Judge Cormac J. Carney, a district court judge in California has determined that the Department of Justice misled the court regarding the existence of records relative to a FOIA dispute, claiming that the “government’s representations were then, and remain today, blatantly false.” The case surrounds a 2007 FOIA request sent by the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California and the Council on American-Islamic Relations requesting materials pertaining to FBI monitoring of Muslim groups in Southern California. After a series of rejections and limited releases of heavily redacted documents, Judge Carney requested to see all FBI materials potentially responsive to the groups’ request to assess the legitimacy of the government’s interests in preventing disclosure for national security reasons. It was later revealed that the government, in preparing these documents for Judge Carney, omitted select portions to avoid “compromising national security.” In his Wednesday ruling, Carney affirmed the government’s right to protect the documents from disclosure under FOIA, but berated the Justice Department for initially attempting to prevent review of the materials by the court, saying, “The government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the court.”
NARA’s Information Security Oversight Office, which broadly monitors and reports to the President annually on the entirety of the government’s classification efforts, has released its 2010 Annual Report to the President and its 2010 Cost Report. The reports contains a host of interesting statistics and a comprehensive assessment of executive agencies’ implementation of Executive Order 13526, which set new regulations regarding the classification system and was signed by President Obama in December of 2009. The report found that only 19 of 41 agencies had implemented the order in any final form and asserted that, “it is clear that the means by which agencies modify and issue implementing regulations are not sufficient to accommodate changes in national security policy. ISOO sees this as the biggest impediment to implementing the reforms called for by the President and as a real threat to the efficient and effective implementation of the overall classification system.” Separately, the Cost Report indicates that total government classification costs increased by 15 percent from $8.81 billion to $10.17 billion, blaming the increase on costs associated with the “implementation of Executive Order 13526.” (more…)
