OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

Whenever it is made public, otherwise the concept o FOIA is an utter oxymoron.

I like the underlying sentiment, but the reality is that not all things should be magically public after five years. E.g., say the FBI investigated me at some point. Today my name would be blanked out under FOIA b6 or b7c. Just because five years goes by doesn't mean that my privacy rights have disappeared. Similarly, a b1 (national security) redaction isn't necessarily invalid after five years.

ha, my wording was terrible on this.

Thanks for the critical comments, please feel free to elaborate further, I am obviously not educated in this area, I am just frustrated by redacted portions of gov't info. What's the justification for keeping names unknown? To protect the individual or to protect the agency? (I could see a case for either, though I would want to know if an agency had been investigating me ... (or do they tell the individual when the investigation ends?)

Also, can you give an example of an ongoing security necessity worth more than five years' secrecy?* Besides the location of Dick Cheney's bunker and an underground missile silo, I'm not sure I know enough to easily think of others.

*note: I am skeptical of the whole "national security" concept, though I've never really seen an argument made in its favor; it's always implicitly a "good thing"

Thanks for the response! And I share your frustration.

You're probably familiar with these, but in case not (and for the benefit of anyone following our conversation) you can see the list of FOIA exemptions used in redacting documents here: http://www.eeoc.gov/foia/hb-11.html (There are lots of these lists on line but the EEOC one for some reason seems to be among the better written, dunno why that is.)

For redacting out names it's usually supposed to be about personal privacy. That is, say the FBI had a file on you and you wrote in and requested your own file under FOIA. The FBI wouldn't redact your name out of the file because the file is about you and you're the one requesting it. But then say I requested your file. I'm a third party (I'm not you, nor am I the FBI). First, the FBI would probably give me a "we can neither confirm nor deny that porklife has a file" because even that might be an invasion of your privacy. But even if they somehow did give me a copy of your file (maybe I requested it by file number instead of by your name), the FBI would redact out your name because of privacy concerns. And I personally think that's the right thing for them to do.

Regarding national security redactions the classic examples are things like nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, or cryptography. Say that you and I have FOIAed a a document that mentions in passing that the US is reading the codes used by Elbonia's military (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbonia). If this becomes public, the Elbonians will go and change their codes and that's bad. Now let's say its five years later and we're still reading their codes because they're still using the same old crappy cryptosystem. Well, same deal.

Another example is where we get under-the-table help from semi-allies. Despite the fact that we're reading their codes, maybe Elbonia helps us with some intelligence task and Elbonia would be super-unpopular with their neighbors if this were to ever come to light. Elbonia will want us to be quiet about this pretty much, oh, forever.

Don't get me wrong -- I think a whole lot of stuff that is redacted under b1 (national security) is really redacted under bs if you get my drift. But I think the right approach to this is to have some dispassionate FOIA reviewers do a better job reviewing the document, preferably reviewers who don't work for the agency that originally produced the document.

Thanks for the idea and the intelligent dialogue!

Hey, I can only pretend to know everything, the rest is just ideals I throw out there in the hopes someone comes along and educates me. Thanks for the link and examples, I really should have recalled such instances and I'll add another along the same vein: covert operatives' identities.

I'll check out the link and see about revising my original post