Read into that what you will about the current administration. While you're reading you might also want to factor in what we know about their documented hostility to FOIA.
Annual shredder budget graphage via Radar Magazine.

And, thematically, what better excuse could there be to bring back one of the post popular Daily Caveat posts of all time - Watch it Shred!

-- MDT

Labels: FOIA, shredding

So says the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The 1996 Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments bill gave a ten year window for Federal agencies to meet certain standards for transparency, the majority of which are doing an rather underwhelming job of meeting.

The NSA's audit of the websites of 91 Federal agencies that have Chief FOIA officers, conducted in cooperation with The Knight Open Government Survey, produced several key findings:

• Only one in five federal agencies (21 percent) posts on the Web all four categories of records that the law specifically requires

• Only one in 16 agencies (6 percent) posts all ten elements of essential FOIA guidance

• Only 36 percent of agencies provide the required indexes of records

• Only 26 percent of agencies provide online forms for submitting FOIA requests

• Many agency Web links are missing or just wrong
  

The NSA report provides a list of agency standouts - both positive and negative. You can check out their run down of "E-Stars" and "E-Delinquents" here.

I realize FOIA news is not exactly as sexy as the latest hedge fund blowup or executive scandal, but access to public records is the lifeblood of all investigative work. Moreover, the capacity for FOIA - to review the actions and records of our government - is one of the core freedoms we have as Americans and a crucial oversight mechanism for the maintenance of our democracy.

The E-FOIA failings are simply one front in a larger conflict over the right to essential evidence. We can never expect perfect availability of information, but the last decade has brought a tenor of increasing restriction of citizen access to government documents - something we've written about repeatedly in this space.

Read more on FOIA's ignored mandate via Information Week. Or, check out the full GWU audit report, File Not Found.

-- MDT

Labels: FOIA, oversight

It is certainly not breaking news that the current administration has done its level best to avoid public disclosures relating to its policy decisions. The number of documents marked secret or higher has increased dramatically over the last decade while at the same time government agencies have become increasingly hostile to Freedom of Information Act Requests. In the last few weeks complaints have come from the National Archives that the push for government secrecy has even prompted certain three letter agencies to restrict access to records that had previously been made public. Even the Chief Archivist of the United States (a political appointee, not a government lifer, btw) has come out swinging at these activities. Turns out the public owes thanks to a New York-area corporate investigator for bringing attention to the current attempts to selectively delete portions of our national memory through a secret "reclassification" program.

The Washington Post has the story:

The Amateur Sleuth Who Gave the Archives a Red Face

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006; A21

The scandal over missing documents that rocked the National Archives this spring came to light not because of the digging of an investigative reporter or a timely leak by a concerned federal insider. Instead it was Matthew M. Aid, an amateur researcher and historian, who figured out that for at least six years the CIA and the Air Force had been withdrawing thousands of records from the public shelves -- and that Archives officials had helped cover up their efforts.

"I'm a 48-year-old part-time historian who just accidentally stumbled onto something," Aid said in a recent interview. "I like things neat. And when I started getting the runaround from people at the Archives about why this stuff wasn't available, that's when I started getting angry. . . . They would not give me an explanation. Alarm bells started going off when that happened."

Aid "stumbled" onto something that everyone else missed in part because he knows the territory so well. By profession, the native New Yorker is a corporate investigator, a digger for hire who has worked for several firms that specialize in rounding up information for lawsuits or corporate takeover bids. He once told a prospective boss that he "loved paper more than life itself." But Aid's passion is history -- more specifically, the history of the U.S. intelligence community. "Basically, I've spent my entire adult career in secrets, in one form or another," he said.

Aid's love for the subject is obsessive, so much so that he spends most of his free time and all of his vacations at the National Archives' facility in College Park. There, he trolls through thousands of old government memos, reports, cables and other documents on such far-flung subjects as CIA operations in Iran in the 1950s, Air Force intelligence reports from World War II and State Department assessments of agrarian reform in Guatemala.

"Countless generations of girlfriends called this the busman's holiday. I have no idea how to take a normal vacation," said Aid, who is single. "Any spare time I have, I run up to the National Archives to do historical research. . . . I love history because it's like solving a puzzle."

For 20 years Aid has been cobbling together many little pieces of a particular puzzle. He is working on a comprehensive history of the National Security Agency, whose initials -- NSA -- are jokingly said to stand for "No Such Agency." Aid, a former Russian linguist for the NSA and the Air Force, began the project in 1986, largely because a fellow researcher bet him he could not do it. He writes from 4 to 9 a.m. every weekday, then begins his day job for a British company he declines to name because, he said, his employer would not like the publicity.

Two decades in, Aid said that he has completed the first of three volumes on the NSA and that the book is at a publisher. He hopes it will hit bookstores next year. He did not get an advance for writing the book and has not made a dime from his years of research. "I'm doing this for love -- or insanity," Aid said. "It's not about money. It literally has become an obsession. I'm dying to know how it's all going to end myself."

Aid has looked through piles and piles of documents, many of them once classified top secret. He has 22 filing cabinets in his Northwest Washington apartment filled with copies of declassified material, much of it from the National Archives. He has read some documents two or three times, and routinely will ask Archives staff to pull papers he perused 10 years ago to refresh his memory or see if he can spot anything new.

