Jul 27
Ben EisenUncategorized Afganistan, Leaks, Wikileaks
How powerful is information if it only confirms what we already know? As over 90,000 documents detailing military intelligence on the war in Afghanistan flood into the public sphere, that’s exactly what we are finding out.
Released by Wikileaks, the documents provide vivid descriptors of efforts to contain the Taliban, and, most strikingly, reveal a potential alliance between al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence.
But for all of the clamoring by government officials to diffuse attention from the information contained in these reports, commentators almost unanimously agree on one thing — we already knew this. These thousands of documents only give voice to what the government and media has already told us: That winning a war against terrorists is a near impossible task with few victories and many failures.
So was it worthwhile to release all of this information? In a word, yes. Not only does it confirm that the news we have been fed about the war in Afghanistan is, for the most part, accurate, but it also gives us the information with almost zero bias.
Yes, it’s possible that Wikileaks and the publications it partnered with to release the documents picked and chose what to make public. And no, it is likely not possible to confirm the accuracy of every piece of information contained in these volumes of history. But for the most part, these newly public facts stand alone – apart from the partisan bickering that can obscure the truths of war, and apart from the news media that sometimes fails to capture world events with infallible accuracy.
With a compendium of knowledge out in the open, the public and officials on both sides of the aisle can look inward and revise their own visions of the war on Afghanistan. These documents could force the president to make a swift decision to either reassert his policy in Afghanistan or come up with an exit strategy. And they could force the public to take apolitical views on a war that had become fodder for policy wonkery.
Open information, whether or not it provides a smoking gun revelation, has the power to refocus interests and align people in working towards a better strategy. Whether or not a solution emerges depends now on how long we can lift the fog of war for.
Jul 25
Michael MorisyUncategorized Associated Press, Boston Herald, Deval Patrick, Health care, insurance
Recently we’ve caught wind of internal e-mails undermining the public messaging from Governor Deval Patrick’s administration about somewhat controversial push to block rate increases on health insurance premiums.
As a Boston Herald editorial summarized:
Just in case anyone thought the Patrick administration’s health insurance rate cap was anything other than an exercise in raw political pandering, along comes a set of e-mails that proves the point.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information request made by State House News Service, we now have a glimpse into how the administration crafted and rallied to defend what has turned out to be an indefensible policy.
Many of the e-mails were in response to a column by Mike Widmer, head of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, who pointed out what a dreadful idea the rate cap was. But the oped, which ran in The Boston Globe on March 17, did nothing to prevent the administration from going ahead with the cap officially on April 1. The e-mails showed administration officials were less concerned about the policy than about the spin!
The Associated Press had apparently filed its own request for the e-mails discussing the rate cap, but one thing is conspicuously missing from both reports: The actual e-mails themselves. Not surprising, but a bit obnoxious: Why can’t we see for ourselves how the Patrick administration was discussing the proposed internally? Soon, state willing, we will. MuckRock has filed our own request (click the link if you’re a registered member), which we’ve reproduced below the fold.
More
Jun 10
Michael MorisyUncategorized
A common reason given by government agencies for denying freedom of information requests is that the information requested is confidential, or is proprietary, or bound by contracts to confidentiality. But is it? Edward Hammond said that too often, opacity and denial of information is the default position when it should be the other way around, and he offered a yardstick to help prove it. He’s kindly let us reprint his suggest: More
May 23
Michael MorisyUncategorized
Recently, on the NICAR mailing lists and elsewhere, reporters have been debating the nuances of exactly how open open records laws should be. The heart of the question is whether reporters should have exclusive access to request responses, for a period of time, when they are the ones requesting (and often times paying for) a specific government document.
As one reporter responded on the mailing list:
Definitely need a period of exclusivity to encourage use of open-records laws. If there is none, requestors will be less willing to expend time and money to fight for the release of withheld records.
I once fought a lengthy Access to Info battle for some federal records only to have the department release them publicly and announce it with a press release. When I got home that day, I found that a courier had been and left them the documents requested on my doorstep.
