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The FOI Advocate
Back to The FOI Advocate Index
June 30, 2004
The E-Newsletter of the National Freedom of Information Coalition
"A government by secrecy benefits no one. It injures the people it seeks to serve; it damages its own integrity
and operation. It breeds distrust, dampens the fervor of its citizens and mocks their loyalty."
-- 110 Congressional Record 17, 087 (1964) (Statement of Senator Long)
A Publication of The Freedom of Information Center
A Unit of the Missouri School of Journalism
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men
born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to
liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
-- Justice Louis Brandeis, 1928
TOP OF THE NEWS
"Sometimes, of course, there are legitimate reasons, such as security, for
the White House's secrecy. Other times, such a reason is elusive. In April
2002, for example, the Orlando Sentinel reported that the Apopka Little
League team of 11- and 12-year-olds would visit the White House on May 5
to watch a T-ball game. The source: the team manager and parents.
'The White House would not confirm the invitation,' the paper reported. "
-- The Washington Post's Dana Milbank in an uproarious Washington notebook column on White House secrecy.
GUARDING ALABAMA....The Associated Press sued the Pentagon and the Air Force on Tuesday, seeking access to all
records of George W. Bush's military service during the Vietnam War.
Filed in federal court in New York, where The AP is headquartered, the lawsuit seeks access to a copy of Bush's
microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.
The White House says the government has already released all the records of Bush's military service.
Controversy surrounds Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard because it is unclear from the record what duties
he performed for the military when he was working on the political campaign of a U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama.
There are questions as to whether the file provided to the news media earlier this year is complete, says the lawsuit,
adding that these questions could possibly be answered by reviewing a copy of the microfilm of Bush's personnel file in
the Texas archives.
Story Link
The AP’s lawyer to E&P: “It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had
nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government
stonewalling. "But we are not surprised."
Story 2 Link
CHECK BACK AFTER THE ELECTION ON CHENEY TASK FORCE: The Supreme Court today refused to order Vice President Cheney
to release secret records of his 2001 energy task force, but prolonged a legal fight over the issue by sending the case
back to a lower court.
By a vote of 7 to 2, the court voted to require the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reconsider its
ruling in the case, which effectively allowed two private groups to use a federal open-meetings law to obtain records of
the task force's deliberations on a national energy policy.
A lower court had granted the groups access to some of the task force's records to try to prove their claim that energy
industry lobbyists and executives of such companies as Enron Corp. were de facto members of the task force and played a
major role in drafting the Bush administration's energy strategy.
The White House indicated it was pleased with the decision, which appeared likely to postpone a resolution of the issue
until after the November elections.
Story Link
Opinion at:
Opinion Link
ANTITERROR, IRAQ, ETC.
COFFIN PHOTO BILL: The Bush administration's policy of barring news photographs of the flag-covered coffins of service members killed in Iraq won the backing of the Republican-controlled Senate on Monday, when lawmakers defeated a Democratic measure to instruct the Pentagon to allow pictures.
The 54-to-39 vote came after little formal debate, with 7 Democrats joining 47 Republicans to defeat the provision.
The measure defeated on Monday was proposed by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, as an amendment to a $447.2 billion Pentagon spending plan for 2005, now under consideration in the Senate. Lawmakers hope to finish work on the bill on Tuesday. Mr. Lautenberg's amendment would have instructed the Department of Defense to work out a new protocol permitting the news media to cover the arrival of the war dead in a manner that protected families' privacy.
Story Link
ROBERTS AND ROCKEFELLER WANT IT OPEN: The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee are pressing the Central Intelligence Agency to agree to a broad declassification and release of the panel's 400-page report, which is highly critical of the agency's prewar performance on Iraq.
The agency and, ultimately, the White House have the power to decide how much of the report should be declassified, giving them great influence over a document that will focus on mistakes related to Iraq and its illicit weapons. The Senate could vote to release classified material even over White House objections, but such a step would be rare...
Mr. Roberts, the committee chairman, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he planned "a full court press" to encourage the C.I.A. to release the document in near original form, and he said he had asked White House officials to exert "all possible cooperation" in that effort.
"I feel very strongly that the great majority of this report should be made public," Mr. Roberts said. "Our report is a good one. It's right, and the American people certainly deserve to see it."
