan journalist, put in a FOIA request for communications between Fouts and others in his administration about FOIA requests and found that he’s essentially been lying about the issue. Read more