So while government officials don’t always like the results of freedom of information requests, by law they can only stall so much, so often and they’ve turned to transparency as an obnoxious counter-measure against requests.
For a case study, see Chicago:
CHICAGO, May 13 (UPI) — Anyone filing Freedom of Information Act requests with the city of Chicago will now find their names on the city’s Web site, Mayor Richard Daley said Thursday.
The mayor says he’s just trying to be totally transparent, not get back at nosy news reporters, who now may find competitors privy to what story leads they are investigating.
The City of Chicago’s own Freedom of Information act homepage says that all document requests and requestors will be public, but the page appears to be down or not yet up.
May 09
Michael MorisyUncategorized FOI Resources, FOIA
The Society of Professional Journalists and National Freedom of Information Coalitions are hitting the trail and helping to educate journalists and citizens alike about their rights to government information. The SPJ’s Freedom of Information Committee Chairman David Cuillier is hitting dozens of states over 45 days and blogging his journey:
What he’s finding, however, is a very mixed picture, particularly in terms of police department openness:
Time after time journalists are raising this issue: They can’t get anything out of police anymore. As I do sessions I ask the old timers to describe what it was like to cover cops 20 years ago. Then I ask a new reporter to describe what it is like today. Here is how it goes:
20 years ago: Walk into the police station and go to the incident reports, kept in a basket or clipboard. Flip through all the reports for the past 24 hours, with no redactions. Everything is there – name of suspects, full address, name of victims – the works. If you had a question you asked the sarge on duty, or even called the officer who handled the call. If we heard something on the scanner we could ask about it. We got news out fast and we got it complete.
Today: You walk into a police station and talk to a PIO, who tells you what the police think is newsworthy, sanitized and little detail. No looking at incident reports. No interviewing the officer or getting information from a sarge in charge. Some agencies are encrypting their scanner channels so nobody can hear what is happening. We are at the mercy of what a PIO wants to tell us, or not tell us. Secret police.
Read on for other great tips and his thoughts on the state of FOI.
Apr 19
Michael MorisyUncategorized FBI, Federal Government, Interviews
An anonymous tipster sent along an interesting bit: The FBI has released a portion of the written interview summaries of Saddam Hussein by Special Agent Piro.
The 132-page document includes:
- Saddam’s thoughts on his greatest accomplishment: “The social programs for the citizens of Iraq and improvements in other sectors of the economy including enhancements to education, the health care system, industry, agriculture, and other areas that generally enhanced the way of life for Iraqis.”
- When asked about his own mistakes, he told the interviewer that “All humans make mistakes, and only God is free of error.” But that he would not identify mistakes to an enemy, and the American system of government was his enemy.
- Saddam wishes that both America and Iraq advance in all areas, “financial, religious, etc.”.
- Pages and pages of details about coups, the Ba’ath uprising, the early days of the Iraqi revolution, and more.
The document release is 132 pages, but unfortunately is not searchable until somebody takes some OCR software to it. You can download it directly from the FBI (warning: PDF).
Apr 08
Michael MorisyUncategorized Citability.org, Healthcare Reform
Last week, I wrote about ProPublica’s Health Care Bill Comparison app, which elegantly took on the task of showing people just what was changing, and how, in the health care bill’s final days and hours. It’s an incredibly important task, since the bill weighed in at over 1,000 pages and it’s often in the final revisions that pork-barrel projects find there way in or out.
But with bills generally seeing multiple revisions, it’s easy to lose track of what exactly was or is included in a bill and when it was added, taken out, or even re-added. The results can be disastrous when it comes to reasoned discourse, as the League of Technical Voters’ founder Silona Bonewald notes in a recent piece for O’Reilly Radar:
Commenting on these types of documents as they are currently implemented is extremely challenging. Pointing a finger at that big pond and telling someone that you swear you saw a fish isn’t very effective. It’s even worse when someone swears they saw a fish that isn’t really there and it is effective because no one is willing to refute them. No one has time to wade around themselves and so they take it on faith. The recent “killing grandma” scare is an excellent example.
