
U.S. government sets record for failures to find files when asked - ZoeZoeBee
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SUNSHINE_WEEK_FOIA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-03-18-11-37-47
======
skywhopper
I'll be the first to agree that the Obama administration most definitely went
against the spirit of the 2008 campaign with its lockdown of certain secrets.
That said, I find the headline number to be completely useless without
comparison data. What was the ratio under Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter,
and Ford? Also need to see trends of number and type of requests over that
time. And who's making the requests and what are they for? Are we talking
about requests for troop locations (reasonably rejected), Obama's Kenyan birth
certificate (spurious and nonexistent), or investigation results in re torture
and the financial crisis (legitimate and embarrassing)?

~~~
platz
I'm not aware he made any such promises in the 2008 campaign with regard to
lockdown of certain secrets?

~~~
leesalminen
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxCVENhSq9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxCVENhSq9M)

"The most transparent administration in history."

------
Spooky23
The government at all levels is terrified of allowing employees to talk to
anyone outside of their agency.

If you look at news reports at the federal, state, local levels of government
from 1990 to today, you'll see that quotes that would come from a local
official in command in 1990 are now issued from a PR flack at HQ. I witnessed
one example first hand where a school principal, terrified of being quoted
about a book sale, frantically directed a person who turned out to be a
reporter to the school district public affairs officer.

FOIA is similar -- these searches used to be distributed but in many cases are
now all conducted by counsel at HQ, and they limit the scope of their search
to the official repositories that may or may not be relevant.

If you want actual information from a FOIA process, focus your search on
email, which is usually centralized, and jump off on addition requests from
there.

~~~
x5n1
It's censorship plain and simple. Instead of denying information, they simply
deny access. And if they do provide access, they provide it through P/R who
knows pretty much nothing so can't really say anything. If they ever do
provide access you better behave yourself or they will never talk to you
again. It's scummy totalitarian control of information while at the same time
trying to extort as much information out of the public as possible... in the
name of terrorism. Terrorism that their shit policies are at least partially
responsible for.

------
HillaryBriss
From the article: "In some high-profile instances, usually after news
organizations filed expensive federal lawsuits, the Obama administration found
tens of thousands of pages after it previously said it couldn't find any."

One explanation is that the administration is being dishonest. Another is that
the administration is just inefficient, sloppy and slow at handling these
kinds of requests.

Obama has taken a "civil rights action hero" approach to being president.

A different president might have taken an "efficient administrator and process
reformer emphasizing high quality service" approach to being president. But
that sounds pretty boring.

~~~
sgift
> Another is that the administration is just inefficient, sloppy and slow at
> handling these kinds of requests.

Which hints at a profound lack of preparation on their part. Basically, they
act like a company that when asked before a merger to provide their paperwork
for due dilligance answers "Um, oh .. eh .. we didn't think that you need
this. We will go and find all that we need and then get back to you, okay?"
with the difference that the company in question has a real incentive to get
all the papers, but still could have avoided this situation if their initial
"paper creation" process included "archive papers so that they can be
retrieved without hassle"

