There should be absolutely no reason for the Freedom Of Information Act when we have such a magnificent MSM that does honest, unbiased investigative journalism to perfection.
After all, some of the most comforting words are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.
Come now, you must not trust your government. /s/
When those in power are able to decide what laws to enforce and upon whom they are to be enforced, the clearest, most unambiguous statutes aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Ain’t that right, Hillary?
That’s one of the flies in the ointment re the Covention of States. Yeah, we can have new amendments and regulations restricting the Government, that they ‘have to’ abide by.
But who’s going to enforce them if, make that WHEN, they’re broken?
To paraphrase: What form of government have you created? A BANANA republic, if you can keep it...
FOIA info bump for later read.
Very interesting and informative, thanks for sharing.
We diffidently need to up date this act...
All new government data (and most existing data) is in computer databases. This data can be easily divided into two types of data:
1) Personal data about an individual, name, address, age, SSN, etc. This is called PHI/PII data.
2) Data that is not PHI/PII data. This is data about government agencies, government contractor firms, and statistics rolled up from individual data that loses the ability to de-identify individuals and their personal data.
No tech reason exists to prevent public access to the Non-PHI/PII data. Each new IT system/application could allow this at no additional cost. It would probably be cheaper.
Fixing poorly designed existing systems to do this would cost money. If private donors want to put up the money (or manpower) then it should be done. How much taxpayer money should be spent on fixing old systems just for this reason is debateable.
Making PHI/PII data available is a very debateable topic. Early on I was involved in the hi-tech publication of public school salaries and benefits in IL including the name of each teacher, principal, superintendent and their income, pension, bonus, etc.
How far should that go? Should the name and amount of money of each person on welfare be public? If Medicaid is part of that welfare, should the name of each person who visited planned parenthood for family planning be public? How about the Medicaid recipient who visits a pro-life clinic for adoption and wishes to remain anonymous in that adoption?
I suggest we go for the non-PHI/PII data and not touch the PHI/PII data.