Start Planning for Sunshine Week
For those of you who can’t get enough discussion about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Open Government issues, I wanted to let you know about several events in March. March 14-21, 2010, is...
View ArticleFOIA Tip 13: Negotiating with the agency
We still have a lot to say about drafting your FOIA request, but today we wanted to look at something a little different and talk about something that many requesters have not had any experience with —...
View ArticleFaxing the FOIA Requests (And More!) for the Archive’s 2009 Audit.
Faxing ninety federal agencies in a single business day is not an easy feat. But to ensure fair conditions for all the agencies included in the Archive’s audit, that’s what had to be done. By the...
View ArticleOn the Phone with FOIA Officers by Law Clerk Courtney French
My first task on the FOIA Audit was to trackdown the nineteen agencies which had not responded to our requests and try to coax out a response (or at least find out what the hold up was). It turns out...
View ArticleDocument Friday: “This Would be the Signal for General Nuclear War”
According to today’s hot doc, the US Air Force was ready and willing to drop nuclear bombs on Communist China at the outset of the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. This 13 August 1958 State Department memo...
View ArticleFOIA Tip 14: Which Government Agencies can be FOIA’d?
All executive branch departments and agencies are subject to the FOIA. A list of these departments and agencies can be found on the Department of Justice’s FOIA Web site. Congress and the courts are...
View ArticleDocument Friday: “A Scenario for a Potential Blowout of the Well … is Not...
As the oil sludge begins to wash up on the Gulf Coast, this week’s documents begin to examine the oversights and decisions which led up to the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. We’ll...
View ArticleBulgarian Journalists Search the Files of the Former State Security Services:...
Opening the files of the former communist security services has been a long and painful process for most of the East European States. In Bulgaria, The Dossier Act (officially The Law for Access and...
View ArticleA Condensed User Guide for FOIA Requests
While Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to increase government accountability and transparency, the FOIA process may seem to further mystify government relations. Many agree that...
View ArticleFRINFORMSUM: 6/1/2011
In a lawsuit filed on May 19, the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Council is in violation of federal open-records laws. The Department of...
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