Story Link
NATION’S SECRET KEEPER: THERE ARE TOO MANY SECRETS! J. William Leonard, head of the Information Security Oversight Office, said in speech this month, "some agencies don't know how much information they classify; they don't know whether they're classifying more than they once did or less; they don't know whether they're classifying too much or too little; and they don't know whether they're classifying material for too long a period or too short." As a result, "agencies classifying too much information and, in some cases, classifying information that by law shouldn't be stamped 'secret' in the first place." According to Leonard, the dysfunctional classification system has also led to an "'epidemic' of leaks to the press."
Story Link
READ THE FINE PRINT: Deep inside a voluminous highway-spending bill before Congress are two sentences that would allow the federal government to seal information now available to the public, including records related to the transportation of hazardous materials through cities such as Louisville.
One sentence would supersede states' open-records laws, including those in Kentucky and Indiana. The other would give the federal Transportation Security Administration wide latitude in defining what is "sensitive" and should be kept secret, letting the agency's director withhold information deemed "detrimental to the safety of passengers in transportation, transportation facilities or infrastructure or transportation employees...."
The secrecy provisions in the Senate version of the bill, which were not in the House version, were requested by the Bush administration to protect information that could aid terrorists, said Andrew Gray, a spokesman for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, chaired by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
Story Link
GENERAL FOI NEWS
PRIVATIZED FOIA: Steven Aftergood has waited so long for federal officials to answer his requests for public information that, he says jokingly, he may be in his grave before some of the documents land on his desk.
Aftergood, 47, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, is still awaiting responses to Freedom of Information Act requests for Air Force historical papers that he submitted in 1990. Government officials have blamed the delay on backlogs and problems in locating the records, he said.
"There is no end of difficulties," said Aftergood, who specializes in unearthing national security materials. "You almost expect them to ask you to designate a next of kin for when the document is ultimately released, because you won't be here."
Aftergood is hardly alone. Many people who have filed FOIA requests can tell stories of waiting months or years for responses.
These days, however, some agencies say they have found a new way to combat such delays. They are turning increasingly to private contractors to help shrink their mounting backlogs of FOIA requests.
Departments that have tapped contractors include Defense, State, Energy and Transportation, as well as agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration. Officials say outside help is necessary at a time when tight budgets make it all but impossible to permanently hire new FOIA officers.
Story Link
FOI AT WORK....MOO! The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims it tested 500 cows with signs of a brain disorder for mad cow disease last year, but agency documents obtained by United Press International show the agency tested only half that number. USDA officials said the difference is made up in animals tested at state veterinary diagnostic laboratories, but these animals were not tested using the "gold standard" test employed by the agency for confirming a case of the deadly disease. Instead, the state labs used a less sensitive test that experts say could miss mad cow cases.
In addition, the state lab figures were not included in a March 2004 USDA document estimating the number of animals most likely to be infected among U.S. herds, and apparently were not given to a congressional committee that had requested agency data on the number of cows with brain disorder signs that had been tested for the disease.
Story Link
ENRON HAS A PR ISSUE...The Department of Justice reportedly has thousands of hours of Enron employees recorded during the West Coast power crisis. Now, some in Congress want all the tapes released.
"I want to make sure that no federal agency suppresses this information, makes the case harder for us to get relief," says U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
After CBS broadcast the voices of Enron energy traders gloating over the crisis they helped create, more tapes were released.
In one tape, an employee says, "You gotta think the economy is going to f------g get crushed, man. This is like a recession waiting to f-----g happen."
The tapes show Enron tried to bring California to its knees.
Elsewhere on the tapes, another employee says, "This is where California breaks."
"Yeah, it sure does man," says another.
Story Link
FOI AT WORK: TRI DATA AVAILABLE: The Right-to-Know Network (RTK NET) published the 2002 Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data today, providing public access to important Environmental Protection Agency data on the release and transfer of toxic chemicals in the U.S. The 2002 data shows an overall increase of 5 percent in toxic releases -- the first year in which this measurement increased since 1997.
The TRI data is reported by individual facilities, which send their reports to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) every year. On RTK NET, users can search the data by geographic area, facility, industry, parent company, and offsite waste transfer data, to learn which toxic chemicals are present, and in what amounts, in their local communities, states, regions, and the entire nation.
