RSSFOI Friday: Now with 5% more accountability!
Mar 04
Hello and welcome to another FOI Friday! Today’s when you get to see what we here at MuckRock are keeping an eye on in the world of FOI. Cool requests and interesting information from the week can be found below. All of the stuff we’re looking at can be found here anytime you like, and if you have any suggestions, please send them on over to tips@muckrock.com.
Now to the news:
Funds for D.C.’s needy go elsewhere: Yvette Alexander, a Democrat on Washington DC’s city council, has raised more than $120,000 since 2007 to help her constituents, a number that rose to its current amount after she sponsored a bill to double the amount allowed. According to the Office of Campaign Finance, however, only 5% of that money has been used to help the constituents of the 7th Ward. The rest has been used to pay her bills, hire consultants, and other purposes. Alexander has also refused several FOI requests that have been filed by Jackie Pinckney-Hackett, a 7th Ward activist. She believes that Alexander and the council as a whole are “stonewalling”, because they have yet to release information that should be freely available to the public, i.e. a detailed audit of Alexander’s expenses.
City refuses to identify workers disciplined for viewing porn: In Springfield, Illinois, the State Journal-Register (a local newspaper) has requested the names of City Water, Light and Power employees who had been disciplined for using their work computers to view pornographic materials. The paper filed a FOI request for the names on January 26th and has yet to hear back. Stranger than the lack of information being released—many FOI requests are denied, and this one may be considered an invasion of the employees’ privacy—is the fact that the Register has yet to receive any official word of denial, which also means they have yet to be given the protocol to appeal a denial. They are simply in limbo, unable to get their information but unsure why they can’t. During this time, the Register and city officials have been firing back and forth at each other, each trying to convince the other of the illegality of what they hope to do.
Supreme Court denies AT&T ‘personal privacy’ rights regarding FOIA: After AT&T reached a $500,000 settlement with the FCC in 2004 over allegations that the phone company was abusing a government program that sponsored internet access for cash-strapped schools, the company must have thought they’d heard the last of that mess. So when competitors of AT&T began using the FOI Act to request documents from the FCC’s investigation, AT&T got squeamish and took the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that it was a violation of the company’s privacy. The Supreme Court, of course, shot that down, given that AT&T is a company, not an individual, and therefore has no right to privacy under FOI laws.
Is DHS Spying on the Drudge Report?: According to Bob Barr and his watchdog group Liberty Guard, the federal government may be spying on anti-TSA advocates such as Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report. Barr’s claims are in response to a TSA document leaked in 2010 that stated “any person, group or alternative media source” who was openly opposed to TSA security measures would be considered a domestic extremist by the government. Barr has filed a FOI request for all government documents concerning Drudge to prove whether or not the government is spying on high-profile “domestic extremists”.
