U.S. Customs and Border Protection Lags Behind Technology

Click here for more on The Texas Tribune's difficulties in getting a FOIA request filed with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.   It seems the office won't accept requests electronically and by fax only in case of an "emergency," leaving open who says it's an emergency and what such an emergency is.  

Fla. city installs city open-records kiosk

The City of Alachua in Florida installed a kiosk at City Hall that allows residents to search for public records without having to file a request, Alachua Today reported. The computer's search engine contains thousands of public records, including e-mails, ordinances, etc. However, the system is limited in that some records haven't been uploaded or haven't been converted into a format that is readable by the search engine. Michael Canney, a resident, said all the city's records aren't on the kiosk, including the city manager's e-mails. “To get certain public records, you have to jump through a lot of hoops and pay large amounts of money,” he said.

The City of Alachua recently installed a kiosk at City Hall for residents to get public records without having to request them from the city clerk.

Alan Henderson, deputy city clerk, said the search engine at the kiosk will eventually give Alachua residents access to ordinances, resolutions and anything considered a city public record.

The engine contains thousands of documents, but the system is limited as city officials continue to reformat and add more records.

More here.

Recycled rubber might be dangerous

FOI at Work!
The recycled rubber used to cushion children's playgrounds could be contaminated with lead and other toxins, USA Today reported. The advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility learned of this potential danger through internal EPA documents obtained via an FOIA request. A 2008 EPA memo said "there are insufficient data to assess the full spectrum of those risks." Rubber-chip surfaces, however, do prevent injuries better than bark mulch of concrete surfaces.

There's a growing debate about the safety of the recycled rubber chips used to cushion falls on many children's playgrounds.

The Environmental Protection Agency has endorsed rubber play surfaces since 1991, both to protect children from head injuries and prevent tires from ending up in landfills, where they can catch fire or become breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Yet EPA officials say they can't vouch for the safety of recycled rubber, which can be contaminated with lead and other toxins, according to internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER.

More here.

Enviro groups ask for list of 'high hazard' disposal sites

A band of environmental groups filed an FOIA request after the EPA declined to provide information on which coal ash sites have been deemed a national security risk. Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security has designated 44 massive coal ash piles as high hazard, but the EPA was informed not to release the site locations due to national security risks.

A coalition of environmental groups today formally asked the Department of Homeland Security, the Army Corp of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency to make public the list of 44 "high hazard" coal ash disposal sites across the country. The Freedom of Information Act request was submitted by the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, the Environmental Integrity Project, and Natural Resources Defense Council after the EPA refused to disclose which of the hundreds of coal ash sites pose such a threat to nearby communities that they have been deemed by the Obama administration to be a national security risk.

"The Department of Homeland Security has designated 44 massive coal ash piles as 'high hazard' because they present a clear and present danger to the people living near them," said Bruce Nilles, Director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign. "People have a right to know if mountains of toxic coal ash are threatening their communities so they can take action and put pressure on their local utilities to demand clean up."

The EPA was instructed by the Department of Homeland Security not to release information about the location of high hazard dams containing coal ash. Unspecified national security concerns were cited as the reason for withholding this critical information from the public, even though the locations of other hazardous sites, such as nuclear plants are publicly available.

More here.

Nevada cites FERPA to redact NCAA violations data

Nevada athletics director Cary Groth agrees that FERPA could be updated so that it's clearer. Nevada provided all information requested except data regarding violations in the Columbus Dispatch investigative story regarding NCAA programs. Legal counsel advised the athletic department not to release this information in the midst of the NCAA investigation into a 2007 whistleblower complaint. The Reno-Gazette Journal had also asked for information on the whistleblower complaint through three FOI requests. The university provided the data but cited FERPA and redacted student-athlete names and cited personnel matters exemptions for redacting the names of coaches and administrators.

Nevada athletics director Cary Groth said she was surprised to learn about the wide range of interpretations of FERPA -- the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act -- and that she agreed with the law's writer that it needs to be revamped.

"I was kind of surprised there was such a variance of openness," Groth said, reacting to an investigative story by the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio that reported that many of the 119 FBS (formerly Division I-A) schools use the 1974 federal law improperly in an effort to keep their NCAA troubles secret. "In the article it talks about bringing (the law) in and looking at it again. That would be very helpful, to identify what we can and what we can't release.

"To hide behind the law when you shouldn't, I think that's wrong."

More here.

NFOIC Summit: Infrastructure coverage tips

James Shiffer, reporter and editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune; Tisha Thompson, investigative reporter at WTTG Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.; and Jaimi Dowdell, IRE training director and former computer-assisted reporting editor at St. Louis Post-Dispatch, discussed how to use FOI to inform the public about infrastructure issues. Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, moderated. Here's part two of the notes from their session at the 2009 NFOIC Summit:

Tips for infrastructure coverage:

• Look at the annual report card put out by the American Society for Civil Engineers each year.
• Keep the National Bridge Inventory and National Inventory of Dams database handy.
  
• Use electronic databases to lead you to paper documents.
• When looking at infrastructure records, contact state inspectors and civil engineers. They can help you analyze data so you don't make mistakes. If possible, first contact other reporters who have done similar stories in other cities.
• The smaller the town or jurisdiction, the better chance you'll have of getting data. Bigger cities become savvier.
  
