"Don't spy on us, FBI" say Minnesota activists

from Twin Cities Daily Planet:

By Bill Sorem, The Uptake -- It was a declassified FBI document that Lucia Wilkes Smith held up before a crowd of Minneapolis peace activists. It was declassified in name only because nearly every word on the dozen or so pages had been blacked out for national security reasons.

"The first letter I got from the FBI said 'we don't have anything on you', said Wilkes Smith a well-spoken gray-haired woman. She had made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of the FBI. The American Civil Liberties Union and others had urged her to file the request because the FBI had been spying on anti-war groups in Minnesota prior to and during the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

"And then another letter came that said 'well we got a few pages, but they're classified'. And then eventually they declassified this and sent it to me." She held up the dozen or so pages with nearly every word blacked out.

Read the rest here.

Fraternal Order of Police Sues City of Jacksonville, Florida

The Fraternal Order of Police has sued the city of Jacksonville, Florida, over an 85-point public records request last fall that has gone unfulfilled. Among the records sought are e-mails from Mayor John Peyton's staff and City Council members regarding a proposed 3-percent pay cut for the police union and other unions.

The city says the records need to be reviewed by attorneys and redacted for negotiating strategy information.

For more, click here.

Overhaul of Florida Sunshine Law Passes Senate Committee

A Florida Senate committee approved a bill to overhaul the state's Sunshine Law. The unanimous vote came despite objections lodged by lobbyists for the Florida League of Cities to key provisions of the bill, including the proposal to end charges for redaction of personal information as required by law by January 1, 2013.

Read more about it here.

Redaction Run Amok!

The Puget Sound Business Journal has been seeking internal communications between Washington Mutual (WaMu) and federal regulators, including the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC).

Of interest are internal emails, which the news organization hopes will help explain why regulators seized the bank in September 2008 even though WaMu appeared to meet regulatory standards for operating banks.

The results of the FOIA requests have been less than forthcoming. OTS denied the request in full, citing FOIA exemptions that protect records concerning the operations of financial institutions and to protect inter-agency communication. Meanwhile, the FDIC produced emails, but they were so heavily redacted as to be meaningless. In doing so, the FDIC relied on FOIA exemption 8, which allows the government to redact information related to the regulation or supervision of financial institutions.

To see the emails, click here.

Green Bay Must Yield Redacted Legal Invoices to Newspaper

A Wisconsin judge ordered the city of Green Bay to turn over redacted legal invoices to the Green Bay Press-Gazette in response to an open records request by the paper. The newspaper had requested legal invoices paid by the city for all outside legal counsel worked in 2007 and 2008.

The city had initially provided only a summary of the work preformed by the city by outside law firms and the amounts paid to them and objected to producing the invoices saying they contained attorney-client privileged information.

Brown County Circuit Court Judge J.D. McKay ordered the city to produce the bills by October 2 with the confidential or attorney-client privileged information redacted.

For more, click here.

Details of contract for transparency site not transparent

ProPublica and other organizations requested copies of the Obama administration's $18 million contract with Smartronix, a software company hired to build the Web site "where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money." However, the contract and related documents are heavily redacted. The General Services Administration justified the redactions by saying they are allowed if material "involves substantial risk of competitive injury" to a contractor. Of the 59-page technical proposal, 25 pages were completely redacted, and 14 pages had half or more of their content blacked out.

Back in July, a software company named Smartronix landed an $18 million contract to build a Web site where taxpayers could easily track billions in federal stimulus money. It was just another part of the Obama administration’s ongoing effort to bring transparency to stimulus spending, we were told.

But it seems the drive for transparency doesn’t cover the contract itself.

After weeks of prodding by ProPublica and other organizations, the General Services Administration released copies of the contract and related documents that are so heavily blacked out they are virtually worthless.

More here.

Release Defense documents still redacted

Although the Department of Defense released 12 documents related to detainee abuse, the redaction of key details is still pretty heavy, The Public Record reported. Some of what the Obama administration redacted had been previously released under Bush. One page is fully redacted. What wasn't redacted, however, suggests that Bush player a larger role in prisoner interrogation than he has admitted to. "I got my marching orders from the president," Maj. Gen. Mike Dunlavey said.

