Does the Freedom of Information Act extend to digital data? In other words, if I want data from a county, say, and I know they’ve got it in digital format, is there any way invoke the FOI to get the digital data rather than data printed on paper?
What prevents governments from making it difficult for the public to access data that’s supposed to be public?
The Freedom of Information Act refers to Federal agencies, not county governments. States and localities may have different laws on public access to information.
But generally speaking, Federal officials may be willing to work with requesters to release information in digital format, depending on how easy it is to so. The CIA, for example, regularly published FOIA’ed information in digital format on its website: http://www.foia.cia.gov/
However, I’m not aware of any provision of law that requires Federal agencies to submit the data in the form that the requester would prefer.