What’s Wrong With CBP?
What’s Wrong With U.S. Customs and Border Protection? That’s the title of a new post over at Buggrit Online, detailing some recent head-scratching, hair-pulling silliness on the part of CBP.
There was much discussion a while back about the NSA and their responses to FOIA and PA requests about the whole wiretapping thing, and I’m kind of surprised nobody has raised a stink (yet!) about Customs’ refusal to play nice with requestors or to comply with Executive Order 13392.
My experience has been that most government agencies are pretty hit-and-miss, as far as FOIPA processing is concerned, and results seem to depend more on the complexity of your request, the subject of your request, and who happens to be processing it. The Department of Homeland Security and it’s components, however, are a consistently notable exception, who seem willfully obtuse and unconcerned with either the spirit or the letter of the laws involved. Getting anything out of DHS is a slow, tedious, and often painful process, and it looks like CBP’s FOIA and Privacy Act staff are about as fun and helpful as a sexually transmitted disease.
If you’ve ever crossed the border to the U.S., or otherwise come into the tender minstrations of CBP, it might be worth the stamp to submit a request for their records on you. I doubt you’re going to get anything, but at least you can play the “what are they hiding?” game.
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[…] On the afternoon of Tuesday, 5 December 2006, I read an essay about some outrageous, and quite possibly illegal, red tape, foot-dragging, and buck-passing on the part of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts (FOIPA) staff at the Department of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a part of the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I felt this was interesting and worth sharing, and made a post about it, with a link to the original article, here on Entropic Memes. […]