Free Republic

Through their efforts, the Competitive Enterprise Institute first shed some light on the rather mysterious life and times of one Richard Windsor, the extralegal nome de plume used by Obama’s former Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson in conducting official EPA business over e-mail. Open-records laws require that all government business be conducted on official accounts so they can later be searched in the event of any Freedom of Information Act requests, and standard protocol directs that if any private e-mails are used for government business, they should be forwarded to official accounts. Jackson and other EPA employees repeatedly failed...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. “This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access...

A journalist and a researcher have sued the Justice Department for access to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s records on the late journalist Michael Hastings. The lawsuit follows the FBI’s failure to respond to separate Freedom of Information Act requests for records on Hastings submitted by journalist Jason Leopold of al-Jazeera and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro. Agencies are required by statute to notify applicants about whether it will fulfill their requests within a 20-working-day period of the initial application. In the hours before his death, which was ruled an accident by the Los Angeles Police Department, Hastings...

Documents obtained from the Health and Human Services Department through a Freedom of Information Act request show that on the day the Affordable Care Act became law, the agency received fast-track authority to hire 1,814 new high-level employees to put Obamacare into practice, at a likely cost of more than $159 million per year. The hiring request was approved by the Obama administration's Office of Personnel Management despite a government-wide hiring freeze. Judicial Watch, a nonprofit that has told MailOnline it files 'hundreds' of such FOIA requests, showed MailOnline the documents on Thursday. They show that HHS designated the hiring...

Over the past weeks, we have learned the National Security Agency has the capability to produced throughout the world. Today, ProPublica reports that when it comes to parsing email sent by its own employees, the United States' spy agency does not have the technology for it. At least that's what the investigative outfit said the NSA told them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. : "'There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,' NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week....

One of my favorite stories about former Louisiana Gov. Huey Long involves one of his early political campaigns in the 1920s. While stumping in the northern part of the state, he would tell a story about waking at 6 o'clock every Sunday morning, hitching his family's old horse to a buggy, and bringing his Baptist grandparents to church. When addressing audiences in south Louisiana, he would tell the same story, only this time his grandparents were Catholic. It was an effective speech that played well to Louisiana's geographic religious divide. Once, after a rally, a local politician remarked, "Why Huey,...

Secret courts. Secret emails. Phone surveillance. Drones. The list of cloak-and-dagger tactics employed by the Obama administration -- and those that preceded it -- keeps growing, as NSA leaker Ed Snowden feeds classified materials to the media and other reports show the extent of the U.S. government's more opaque dealings. The latest was a report by The Associated Press that said the administration had military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Usama bin Laden’s hideout transferred to the CIA, where they would be harder to uncover by the press and public. If this were any other administration, perhaps the...

Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected. What he received in response made his blood boil. “I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour wrote to me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.” So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled...

One of the most important and so-far least noted threads in the IRS sandal cloth is the inexplicable remark made by Austan Goolsbee, at the time the Chairman of the White Council of Economic Advisors about the taxes paid by the Koch brothers - arch villains in the Manichean delusions of the American left - that would require his knowledge of their confidential tax returns. Did the White House senior staff illegally browse through the tax records of their political enemies? The Washington Free Beacon has been trying to find out, and uncovered an interesting response: CJ Ciaramella reports: The...

A secretive data collection program run by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau allows private contractors access to millions of Americans’ personal financial information, according to a government accountability group. The information may also be shared with other federal agencies. Documents obtained by Washington-based Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act illustrate the cost and scope of the program, which business groups and some Republican lawmakers have assailed as invasive and potentially illegal. The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported how the CFPB compelled banks to comply with the program by making successful passage of routine inspections conditional on supplying...

Get ready for another front on the debate over privacy, consumption, and the trade-off between them. Yesterday, Judicial Watch announced that they had received data through a FOIA demand that showed warrantless surveillance on 5 million American consumers — not for national-security reasons, but for the new Consumer Financial Protection Board. The documents show that the controversial panel has contracted out the service of trawling through millions of transactions, emphases in original: Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) revealing that the agency has spent millions of dollars for the warrantless...

First State Department Benghazi photos released By SHARYL ATTKISSON / CBS NEWS/ June 20, 2013, 4:51 PM After being sued under Freedom of Information (FOIA) law, the State Department released its first photos Thursday showing the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Benghazi. Why the Benghazi controversy is "absolutely not" over According to the watchdog group Judicial Watch, which filed the lawsuit against the government, the seven photos "seem to depict portions of the so-called 'Special Mission Compound' in Benghazi, including: what appears to be a burned and ransacked building; at least two burned vehicles; and Arabic...

The Michigan Department of Education said the least expensive employee able to fulfill a specific Freedom of Information Act request has a total compensation of $116,917 a year. In 2009, the Michigan State Police said in a FOIA response to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy that materials related to the spending of Homeland Security grants would cost $6.8 million. Whether it's $337.26 for school district deficit elimination plans from the state department of education, or an outrageous FOIA bill of $6.8 million, reformers pushing for more government transparency find that costs can serve as an effective barrier to the...

Some of President Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press. The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press. The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more...

The American Civil Liberties Union made a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about warrant less spying of text messages. The Department of Justice responded with this….TRANSPARENCY! [ Page upon page of totally redacted information. ]

So the American Civil Liberties Union, concerned about the US government's alleged propensity to surveil the email of American citizens without a warrant, filed a request with the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act for more information. This is what it got: A memorandum entitled “Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones” that is completely blacked out. All fifteen pages of it. Mr. President, I don't think "transparent" means what you think it means.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that it’s legal for a state to limit use of its Freedom of Information Act to its own residents. The court unanimously upheld a federal appeals court decision validating Virginia’s limitation of its FOIA law to state citizens and some media outlets. In the case before the court, Rhode Island resident Mark J. McBurney and California resident Roger W. Hurlbert were suing Virginia for blocking them from getting public documents in Virginia that in-state citizens could have easily obtained. Virginia’s FOIA law limits access to state citizens and some media outlets. “We hold, however, that...

A Saudi family who “fled” their Sarasota area home weeks before 9/11 had “many connections” to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” according to newly released FBI records. One partially declassified document, marked “secret,” lists three of those individuals and ties them to the Venice, Fla., flight school where suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained. Accomplice Ziad Jarrah took flying lessons at another school a block away. Atta and al-Shehhi were at the controls of the jetliners that slammed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people. Jarrah was the...

Here’s  a benefit FOIA probably didn’t imagine. Skeptical networks. For anyone who doesn’t know, Jennifer Marohasy has published one of the longest-running skeptical blogs in the world, and she’s one of the few other women on the front lines. I don’t know why we hadn’t spent a long time on the phone before. I’m delighted that we are in much better contact… – Jo—————————————————————————-Guest Post By Jennifer Marohasy FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act.  Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000....