The suprising users of FOIA – businesses!
I'm surprised I missed a study issued in July 2006 by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government titled Frequent Filers: Businesses Make FOIA Their Business. This study of thousands of FOIA requests made some surprising findings:
The report by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government analyzed 6,439 FOIA requests to 11 Cabinet-level departments and six large agencies in September 2005, the closing month of the last federal budget year. The review found that more than 60 percent of the requests came from commercial interests, including professional data brokers working on behalf of clients who wanted such information as the asbestos level on old Navy ships, cockpit recordings from crashed airliners and background data on prospective employees. The second-largest group of requesters —categorized as "other" and consisting mostly of private citizens—comprised a third of the total. These were individuals from a wide swath of society: a movie producer doing research for The Road to Guantanamo, a divorcee searching for hidden assets and UFO enthusiasts seeking evidence of other worldly visitations. There were also requests from a local police department mining for information on federal grants, a whistleblower trying to shore up a claim of government wrongdoing, historians digging into original source material, a cryptologist trying to recover a Navy intelligence report he had worked on years earlier, and a lawyer in the Texas Attorney General’s office trying to locate parents overdue on child support payments. "Media" requests accounted for 6 percent of the total. Many reporters say it takes too long to get information through FOIA to make it a meaningful tool for newsgathering. It is used more frequently by journalists working on longer, investigative projects.So, at least according to this study the picture of the Freedom of Information Act as a tool for journalists to embarassment the government while wasting its time is another urban legend. Granted, the study was done by reporters, but their methodology looked sound. Pull up the study and judge for yourself. Freedom of information is just as good for Wall Street as for Main Street, or even better. When you're done checking out the study, try looking up their background papers. Lots of good stuff. Continue reading
DefectiveByDesign’s Day Against DRM
A tip of the FGI hat to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation Deep Links blog, which has alerted readers to DefectiveByDesign's Day Against DRM taking place today. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and in practice means crippling the functionality of digital files to discourage or prevent any copying, even if that copying would fall under fair use provisions of copyright law. Additionally, DRM technology can track users across the Internet or even expire documents to make them unreadable. We at FGI are very concerned about DRM because the Government Printing Office (GPO) has never publicly pledged to keep DRM'd documents off their Future Digital System (FDSys). GPO does not have any current plans for DRM that we're aware of, but GPO insistance on a policy neutral FDSys leaves open the possibility that future federal documents will be subject to DRM. So we wish the folks at DefectiveByDesign well in their efforts to foil DRM for legal purposes. Continue reading
Part 17: Nonlawyer’s journey through Title 44: Index of documents: number and distribution
This post, all earlier postings in this series, and my “not a lawyer†disclaimer can be found at http://freegovinfo.info/title44 or through our library under Nonlawyer's Journey through Title 44. Sec. 1710
TITLE 44--PUBLIC PRINTING AND DOCUMENTS CHAPTER 17--DISTRIBUTION AND SALE OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS Sec. 1710. Index of documents: number and distribution The Superintendent of Documents, at the close of each regular session of Congress, shall prepare and publish a comprehensive index of public documents, upon a plan approved by the Joint Committee on Printing. The Public Printer shall, immediately upon its publication, deliver to him a copy of every document printed by the Government Printing Office. The head of each executive department, independent agency and establishment of the Government shall deliver to him a copy of every document issued or published by the department, bureau, or office not confidential in character. He shall also prepare and print in one volume a consolidated index of Congressional documents, and shall index single volumes of documents as the Joint Committee on Printing directs. Two thousand copies each of the comprehensive index and of the consolidated index shall be printed and bound in addition to the usual number, two hundred for the Senate, eight hundred for the House of Representatives and one thousand for distribution by the Superintendent of Documents. (Pub. L. 90-620, Oct. 22, 1968, 82 Stat. 1280.) Historical and Revision Notes Based on 44 U.S. Code, 1964 ed., Sec. 76 (Jan. 12, 1895, ch. 23, Sec. 62, 28 Stat. 610).When I first came across this law, I thought that it might be the statutory authority to create the US Serial Set, and I still believe this to be the case. It is more. According to chapter one of the Federal Depository Library Manual, 44 USC 1710, together with 44 USC 1711 are the statutory authorities for the the Cataloging and Indexing Program which provides for bibliographic control of Government documents. This is a surprising situation for me. Cataloging government publications seemed to be tied into sales program law (chapter 17), while shipping government publications is under a different section (chapter 19). We librarians so strongly association cataloging with libraries that it's hard to picture cataloging as formally part of the Sales program; at least in statutory authority. I have to confess that I don't know where all the serial set volumes go. It seems like the House and Senate are getting twice as many as each individual Representative or Senator would need. Additionally, I'm not sure that 1,000 are still produced for distribution by the Superintendent of Documents. According to a recent FDLP-L posting, the Serial Set is only distributed to regionals in each state plus one copy per state without a regional. So I'd suspect that the others are not being produced. If someone with more information could comment, feel free! Next time we will examine the other surprising piece of sales program law, the Catalog of Government Publications. Continue reading
If you read through Bloglines (or not), please vote in our poll
This post is especially for the 148 people who read FGI posts through Bloglines, and also for people who use other news aggregators. We're currently trying to get a better sense of our audience to help us focus our efforts at outreach and dialog. One of the tools we're using is a new poll. Right now we've got 26 responses, mostly from librarians, and that isn't enough to tell us anything. But if you and your fellow Bloglines readers would hop over to our poll, we'd have close to 150 responses to look at. That would give us a much better take on our readership and we could start planning some coverage and outreach accordingly. If you visit FGI through the web and not through an aggregator, we'd really love you to participate in the poll as well. Thanks! Continue reading
Lori takes govdocs to MySpace
Every once in a while we like to highlight government documents librarians who are engaging in creative documents outreach. One such person is Lori Smith of Southeastern Louisiana University. Lori has a MySpace profile complete with a fairly active blog. The profile and blog are very focused on government information and I think Lori has done a good job in selecting topics like to appeal to MySpace folks. Some of her recent topics have been:
- Acne or Staph?
- Still Missing
- Get Involved!
- Stingrays
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