Seven Agencies Experiment with Publishing FOIA Releases

The general public will have access to documents released through other people’s Freedom of Information Act requests under a pilot program involving seven agencies, the Justice Department announced.

Linking the experiment to the 49th anniversary of FOIA’s enactment, a Justice Office of Information Policy blog post quoted then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s 1967 memorandum on implementing FOIA, which stated, “If the government is to be truly of, by and for the people, the people must know in detail the activities of government.”

Participating agencies include the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Environmental Protection Agency, components or offices of the Defense, Homeland Security and Justice departments, and the National Archives and Records Administration.

By posting documents obtained by requesters on agency websites for all to view during a six-month trial, Justice’s FOIA specialists seek to learn about “costs associated with such a policy, effect on staff time required to process requests, effect on interactions with government stakeholders, and the justification for exceptions to such a policy, such as for personal privacy,” the statement read. “For privacy reasons, participating agencies will not post online responses to requests in which individuals seek access to information about themselves.”

The “release to one, release to all” approach is a shift from current policy under which agencies post FOIA results only if the same records were requested three or more times.

Patrice McDermott, executive director of the nonprofit coalition Openthegovernment.org, told Government Executive that the pilot will be significant over time, “with a couple of caveats.  Once established, there will need to be some indexing of released/posted documents so that the public can actually find potentially relevant information. There will need to be some sort of oversight, perhaps by agency Chief FOIA Officers, and reporting. The posted documents will need to be machine-readable -- which is part of the pilot process, I presume. As with all things government, there will likely be a slow and uneven rollout -- but this is a critical move toward a more fully informed public.”

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation welcomed the change, noting that it goes beyond current legislation to strengthen FOIA requirements in favor of greater disclosure. “This new policy could actually improve FOIA practices beyond what is currently being considered by Congress, if the pilot is successful,” wrote blogger  Zachary Sorenson.

(Image via Bacho / Shutterstock.com)