Friday FOIA Stuff

For a couple months now, Leslie over at State Sunshine and Open Records has been doing something pretty neat - “follow a FOIA Friday”. Basically, you get to follow FOIA requests through their complete lifecycle. Happily for the short-attention-spans among you, Leslie is only dealing with state open records stuff, not federal FOIA. This explains why he’s already gotten the response to one request, and been promised records in response to another.

I decided this was a nifty enough idea that I’m going to appropriate it myself, though for dealing with national FOIA requests, not state ones. (My limited experience making open-record requests here locally suggests the biggest - nay, only - hurdle is finding the right person to pay, which in any given department is never the person with the records you want.) Because these things can take so damnably long, I’ll be looking at a couple different requests simultaneously, and the results - if any - will be published here, of course.

In the last week I made four FOIA requests that I’m going to be tracking here (plus a couple I’m not going to follow, and a couple of follow-up queries to outstanding requests.) They are:

To the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for records held at the Bureau headquarters on a named domestic terror organization;

To the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Minneapolis Field Office, for records on a different organization than the one above;

To the Department of Homeland Security, for last year’s FOIA logs for one component;

And to the UK Ministry of Defense, for a copy of a report released to a previous request which hasn’t been put online.

All the U.S. requests were sent by fax through a VOIP gateway, to keep costs down; the MOD request was made through their website. Both the FBI and DHS accept FOIA requests by email, but I have a theory that faxed requests might get entered into the system a little more quickly - for reasons unknown to me, the person you send FOIA requests to at the FBI is not the person responsible for opening new requests, so you invariably get a quick note in response that your request has been forwarded to the correct person. The MOD accepts requests by fax, I believe, but the VOIP service in question only offers free faxing to the U.S. and Canada, so…

So far, I’ve received no response to either of the FBI requests; there will probably be form letters in the mail in the next week or so, acknowledging receipt. The Minneapolis Field Office doesn’t process their own FOIA requests; they’re sent to, and handled by, Bureau headquarters. I’ve received no response yet to the MOD request, which is perfectly normal; they generally don’t even provide an acknowledgment of your request, until twenty working days later you get an email in your inbox from them with an attachment. They did “Google” my email address, though; it’s also fairly common for them to try and see who, exactly, is making the request…

Several days after making the request to DHS, I received a phone call from them, wanting to clarify one aspect of the request, so that it could be routed to the correct department. I quite appreciate their willingness to resolve questions like this in real-time, rather than sending letters like some agencies I could name. At a minimum, it shows that someone has at least looked at the request, which is more than can be said for some agencies…

In theory, I should receive a response to all of these requests within twenty working days. In practice, I’m confident the Ministry of Defense will come through by then, and there are better-than-even odds the FBI will respond to at least one of the requests with “no records found” by then. (I’m not expecting records to be found for either of the FBI requests, though I’m always happy to be proved wrong.) My educated guess is that the DHS records will be released sometime in March of this year.

Next week, updates if any on these requests, and new, slightly more complicated requests to a couple of government agencies, including the bottomless pit of FOIA nonresponsiveness that is the United States Air Force.

Effort to date: About ten minutes per request. Cost incurred: Nil, thanks to the wonders of the Internet.

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