After reading “Closing Time” by Joseph Heller, I started to wonder about what exactly people can access from the FOIA. Anyway, does the FBI have some type of information on everybody? And, how does one go about getting it?
Essentially the law states that unless it’s a matter of national security or it would compromise an investigation or it would endanger somebody else, they have to show you whatever information they have about you. You can only get information about yourself, and certain deceased individuals. The FBI’s FOIA Website is very good, and even has sample letters that show you what you need to do to find out if They’re Watching You.
Oops, the letters and forms are at the DOJ’s FOIA site. They also have a list of FOIA contacts at every government agency. Even the dept of agriculture. Go figure.
Every department has an FOIA contact because not everybody is asking for personal or criminal information. For example, someone might be interested in finding out from the Department of Ag how it has audited its money for a particular program.
DOA might not want to show you that, but you can ask under FOIA for them to cough up the info.
In Los Angeles, the Public Library had to surrender its statistics regarding overdue books to the L.A. Times after the paper filed an FOIA request. (or its state of California equivalent.)
I actually filed an FOIA request once, as part of a story I was working on at my college newspaper. The problem with FOIA requests is that many government agencies have made hemming and hawing about them a science. You might get what you want, or they might make up some legal BS to throw at you, figuring you probably can’t or won’t take them to court over it. If they’re taking a long time, you just have to be persistent. But if they claim that they are not legally obligated to tell you anything, then nothing short of a lawsuit will budge them.
Many Federal-level agencies get so many FOIA requests that it takes forever for them to respond. Usually they’ll just give the stuff up, because they get sued all the time if they don’t.
FOIA is also a very effective tool for introducing further delay into the process of bureaucracy. For example, it has become standard practice for interested parties to invoke FOIA at very inopportune times in the recognition process for Indian tribes.
There are at least six exemptions from FOIA releases. One at least centers around state secrecy and similar matters. Exemption #4 prevents release of financial plans and business concerns. Exemption #6 protects personal information on living individuals, including (but not limited to) telephone numbers and addresses, social security numbers, and “indicators” that may lead a FOIA requestor to deduce such things, including the name of the individuals in question.
The state of Connecticut is going to take the probable recognition of the Eastern and Paucatuck Eastern Pequots to the district court level, largely on the fact that it has taken over two years for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to honor Connecticut’s FOIA request for the tribes’ petition documents. Some twenty thousand pages of documents (largely gleaned from the records of the state of Connecticut itself, but that’s another story) had to be gone over, page by page, and redacted to protect the identities of tribal members. Due to staff shortages, historians, genealogists, and anthropologists were doing the photocopying.
The delay in the process borders on the absurd. I have it on good authority that the Branch of Acknowledgment and Recognition, now pared down to an elite team of academics, spends about fifty percent of their time addressing FOIA-related issues. Every time a FOIA issue is not addressed in the required time, they are left open to litigious assault, often as named individuals. In the meantime, they are attempting to give recommendations to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs on whether or not the federal government is going to accept a government-to-government relationship with a particular Indian tribe. While I accept FOIA as a necessary and useful practice, I have seen the dark side of it, and the inconvenience it brings upon those who are simply trying to do their jobs.