Information Con Game
NY Times EditorialThe very title of a now 41-year-old law — the Freedom of Information Act — sounds naïve in today’s Washington, where government secrecy has become an even higher and darker art under the Bush administration.
The open-government law, known as FOIA, should be one of the chief tools for citizens to find out what’s actually happening. For that, citizens’ requests for information would have to be answered. Instead, FOIA requests have disappeared into the bureaucratic maw for up to 20 years with no answer for why the statutory 20-day deadline has become such a Dickensian maze of delay and frustration.
Call it reform or call it revenge, but Congress has just passed a measure to tackle glaring flaws in the FOIA process. With overwhelming bipartisan support, the measure would:
- Prod stricter deadlines with a numerical tracking system so citizens could follow their requests like (lost) package deliveries.
- Establish clear penalties for foot-dragging, including repayment of attorney fees for applicants found suffering the run-around at recalcitrant agencies.
- Create an ombudsman office at the National Archives to mediate disputes over requests, which currently are rejected outright in a full third of the cases.
- Ensure that information records held by private government contractors can no longer be kept off-limits to FOIA requests.
"Ensure that information records held by private government contractors can no longer be kept off-limits to FOIA requests."
ReplyDeleteI guess nobody who handles FOIA requests will be getting RIFed!
Don't forget that LANS is a "for-profit" corporation and not the federal government. LANL's official government work might be requested by outsiders using FOIA, but the LANS insider corporate stuff is strictly off limits.
ReplyDeleteEven the LANL general staff still can't see the LANS agreement used to win the RFP contract or even the official LANS SSP/Workforce Restructuring plans. It's considered "proprietary company information", just like the LANL salaries.
The fact that LANS feels the need to hold this stuff back is very telling. What don't they want us to see?
See also this post from May:
ReplyDeleteLos Alamos Blocks Researcher Access To Archives