
Pentagon Responds to FOIA with Ultimatum - corndoge
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/06/02/reporter-says-pentagon-agreed-to-give-up-docs-if-he-never-submits-another-foia-request/
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bernardom
I met a guy at a party who started a news outfit[1] trying to simplify FOIA.
He had stories like this galore- such as meeting gov't employees in person at
conferences, saying his name, and seeing their eyes grow big. Apparently
frequent requesters become notorious.

[1] [https://www.muckrock.com](https://www.muckrock.com)

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eli
Indeed, some state FOIA laws even have provisions for dealing with "frequent
requestors." (And to be fair, not all frequent requestors are acting in good
faith. There was a push recently to bury the NSA in FOIA requests as a protest
against surveillance. Not a great idea.)

Muckrock is awesome though.

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morisy
Yes, we haven't run into that problem so far, but I know Illinois has pretty
strict rules on this.

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fweespeech
I think it really shows how powerful the bureaucracy really is that they'd
write down an essentially illegal ultimatum, confident that the consequences
would be essentially nonexistent.

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some1else

      “As a matter of policy, we don’t comment on legal matters,” says Defense Department spokeswoman Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson.
    

This is very confusing. What was the question?

As an aside: Would "sub judice" policy still make sense if we treated all
speech the same? (under & not under oath)

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davidcollantes
What is FOIA?

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URSpider94
Freedom of Information Act. It's a US Federal law that allows private citizens
to request that the government provide any records that it has in its files.
The government likes to keep copies of EVERYTHING, so you can often turn up
quite a bit of documentation. The law has very strict requirements on what can
be withheld or redacted -- for example, the government can't withhold data
just because it's embarrassing to them.

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bhayden
Except in the cases where it actually is embarrassing, in which case it is
redacted "for national security".

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MrZongle2
Why doesn't Mr. Leopold realize that our superiors in public service know
what's best for the country and act accordingly, and shouldn't have to waste
their time responding to plebians? /s

Edit: because it seems to have been lost on many, the "/s" above indicates
that the preceding is _sarcasm_.

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AC__
You're being sarcastic, correct? Or trolling?

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MrZongle2
Sarcastic, which is why I included /s (a de facto emoticon of such) at the
end.

Although sarcasm isn't popular with some HN users, I felt that I could either
post a longer, heartfelt diatribe about how this is wrong.... or I could
convey the same opinion in less space and perhaps with a bit of humor by using
sarcasm.