Story Link
IN THE STATES
IN OHIO, OFFICIALS ARE 50-50: Joanne Huist Smith walked into the Eaton Police Department in southwestern Ohio and asked to see the most recent police reports. The record clerk turned her down. "He said, 'It's just too much of a headache. There are too many,'" said Smith, a Dayton Daily News reporter who helped conduct a statewide survey on the availability of public records in Ohio.
Public employees asked to provide common records on an unconditional and timely basis followed Ohio law only about half the time, according to results of the survey conducted on April 21, although some auditors sought records near that date. More than 90 people from 43 newspapers, The Associated Press, two radio stations, the University of Dayton and Ohio University asked to see public records in all of Ohio's 88 counties.
Government officials and employees regularly questioned the need for the records, asked for requests in writing and demanded to know the name of the person who wanted the record, all in violation of Ohio law.
Story Link
SUNSHINE STATE ELECTIONS: U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson on Monday joined a growing chorus objecting to the secrecy surrounding a list of felons to be purged from Florida voter rolls.
Nelson, a Democrat from Tallahassee, filed a friend-of- the-court brief in Leon County Circuit Court in connection with a lawsuit originally brought by the CNN television news network. It challenges a state law restricting access to the list.
Also Monday, the Tallahassee-based First Amendment Foundation and several Florida newspapers, including The Tampa Tribune, indicated that they had filed to intervene in support of the CNN suit or would do so soon.
Nelson cited the ``awful experience'' of the 2000 presidential election, when hundreds, possibly thousands, of voters were erroneously prohibited from voting. George W. Bush carried Florida that year by 537 votes of the 6 million cast.
``We now have the makings for a repeat of the same thing,'' Nelson said.
The Florida Division of Elections and its outgoing director, Edward Kast, are named as defendants. The Department of State, which houses the elections division, has said the law is necessary to protect the privacy of those on the list.
Story Link
JERSEY COURTS OPEN MALPRACTICE PAYMENTS: Secret payments made by New Jersey doctors to settle malpractice lawsuits are no longer secret.
U.S. District Judge William Bassler on Monday ordered the state Division of Consumer Affairs to release information about the nearly $1 billion insurance companies paid in the past five years to settle medical-malpractice lawsuits. The database provided to newspapers Monday lists the names of each doctor whose insurance company made a payment to settle a lawsuit. There were more than 2,800 such payments.
The lawsuits were all settled with confidentiality orders, which means the person bringing the lawsuit could not reveal what they were paid. But Bassler's ruling overturns those confidentiality orders.
There were 187 payments of $1 million or more; the median, or typical, payment was $180,000.
The Medical Society of New Jersey opposed the release of the information, claiming that medical-malpractice lawsuits are not an indication of a doctor's competence. But the judge ruled that the information should nonetheless be released. He ruled in favor of The Record of Hackensack, which filed the lawsuit to get the records.
Story Link
HEY! A POSITIVE STORY ON E-ACCESS! Twenty years ago, Betsie Norris' search to find her birth parents in Wisconsin through paper records took eight months.
She likely could now do it in a day or so using public records and other documents available on the Internet.
"The Internet certainly has made that easier," said Norris, executive director of Adoption Network Cleveland. "It helps to speed things up."
Adoptees looking for their birth parents, or anyone else trying to search public documents, can turn on their computers to sift through items such as marriage records, the Social Security Death Index, military records, professional licenses and property records.
That easy access to such records has encouraged more adoptees to search for their birth parents, Norris said.
Now that many public records are available on the Internet, more people are tapping their way to them, including those who before might not have bothered.
Story Link
MORE OPEN MEETINGS COMPLAINTS IN NEVADA: The state attorney general's office this year has received nearly twice as many complaints as it did last year about possible violations of Nevada's open meeting law, one of the top officials from that office says.
The law mandates that the decisions and actions of public agencies be made openly and also define how the public should be advised of meetings.
Thirty-seven complaints questioning whether the law is being followed have been filed with the attorney general's office so far this year, on pace to reach a total of about 90 by the end of the year, Keith Marcher, senior deputy attorney general, said.
The total number of open-record law complaints for all of last year was 49, he added.
Attorney General Brian Sandoval said the trend is `"very positive - it shows that people are concerned about open government.''
Story Link
FLORIDA JUDGE ORDERS EDUCATION RECORDS OPEN: A state judge has ordered the Department of Education to release public records, including teachers' Social Security numbers, sought by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
But Florida's top education official said yesterday that the order would be appealed. When the state appeals a ruling by a trial judge, the ruling is automatically stayed.