I wonder if forcing/automating such an archiving at creation/update of
documentation could solve this problem.

~~~
mkhpalm
It certainly couldn't hurt... but I believe it would still be hard to find
certain things. An example of that is taxes, accounting, or just general
budgeting. Depends where the incentives are as to how easily findable anything
will ever be.

------
danso
Obama's administration is rightfully getting increased scrutiny over
FOIA...the day after his inaugural address, he made a very clear statement
that FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of
doubt, openness prevails." [0] (ProPublica recently published a new
retrospective here [0a]) In terms of being data-oriented, Obama's
administration has been very forward thinking, IMO...it's one thing to release
White House visitor logs under threat of lawsuit, it's another to go the extra
mile and throw it on a data portal where it can be easily searched and
downloaded as bulk data, along with other data such as staff salaries [1]. You
could argue that that's just the way things would be for any administration
due to the advent of the Web...but only if you didn't look at how the Senate
distributes their required disclosures.

But being more open-minded to releasing machine-readable data and responding
to FOIAs are a different thing...just as Obama can make an argument that he's
been very pro-civil-liberties, and yet his administration has prosecuted more
federal whistleblowers than all other administrations combined [3].

Maybe I missed it...but it seems like the AP goes out of its way to avoid any
use of percentages for comparison between administrations...Maybe this was not
tracked in the same way during the Bush administration? That said, I wouldn't
be surprised if Obama led in both raw numbers and percentages of denials.
Though it's still difficult to know how apples to apples that is.

I had to Google around quite a bit to find any reference to Bush
numbers...here's an old AP article I found linked to from an old Slashdot
thread [4]:

> \- _In all, the agencies reviewed by the AP reported getting 444,924 FOIA
> requests in fiscal 2009, compared with 493,610 in fiscal 2008. Besides those
> cases, they started each year with FOIA requests pending: 145,162 as the
> 2009 budget year began last October; 156,611 as the 2008 fiscal period
> started._

> \- _The agencies processed 501,158 FOIA requests in the 2009 period,
> compared with 504,110 the previous year._

> _Much of the Obama administration’s early effort on FOIA seems to have been
> aimed at clearing out the backlog of old cases: The number of requests still
> sitting around past the time limits spelled out in the open-records law fell
> from 124,019 in budget year 2008 to 67,764 at the end of the most recent
> budget year over the 17 agencies, the AP’s review found_

> \- _The agencies reviewed provided everything sought in FOIA requests in at
> least 162,205 cases last fiscal year, compared with 196,776 the previous
> year._

> \- _They denied FOIA requests in their entirety based on exemptions 20,005
> times last fiscal year, compared with 21,057 times the previous year._

[0] [https://www.propublica.org/article/has-obama-kept-his-
open-g...](https://www.propublica.org/article/has-obama-kept-his-open-
government-pledge)

[0a] [https://www.propublica.org/article/trying-to-get-records-
fro...](https://www.propublica.org/article/trying-to-get-records-from-most-
transparent-administration-ever)

[1] [https://open.whitehouse.gov/browse](https://open.whitehouse.gov/browse)

[2] [https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/08/05/now-its-
easie...](https://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/08/05/now-its-easier-to-
account-for-how-the-senate-spends-your-money/)

[3]
[http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10/...](http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10/jake-
tapper/cnns-tapper-obama-has-used-espionage-act-more-all-/)

[4] [http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/ap-
analysi...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/ap-analysis-of-
obama-foia-record-at-a-glance/)

------
dang
It breaks the HN guidelines to rewrite titles to editorialize them, so please
don't do that.

(Submitted title was "Obama's Lack of Transprency: Censored or Denied 77% of
FOIA Requests".)

------
dbg31415
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0m6Rxm9vU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU0m6Rxm9vU)

------
tyingq
I would guess some of it would be the result of either vague, or overly broad
requests as well.

I found an amusing response to a request like that here:
[http://www.mackinac.org/media/images/2009/7FOIAb.jpg](http://www.mackinac.org/media/images/2009/7FOIAb.jpg)

To me, that's a reasonable response to an overly broad request.

~~~
Spooky23
Not at all, it's pure bullshit designed to intimidate the request or.

State agencies, especially police agencies, are laser focused on external
funding sources and track federal grant monies very carefully. Likewise, the
Feds require exacting tracking of assets purchased.

Usually there is an office of 6-12 people dedicated to those grants.

~~~
tyingq
I see we disagree, but in this case, the language of the request seems very
broad to me. It clearly pulls in related documents that may not even mention a
grant directly. That language is quoted in the reply.

~~~
ZoeZoeBee
>The website Gawker sued the State Department last year after it said it
couldn't find any emails that Philippe Reines, an aide to Hillary Clinton and
former deputy assistant secretary of state, had sent to journalists. After the
lawsuit, the agency said it found 90,000 documents about correspondence
between Reines and reporters.

Broadness of Scope is the Only way to deal with Agencies attempting to
obfuscate data and documents.

\--tyingq: My Apologies if it was not you, I'd be interested in knowing how
people believe pertinent documents can be researched if not for a broad net of
related documents, when the succinct question to be asked is unable to be
known due to completely hidden documents and "missing information"

~~~
tyingq
"You could respond instead of downvoting"

I did not downvote. In fact, I don't think you can downvote direct responses
to your own comments, can you?

Edit:

>> I'd be interested in knowing how people believe pertinent documents can be
researched if not for a broad net of related documents

Well, there's broad (90,000 documents, your example) and really broad (2
million documents, my example).

------
hsnewman
Well, at least we are #1, nobody's worst...