• Ask for five years of inspection reports to notice problems that haven't been fixed.
• Start with bridges and dams stories. River communities should look into levees.
• Keep a list of those you request records from. Divide them into a naughty and nice list. Send Christmas cards to both. Be creative.
• Go to your local transportation department and goggle what it has posted.
• Look at the infrastructure in urban sprawl areas.
• For a breaking news story, immediately go to the web and take screen shots of everything you can find about the bridge, dam, etc. Chances are that someone will take that info down.
• When googling something, click on the Google cached link, which Tisha Thompson refers to as the "sexiest thing in the world." It shows you what a Web page looked like on a certain day.
• You can also use Wayback Machine to find older versions of Web pages. Thompson used this to access the Web site of Eliot Spitzer's call girl after her site was removed. She was able to obtain information about her and her picture. Warning: This site doesn't delve deeply into federal and state government Web sites.
• Use your stories to highlight the ridiculous excuses given for why information isn't made public.
• Find the human element. Remind agencies that people have a right to this information. This is the people's money and safety at stake.
• Find an inspector who cares and convince him/her to provide you with data or the records.
• Get data any way you can, even if it's in a PDF file. Then, find someone who can figure out how to turn it into something usable.
• Trick from Jaimi Dowdell: If a government agency says it can't export data because of the system it's using, just say "Well, that's terrible. But I have to give my editor a report back on why I couldn't get this data. What's the name of your software?" Then call that software company and tell them that their client says it can't export the data. Chances are, the software company will say its software can do back flips. It usually contacts the clients and essentially helps you get the data.
• Conduct advanced searches in Google and search by file type.
• Fish for data and know what's out there. Agencies can't claim records don't exist that way.
• Consider looking into highway construction as well as asphalt and concrete contracts.
• Look into data on electricity grids, fire hydrants, street light outages, pot holes, population growth, water main breaks, road construction, etc. Who's getting stimulus funding?
• Request videos and photos in your FOI requests.
• Find more tips here.

City slowly releases payroll records

The San Jose Mercury News filed a public records request for the 2008 payroll records for all city workers in order to create public employee compensation databases. All jurisdictions provided the full records except for Watsonville, which is releasing information "as it becomes available." Watsonville initially just released records on the highest paid police officers and firefighters. It hurried to released the names and salaries of other employees who made more than $100,000 because some thought police and firefighters were being targeted. The city attorney says Watsonville is only legally bound to release records for employees with salaries of $100,000 or more.

City officials have released the names and salaries of 27 employees who made more than $100,000 in 2008.

The release came late Friday, a day after the Sentinel published the names of police and firefighters who earned more than $100,000 in 2008, a story that sparked controversy in City Hall corridors and in the community.

On April 27, the Sentinel made a public records request for the 2008 pay records for all city workers as part of a countywide project to create public employee compensation databases. The city and county of Santa Cruz databases are available on the Sentinel's Web site, santacruzsentinel.com.

More here.

The story behind the 2009 Pultizer Prize for Investigative Reporting

In the recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, David McCraw recounts the lawsuit behind The New York Times's story on retired military officers working as TV war analysts. McCraw and reporter David Barstow filed suit to get the Department of Defense to respond to an FOIA request for data from the Pentagon on the "dozens of retired military officers who had been deployed by Defense to sell the war in Iraq." He also describes how he used reporting to shape the litigation strategy.

Six years and a day after 9/11, I filed a complaint in federal court asking a federal judge to do what New York Times reporter David Barstow and I had failed to do in countless phone calls and letters for nearly a year and a half: get the Department of Defense to respond fully to David’s freedom-of-information request. The request was gargantuan—basically, David wanted every piece of paper the Pentagon had about dozens of retired military officers who had been deployed by Defense to sell the war in Iraq—and our hopes were modest. Freedom of Information Act cases often move slowly, and Defense had little interest in shining any light on how the retired officers—now rechristened “analysts” on TV—had been given special access to Pentagon briefings even as some of them pitched business for military contractors. There was also this: Our judge was a former government prosecutor, freshly appointed to the bench by President Bush.

Nothing quite prepared us for what followed. Over the next six months, Judge Richard J. Sullivan’s orders drove the release of thousands of pages of documents, and when the Pentagon stalled, he took no prisoners. The last time we appeared in his courtroom, he made himself clear: “The Executive Branch doesn’t get to just thumb its nose at a separate branch of government.”

More here.

Law center questions Homeland Security's classifications of 'extremists'

The Thomas More Law Center is asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain why it classifies "Americans who oppose abortion, support 2nd Amendment gun rights and dislike lax immigration law enforcement" extremists, WorldNetDaily reported. The question stems from a right wing extremism report that alerted police to these American "extremists."

The Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Mich., says it has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Homeland Security demanding why it calls Americans who oppose abortion, support 2nd Amendment gun rights and dislike lax immigration law enforcement "extremists."

"This is not an intelligence report but a diatribe against those who oppose the policies of the Obama administration," said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel for the organization.

"It is a declaration of war against the American people and our constitution. It is a prelude to extreme gun control legislation and hate speech laws targeting Christian churches and others who oppose abortion and same sex marriage," he continued. "The federal government should be focusing its attention on the 35 radical Muslim compounds in the U.S. training its followers on how to kidnap and kill Americans."

More here.