It was while revisiting (or trying to) some Cold War-era State Department records last August that Aid realized documents he had seen before -- indeed, he had copies of some at home -- were no longer on the Archives shelves. He inquired about it but was given no explanation. He let it go for a while, but by October, after several other files had gone missing, he demanded answers.

"I had been on a slow burn for months at this point," Aid said. "None of the reference librarians would tell me anything. . . . They knew I was suspicious about something, but they clearly had been ordered not to talk about it."

Finally, someone took him aside and told him the CIA and other agencies had been pulling files since 1999. Aid took the matter to friends at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library. Other researchers also had started noticing irregularities, and together they sent a letter to the Archives requesting a meeting.

At the meeting, held at the end of January, Archives officials "admitted everything," Aid said. "They said, 'Yes, there has been a reclassification program going on here.' " The next month, the New York Times broke the story. Allen Weinstein, the head of the Archives, soon announced a moratorium on reclassification while the agency undertook an audit of the withdrawn documents.

Completed in April, the audit found that at least 25,515 records had been removed by five agencies, including the CIA, Air Force, Energy Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Archives itself, which had agreed to keep the program secret.

Although the agencies said the documents were improperly declassified in the first place, Weinstein announced that more than a third of them should never have been removed. Auditors also found that the CIA withdrew a "considerable number" of records it knew should be unclassified "in order to obfuscate" other records it was trying to protect. Weinstein announced new procedures to ensure that withdrawals of records were rare and that the public will be notified when that occurs.

Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia history professor who in October will become the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said Aid had performed "a great service" in exposing the reclassification program.

"His work helps all of us fight against the culture of secrecy in Washington today. We don't have enough watchdogs," Naftali said. Aid applauded the audit and the policy changes. But he said the intelligence agencies are still dragging their feet when it comes to declassifying records.

"This entire experience has been an eye-opener for me," Aid said. "What's at the National Archives, I thought, was sacrosanct. It had nothing to do with the secrecy that was prevalent in Washington and I read about in the newspapers. So this has come as a huge shock for me. . . . You don't stand up and take notice until it has a direct impact on you. I'm taking it very personally."

The original article appears here. And for more on The Daily Caveat's history with the archives...check here.

-- MDT

Labels: FOIA

In yesterday's New York Times Chief Archivist Allen Weinstein lambasted the recently outed government document reclassification program. This program, spearheaded by several un-named but most likely three-letter government agencies, has been under way for the last seven years and has seen unprecedented numbers of documents listed as classified and unavailable for public review.

This is a serious blow to transparancy in government, and business as well. Federal Archives ands FOIA requests are standard tools used by investigators to protect their clients's from fraud and deception. While one certaily needs to balance the needs of national security with public disclosure, Weinstein's statements seem to indicate the goal here was not to serve such precise needs, but rather to push back the line on docs across the board.

Check out the NYT article before it dissapears behind their subscription services, and check the above back-link for more background on the issue.

-- MDT

Labels: background checks, FOIA

We've written a few times here at The Daily Caveat about the growing hostility towards Freedom of Information Requests - an important tool for transparency in government and an indispensible one for your friendly neighborhood investigator. On a related point, Holly Manges Jones from The University of Pittsburgh School of Law's blog, The Jurist recently wrote about the rapid growth in classified government documents:

...15.6 million documents were classified by the US government in 2004, almost double the number from 2001, leading to a cost to taxpayers of $7.2 billion. At the same time, the declassification process, which makes historical documents available to the public, has slowed from 204 million pages in 1997 to approximately 28 million pages in 2004. The increased numbers are being criticized by politicians, including some conservatives, and traditional watchdog groups...

The disturbing numbers come from a recently released report (PDF) from the federal Information Security Oversight Office, a division of The Daily Caveat's former emloyer, the National Archives. The Jurist has a link to the report as well as as to a New York Times article with additional details.

-- MDT

Labels: FOIA

BeSpacific has the story.

They've also got a link to the related federal lawsuit filed this week as well as some background on why IRS secrecy is not a good thing.

-- MDT

Labels: FOIA

On today's Diane Rhem Show the second hour featured an interview with Kurt Eichenwald regarding his new book Conspiracy of Fools about the rise and fall of Enron. Eichenwald is a New York Times reporter and gives a good interview, which is available for streaming here (RealPlayer required). Worth your while to give it a listen if you missed it.

In honor of the book, which is supposed to contain all manner of FOIA-finagled documentary goodness, here's an info-packed link to the Law Library Resource Xchange bibliography of online resources relating to Enron's collapse.

Check out today's New York Times story by Alexei Barrionuevo which relates the current top-tier shuffling in American business to the heightened regulatory climate and pro-active board rooms that Enron, Worldcom and their ilk have ushered into being.

-- MDT

Labels: Enron, FOIA

For anyone who has ever sweated over a FOIA request, let this be a cautionary tale - too much of a good thing:

"People for the American Way Foundation made a FOIA request to the Executive Office for the United States Attorneys for records pertaining to requests by the government to seal proceedings of cases in court concerning the detention of post 9/11 immigrant detainees. The request also sought any pleadings (with detainee names redacted) filed in these cases. The government initially declined to produce any records in the case. Then, just two days before it was to file its motion for summary judgment asking to court to dismiss the case, it came up with a new tact. The government told the requester it would be more than happy to search for responsive records, with one caveat. Before the government could search for responsive records, the EOUSA asked the requester to pay estimated search fees of $372,799."

-- MDT

Labels: FOIA