Although Social Security numbers are generally confidential, there is in state law an exception for a "legitimate commercial entity" seeking the numbers for identification purposes, according to Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation.
The Legislature this spring passed a new law that lets teachers and other government workers request that their full Social Security number still be held confidential and the last four digits only released when requested. But the law doesn't take effect until July.
The Herald-Tribune wanted information from two databases. One contains basic information about teachers and the other holds information about teacher certification.
Story Link
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS
BLAIR GETS TO HIDE: Tony Blair has been granted permission to keep secret the full legal advice he received about the invasion of Iraq, it emerged yesterday.
Ann Abraham, the parliamentary ombudsman, has ruled that the prime minister was justified in withholding the controversial legal advice which he received from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general.
She had been investigating a complaint under the "open government" code that copies of the full advice should be published.
Many MPs and public figures have been calling on Mr Blair to make public all the advice, as there has been continual speculation that Lord Goldsmith offered only tentative support for the invasion.
Story Link
FOI AT WORK IN CANADA: Former Police Services Board chairman Norm Gardner approved his own expenses and rarely asked for board support for major items such as $50,000 worth of conferences all over the world, including a $3,459.44 junket to Paris, according to documents obtained by The Globe and Mail under the Freedom of Information Act.
"He wouldn't ask for permission to go. He just went. We'd find out about it later, if we found about it at all," former board vice-chair Gloria Lindsay Luby said in an interview, adding that Mr. Gardner, who was chairman for five years with an annual salary of $91,000, never filed written reports upon his return.
When attending some police-related conferences, Mr. Gardner would stay after the meetings wrapped up and then bill his extra travelling time to taxpayers.
Story Link
CANADIAN PRIVACY CZAR CALLS FOR OPENNESS: The Ontario government needs to lift the veil of secrecy and foster a "culture of openness" among its members and staff, Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian said today.
Cavoukian described her seventh annual final report as a ``blueprint for action" for the government of Premier Dalton McGuinty, whom she urged to encourage more disclosure among his ministers.
McGuinty, who speaks often about more open and accountable government, should issue an open letter to all ministries ``signalling a clear change in attitude in favour of disclosure," Cavoukian said.
"The premier should emphasize the importance of freedom of information and protection of privacy acts in ensuring openness and transparency."
She urged McGuinty to follow the lead of former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who issued a similar directive to the heads of all departments and agencies shortly after taking office in 1993.
Story Link
STASI FILES ON KOHL TO OPEN: The former German chancellor Helmut Kohl suffered a setback when a court ruled that thousands of secret documents on him compiled by the Stasi, East Germany's notorious secret police, should be released.
The federal court said files relating to Mr Kohl's private life - many of them based on information from illegal phone taps - should remain classified. But the court said the archives dealing with his political activities could now be released.
The files are believed to shed fresh light on a damaging corruption scandal which has haunted him since shortly after his defeat in 1998 by the current German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder.
Mr Kohl, who recently published the first instalment of his memoirs, admitted secretly accepting illegal contributions to his conservative Christian Democratic party.
He has refused, however, to name the benefactors who gave him the money.
The Spendenaffare (slush fund scandal) has largely overshadowed Mr Kohl's reputation as Germany's longest serving, and arguably most successful, post-war leader and the architect of German reunification. It is believed to date back to the early 1980s, when the Stasi successfully penetrated the top echelons of Germany's political elite.
Story Link
ON THE OP-ED PAGES: WHAT SOME ARE SAYING ABOUT OPEN GOVERNMENT
The Baltimore Sun on its mayor’s secrecy: Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is doing his police chief a disservice by refusing to release information about the investigation of a domestic dispute between Commissioner Kevin P. Clark and his girlfriend. Labeling the investigative report a "personnel" matter, as Mr. O'Malley has done, won't end the speculation about what's in the document. The public paid to have the Howard County police investigate the May 15 dispute at Commissioner Clark's home and the public should have a right to it - or at least a summary of its findings.
Story Link
WANT TO SUBSCRIBE?
News tips? Hot FOI links for us to use? Send them to the FOI Center at foi@missouri.edu
Additional information on the FOI Center can be found at the Center's website.
The FOI Center is a part of the Missouri School of Journalism.
Send comments or inquiries to: foi@missouri.edu Or call: (573) 882-4856
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