The Department of Defense released redacted documents Thursday related to abuse and torture of detainees held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas prisons.

The 12 documents were released as part of the American Civil Liberties Union's long-running Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the government.

The Obama administration agreed to reprocess the documents, but it continues to withhold many key details related to the Defense Department's use of torture methods. In some documents, the Obama administration has withheld details that were previously disclosed by the Bush administration.

More here.

NFOIC Summit: Arizona FOI roundup

State-by-state updates at the 2009 NFOIC Summit: David Cuillier of the Society of Professional Journalists provided a summary of Arizona's FOI news.

• Police agencies are redacting names in police reports. Some just leave in the first name. They're redacting addresses. They use the excuse that they're protecting suspected criminals from identity theft.
• The legislature proposed a policy whereby if someone requested records and didn't pick them up, that person would be banned for life for requesting records.
• There is also a proposal to limit access to online court records to Arizona citizens.
  

NFOIC Summit: Public access threats

Richard J. H. Varn, director of the Coalition for Sensible Public Records Access and the chief information officer for the City of San Antonio, spoke on the threats to and values of public access. Here's part one of notes on his 2009 NFOIC Summit session:

Threats to public access:

• Identity theft and security: The problem with identity theft is not with public records. It would flourish even if all access was cut off. A social security number is only worth about 10 cents on the black market. Concerns over identity theft, however, had led to more restrictions to public access than any other issue in the past couple decades. When public identifiers are not made public, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one person from another. It leads to more false positives and false negatives.
• Implementing public policies by redacting the truth: Because people with criminal records have difficulty finding jobs, apartments, etc., there has been a trend to expunge convictions from public records. However, this doesn't hide the fact that someone has been convicted. It's still in the police blotter archives, and a fellow co-worker could definitely reveal a prior conviction that another employee tried to hide. Redaction doesn't solve the problem. What would solve it is an employability of felons act. Facts can still be acted on. These people need rights.
  
• Increased fees beyond marginal cost and self-funding portal: Florida, for example, passed a cost increase to help solve its budget problems.
• Security concerns lead to overclassification.
  
• Coalition failures: Exemptions for media aren't enough. Citizens should have rights to the same information, and coalitions should champion for them. These citizens who request records are, after all, sometimes valuable sources.
• Private technology, public business: Using private e-mail accounts to conduct public business is ever increasing.
• New technology, same old issues: Just because it's Twitter or the latest social networking fad doesn't mean anyone is excused from providing access and charging only marginal costs.
• Enforcement failures: Obviously, many state coalitions are struggling to add teeth to their state's FOI laws.

Power company sues county for records related to license renewal

The Alcoa power company, which controls four reservoirs, sued Stanly County for allegedly not responding to records requests and improperly redacting nonprivileged information, the Charlotte Observer reported. The power company wants the judge to decide if the records are exempt from the law, to order the disclosure of the records and to force the county to reimburse Alcoa for its attorney fees. Alcoa is attempting to renew a 50-year federal hydroelectric license.

The Alcoa power company sued Stanly County on Friday, saying government officials have dragged their feet in responding to public-records requests.

Alcoa Power Generating Inc., which controls four reservoirs along the Yadkin River, is hoping to renew a 50-year federal hydroelectric license.

The county has spent nearly a million dollars fighting the renewal. It says the company has not cleaned up 90 years' worth of pollution, a charge Alcoa denies.

More here.

Now THAT is some redacton....

From the ACLU's excellent work on the CIA files comes this gem:

After CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, waterboarded detainees, the agency could no longer cling to its last excuses for covering up the use of the very word “waterboarding” in CIA records. As a result, yesterday we obtained several heavily redacted documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.

While the documents do, in fact, reveal the word “waterboarding” or some variation, they leave pretty much everything else to the imagination. The pages that haven’t been completely withheld (many of them contain the words “Denied in Full” instead of any actual content) have the clandestine blacked-out look that’s become a sort of trademark of this administration. This is my favorite: