Government secrecy

C.J. Ciaramella | From the December 2024 issue

Over the past decade I've submitted hundreds of records requests to federal agencies through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I've written extensively about the law, taught college students how to file requests, and evangelized the importance of having a statutory right to inspect public records.

I love FOIA. And I hate it. The federal FOIA law is broken and should be replaced with something better.

FOIA requests can take years to fulfill, unless you can afford to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit. Agency FOIA officers routinely abuse exemptions to hide records. The process is difficult even for experienced reporters to use for newsgathering.

For example, Reason has been waiting more than two years for portions of a national FBI database of police use-of-force incidents. I submitted a FOIA request in July 2022, but the FBI currently estimates it will produce the records no sooner than November 2025. The FBI has never released any of the raw data from this database, which could shed light on police encounters around the country. Nevertheless, it will take at least three years to obtain public records that we are ostensibly guaranteed access to under FOIA, and even then the FBI might redact or withhold records to the point of uselessness.

Considering the possibility that I'm just bad at my job, I talked to one of the best in the game, Bloomberg News reporter Jason Leopold. He is likely the most prolific individual FOIA requester in the country. At the time of our interview, he had 4,748 pending FOIA requests at various federal agencies. Over the years he's uncovered everything from Hillary Clinton's private emails to the number of cans of vanilla........

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