FRINFORMSUM: 4/13/2011

You wish you had a dollar menu!

Ben Kerschberg at Forbes has an interesting discussion of recent Federal Court activity surrounding the applicability of existing federal FOIA legislation to digital metadata, the information embedded in digital files that documents when a file was created, altered, or transmitted.  The issue has only recently come to the attention of the Federal Courts in National Day Laborer Organizing Network v. United States Immigration and Customers Enforcement Agency. The case pertains to a series of FOIA requests sent to four federal agencies for information and specific types of digital files regarding the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency “Secure Communities” Program, which seeks to empower state and local authorities to enforce elements of U.S. immigration law.  Instead of producing the requested digital files, the federal agencies produced pdf files devoid of any useful metadata.  In response to the plaintiff’s objections, the District Court Judge ordered that the agencies produce the materials “without any degradation of electronically stored information.”  The order is currently under appeal, but the decision and rationale are nonetheless significant.  For a detailed look at the Judge’s order, see Kershberg’s piece.

Apparently taking notes on recent Republican Party FOIA attempts in Wisconsin, the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan has FOIA’ed emails of various labor professors from several Michigan universities.  Given the broadness of the request, it has been labeled a “fishing expedition” by some.  By all indications, the universities are complying with the controversial requests.

In other ostensibly appropriate uses of FOIA, one blogger, in a desperate attempt to get the CIA to produce anything responsive to a FOIA request, finally got a substantive response to a request calling for all “complaints received by the CIA about its employee cafeteria.”  In case you were interested, in between all the classified stuff, CIA employees have significant concerns regarding whether the Pepsi served is actually Diet Pepsi (“they have the wrong Pepsi hookled [their spelling] up to the wrong Pepsi spout”), why the almond levels are so low on the cereal bar, why there is no dollar menu at the Burger King, and why the Subway sandwich bread is so stale.  The response documents are posted here.

Republican House Oversight crusader Darrell Issa held a predictably colorful oversight hearing on politicized FOIA compliance at the Department of Homeland Security, which Issa claimed “reeks of a Nixonian enemies list.”  Although DHS allegedly ended its process of vetting FOIA requests through political appointees, the previous existence of such process has drawn the ongoing ire and skepticism of House Republicans.  House Democrats, witnesses, and the DHS inspector general claim political considerations were never factored into the denial of any FOIA requests.

Recently declassified German intelligence files have uncovered tapes of interviews with former Nazi SS-Obersturmbannfuhrerand bureaucratic enabler of the holocaust Adolf Eichmann from his post-war time in Argentina.  The tapes horrifyingly document Eichmann expressing disappointment at missed opportunities to do his job more effectively, claiming, “We didn’t do our job properly” and “We could have done more.”  He is also heard saying that, “I didn’t just take orders…if I had been that kind of person, I would have been a fool. Instead, I was part of the thinking process, I was an idealist.”

In other declassified Nazi news, records recently released by the British National Archives document a fascinating failed Nazi mission to sabotage transportation and industrial infrastructure in the U.S..  Although German forces were successful in landing agents in Long Island, NY and Jacksonville, FL (despite being stopped and released by the coast guard despite suspicions regarding their “bathing trunks and army forage caps”), their plans collapsed when their leader George John Dasch decided to surrender to the FBI.  For more information, the full 93 page document is available for free from the British National Archives for the next several weeks.

A declassified FBI memo obtained by the Center for Public Integrity indicates that the FBI had an inside informant in ABC News during the Oklahoma City Bombing aftermath.  The informant, referred to only as “secret,” allegedly revealed a confidential source that claimed the Iraqi intelligence service was responsible for the terrorist bombing.  The information was obviously incorrect, but the document has raised questions regarding the conflict of interests between a reporter supplying information to government and honoring his responsibilities to his sources and news agency, leading one journalism professor to claim, “I mean, he’s not only a rat, he’s a really huge rat..He’s obviously decided that helping the government on an ongoing basis is more important than being a journalist.”