As so often happens when the authorities provide the documents, a considerable portion of them are blacked out. Do they keep uncensored versions for their own files, or is that it? How do you request the “real” documents?
Some of the ones I have seen are nearly worthless as information sources.
Dennis
In most cases, yes.
You can’t. Not without proper clearance, at least.
FYI the official terms for this sort of thing are “sanitization” or “redaction.”
In some cases, the redactions can be made public after a few decades. So, you could just wait and try another FOIA request in 2040 or so.
There are several reasons that information within a document may be redacted before being released to the public. The redacted bits may include :
-sensitive-but-unclassified information
-confidential business information
-personally identifiable information
The original documents held by goverment agencies will have all of this information intact, even if it’s redacted on the versions released to the public under FOIA requests. Obtaining unredacted versions probably requires a court order.
Is there a way to challenge if you think the document has been overly censored, rendering it purposefully totally useless?
I think most agencies have an internal appeal process, and then FOIA does permit a dissatisfied requestor to sue in federal court to overturn the agency’s decision to redact or withhold.
Are there records of this being successful?
Yes. There are also many records of it being unsuccessful. FOIA lawsuits are common as dirt.
Thanks.
Judicial Watch’s FOIA lawsuit over Clinton’s email records is perhaps the most famous recent example.
There are currently about 500 FOIA lawsuits filed each year, up from around 300 in years past. That site has a lot of information about cases and appeals, but I’m not sure how granular any of their statistics are.
Also, DOJ maintains a government-wide repository of each agency’s report on its FOIA activity each year, which tend to show how many cases get partly or wholly reversed on internal appeal or in court. The data generally seems to be tracked by number of cases rather than the volume of information at issue in particular cases, but one can see how many requests were initially denied based on an exemption (i.e., something withheld or redacted for some reason) that then get reversed. Note that many requests get denied simply because there were no records found.
My company is a federal IT contractor. Once there was a FOIA request for one of our contracts, and we were given the opportunity to redact it first to remove proprietary data. I did the redaction. The government, of course, has the complete unredacted version and always has.
If you are getting a redacted document you cannot request the “real” documents. There is a reason they are redacted.
Well, you can request anything you want. But you probably won’t get it.