Hucul v. HHS (S.D. Cal.) -- granting summary judgment to government because plaintiff declined to oppose two of three requested items and because agency reasonably interpreted scope of plaintiff’s remaining request and performed adequate search for responsive records.
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.
Senators Grassley, Leahy, and Feinstein have introduced a bill, the Open and Responsive Government Act of 2020, that would restore Exemption 4’s substantial competitive harm test, which was nullified by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019.
Read Senator Grassley’s press release here.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock News have announced the winners of the year’s worst public records responses in 2020. Enjoy the stories here.
Letting the Sun Shine on the FOIA
By Dep’t of the Interior, Blog, Mar. 15, 2021
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In the below Q&A, Deputy Chief Freedom of Information Act Officer Rachel Spector . . . discusses how FOIA works and why accountability matters.
Q: Happy Sunshine Week! Tell us what you do as a Deputy Chief Freedom of Information Act Officer (DCFO) for Interior.
A: In my role as DCFO, I run the Departmental FOIA Office (DFO), which was recently established to provide central governance and support to the FOIA offices in the Department’s component Bureaus/Offices. The DFO works with the FOIA Officers, who oversee the FOIA programs in their Bureaus/Offices, to develop effective policies and efficient best practices for FOIA request processing and engages with the FOIA Officers in collective problem-solving to identify, prioritize, and address the challenges they face. The DFO also works with Bureau/Office leadership to ensure that FOIA offices are sufficiently resourced. In addition, the DFO oversees the deployment of modern technology to facilitate efficient FOIA request tracking, case management, and processing, and provides targeted operational support to address large backlogs or complex issues.
Read more here.
Attorney General Merrick Garland provided the following remarks at DOJ’s virtual Sunshine Week event on March 15, 2021: https://youtu.be/OGRB22TZGbY.
Happy Sunshine Week, which kicked off on Sunday, March 14, 2021. The National Archives and Records Administration will host a virtual celebration on Monday, March 15, 2021, from 1pm to 3pm. Watch the livestream on the National Archives’ YouTube Channel.
We have crunched the fiscal year 2020 FOIA data posted by the Department of Justice on FOIA.gov. Here are the highlights:
Agencies received 790,772 requests, a 7.9 percent decrease from 2019 (858,952 requests).
Agencies processed 772,952 requests, a 12 percent decrease from 2019 (877,964 requests).
Unfulfilled requests climbed to 203,998, a 9.6 percent increase from 2019 (186,178 requests).
Backlogged requests climbed to 141,794, a 17.4 percent increase from 2019 (120,796 requests).
Average time to process “simple requests” was 32.28 days, a 17.9 percent improvement (39.30 days)
Agency processing costs were $553,234,056.70, a 13.8 percent increase from 2019 ($486,194,199.50).
Agency litigation costs were $42,913,963.52, a 10.9 percent increase from 2019 ($38,710,512.60).
Fees collected from requesters totaled $2,113,456.41, a 17 percent decrease from 2019 ($2,547,638.48).
Note: Agency processing costs and litigation costs in 2020 are historic highs.
Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Wash. v. DHS (D.D.C.) -- concluding that Secret Service properly relied on Exemptions 7(E and 7(F) to withhold hotel room rates paid by the government to Trump resort in Scotland, as well as the estimated amount the Secret Service spent on meals and incidental expenses at the resort, because “releasing the requested data could help outsiders predict the size of future Secret Service details, which could render the Secret Service more vulnerable to circumvention and increase the risk of physical harm to agents and protectees alike.”
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.
Judicial Watch v. FDA (D.D.C.) -- in case involving government’s acquisition of human fetal tissue for research, concluding that: (1) government improperly relied on Exemption 4 to withhold names and addresses of laboratories because it failed to adequately explain how such information qualified as “commercial” information; and (2) government improperly withheld unit prices and line-item amounts pursuant to Exemption 4, because plaintiff demonstrated that such information was in the public domain. Lastly, the court noted that Exemption 4 could not be used to protect illegal business practices and that there was reason to believe that the government’s transactions with a laboratory were unlawful, but the court found it unnecessary to reach a decision on that issue,
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.
Am. Civil Liberties Union v. ICE (S.D.N.Y.) -- ruling that ICE was not required to create and substitute unique identifiers for alien numbers maintained in database, notwithstanding agency’s prior practice of providing different identifiers to other FOIA requesters.
Summaries of all published opinions issued since April 2015 are available here.
Judge Says Affirming Khashoggi Tape Would Hurt US Security
A New York federal judge has reversed course on his previous order that intelligence agencies must formally acknowledge the possession of a tape of the Saudi Arabian government's killing of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, saying that doing so would put national security at risk. Classified submissions by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had shown that making an official acknowledgment about whether they possess the tape "would reveal information pertaining to intelligence sources and methods," U. S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer ruled on Tuesday.
Read more here (accessible with free trial subscription).