So the league has created an advanced citability solution, Citability.org, that tracks changes and makes sure that it’s easy to see how your political sausage is made, and who is putting in what ingredients.
Apr 02
Michael MorisyUncategorized Federal Government, Federal Stimulus, Healthcare Reform, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Podcasts, ProPublica
Of all the recent media startups, few have come with the gravitas of ProPublica, a non-profit currently helmed by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. With ample foundational funding and partnerships with organizations ranging from the New York Times and CNN to Politico and Reader’s Digest, it’s wasted no time in doing important, in-depth journalistic work.
They also have a great podcast series in which Mike Webb interviews ProPublica staff.
In episode 6, Mike interviews Jennifer LaFleur about her work developing Recovery Tracker 3.0, a tool that aims to help the public tracker every stimulus dollar spent. For example, you can see how the $1,368,268,456 targeted at Middlesex County, MA is being spent, broken down by agency and department:
Or you can dive even deeper, and look at individual stimulus contracts.
In all, it’s an immense amount of financial data that LaFleur and her team made easily digestible without dumbing it down, and as she remarks in the podcast in many areas it’s more complete than the government’s own database at Recover.gov.
Mike Webb also interviewed Olga Pierce, Jeff Larson and Scott Klein for a podcast on how the former pair’s Health Care Bill Comparison News App came together, from the inception of the idea over a coffee break to finished product just a few weeks later. While the app itself is relatively simple, it’s a quick, clean way to find and understand a myriad of changes occurring in what could be the most landmark legislation of the decade, legislation that was knocked back and forth so many times there’s a good chance most of the senators voting for and against it weren’t fully aware of what they were voting on.
Jeff’s execution of the application is elegant, and as they note on the podcast, it became a hot tool while the bill was actually on the floor as both pundits and the public tried to figure out what, exactly, this monumental legislation included.
Know of other great government data resources, whether state or federal? Let me know at Michael@MuckRock.com, and we’ll share the knowledge with the rest of our community.
Mar 29
Michael MorisyUncategorized FBI, Federal Government, Special File Room
What, you thought the warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark was some George Lucas fantasy? Ok, maybe it is, but the Boston Globe’s Bryan Bender takes us someplace almost as secret, the FBI’s “secret file room”:
It is where the government has hidden the most secret information: plans to relocate Congress if Washington were attacked, dossiers on double agents, case files about high-profile mob figures and their politician friends, and a disturbing number of reports about the possible smuggling of atomic bombs into the United States.
It is also where the bureau stowed documents considered more embarrassing than classified, including its history of illegal spying on domestic political organizations and surveillance of nascent gay rights groups.
The FBI recently released memos detailing what the special file room contains and why those documents were placed there rather than the FBI’s normal filing system. The memos cover the time from the 1950s through the 1980s, and include information about international espionage, domestic threats and a rather heightened interest in gay activist groups and “allegations of homosexuality of some very prominent individuals.’’
Our friends at GovernmentAttic.org are hosting the memos (Warning: Link to 17.1 MB PDF), which run over 470 pages.
Mar 28
Michael MorisyUncategorized Federal Government, FOI Resources, FOIA, Inmates, Prisons
An anonymous tipster writes in with a great resource for those of you trying to look up information on federal inmates: Federal Bureau of Prisons documentation on how inmate information is stored (PDF). Knowing what documents to look for is perhaps the most critical piece of any Freedom Of Information: Request the wrong thing or make a request that’s too vague, and you’ll end up with either a rejection or thousands of dollars in handling fees, when the properly phrased request could have gotten you the exact data you’re interested in in a timely, hassle-free fashion.
This 26 page document details the organization and maintenance rules surrounding Inmate Central File System, which contains:
- Conduct, Work and Quarters Reports for federal inmates
- General correspondence about inmates
- Parole materials for inmates
Download the full document from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or if that’s down use our alternate download hosted on MuckRock’s servers.
Photo licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike from Decade_Null. See original.
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