Tag Archive for: requests

UK Tribunal To Decide Whether Gov’t Agencies Can Continue To Pretend There’s A Residency Requirement For FOI Requests

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The UK’s Freedom of Information law is pretty straightforward when it comes to residency requirements. There aren’t any.

Anyone can make a freedom of information request – they do not have to be UK citizens, or resident in the UK. Freedom of information requests can also be made by organisations, for example a newspaper, a campaign group, or a company.

And yet, some UK government agencies have decided to read a residency requirement into a law that doesn’t contain one. As Owen Bowcott reports for The Guardian, these seemingly illegal non-responses to requests are about to be tested in court.

A combined hearing involving the Home Office, Metropolitan police, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and 13 separate cases is to be held at an information tribunal in London.

At issue is whether applicants overseas are entitled to a response when submitting freedom of information requests to UK government departments and agencies.

Nothing in the UK’s Freedom of Information law appears to institute a residency requirement for FOI requesters. Nor does it hint at territorial limitations that could allow agencies to withhold documents from certain requesters. But the agencies handling these 13 cases seem to feel there is a residency requirement and they appear to be applying this novel interpretation to screw with requesters they’d rather not respond to.

One set of requests deals with the UK’s government’s involvement with attempts to extradite Julian Assange for prosecution.

One of the blocked cases is an appeal by the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who works for daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and writes about WikiLeaks.

She has been pursuing information about how the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with its Swedish counterpart during initial attempts to extradite Assange to Sweden.

So, it appears that at least one of the 13 cases is about documents being withheld because the agency doesn’t want to release them, not because there’s a genuine question about whether the agency is obligated to respond to non-UK residents. Meanwhile, the government says it’s going to continue following the law… by not following the law in these 13 cases — at least until the tribunal says otherwise.

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Paulding County School District Now Trying To Duck FOIA Requests

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You will recall the brief clusterfuck that occurred earlier this month in Georgia’s Paulding County. The school district there, which opened back up for in-person classes while making wearing a mask completely optional, also decided to suspend two students who took and posted pictures of crowded hallways filled with maskless students. While the district dressed these suspensions up as consequences for using a smartphone on school grounds, the school’s administration gave the game away by informing all students that they would be disciplined for any criticism by students on social media in general. That, as we pointed out, is a blatant First Amendment violation.

Once the blow-back really got going, the school district rescinded the suspensions. In the days following, students and teachers at the school began falling ill and testing positive for COVID-19. It got bad enough that the school decided to shut down. With so much media attention, it was a matter of who was going to get the FOIA requests in for documents on what led to the suspensions first.

Vice put a request in. However, because this district can’t seem to stop punching itself in the gut, the school district is attempting to duck the FOIA requests entirely. Not through redactions. It just isn’t going to give up any internal documents at all, even as it acknowledges it has documents in hand.

“The District is in possession of responsive documents,” the response, signed by W. Thomas Cable in their role as the attorney for the Paulding County School District, reads. “However, pursuant to Georgia law, the following categories of information have not been produced, via redaction or removal, to the extent a statutory exclusion is directly applicable.”

The public records request response also says the records are “specifically required by the federal government to be kept confidential.” School districts often attempt to reject freedom of information requests on the grounds of student privacy, but districts and individual schools should be able to produce redacted records that protect privacy while still giving information about how specific decisions were made behind the scenes.

Without question, the district has the ability to disclose the documents requested without violating any student or faculty privacy. What this is instead is a fairly brazen attempt to refuse a records request that will almost certainly be embarrassing for the district. Due to this, the refusal has gotten the attention of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, which doesn’t sound like the kind of group that is going to simply let this go.

The cover up is always worse than the crime, as they say. However bad those records would have made Paulding County School District look, it’s now going to look all the worse with this attempt to bury the truth, should those documents eventually come out. And, given the speed with which the district retreated from the suspensions when challenged, you have to imagine a little bit of public pressure is all it’s going to take here as well.

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Months After The Law’s Enactment, California Law Enforcement Agencies Are Still Blowing Off Public Records Requests

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It’s been more than six months since a new law in California opened the books on police misconduct and use of force records. And there are still agencies stiff-arming public records requests. Law enforcement agencies aren’t known for their transparency and accountability, which is why laws like California’s are needed to force these obligations on them. But while violations of state law might get a resident arrested, they seem to be a bit powerless when it comes to making law enforcement behave in a legal fashion.

The Desert Sun reports it still hasn’t heard back from a number of agencies it’s sent requests to. In some cases, it appears an effort is being made but the responding agencies are just understaffed.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva acknowledged earlier this year that public records requests were “stacking up.” He has said he’s asked the county Board of Supervisors for funding to hire more people to handle requests.

This excuse would be a hell of a lot more legitimate if the Sheriff’s Office hadn’t had months of advance notice. It had a chance to staff up prior to the law’s enactment date, but it chose to wait until several months after that to start asking for help.

Thus ends the roundup of quasi-legitimate excuses for dodging accountability obligations. And even this one is still mainly horseshit. The Desert Sun reports the “we’re doing what we can!” Sheriff has refused to search for records in response to requests, demanding requesters identify the specific cases they’re seeking — something that, in most cases, they can’t possibly know until after they’ve gained access to records.

What follows from there is a list of non-compliant agencies:

Both the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the Long Beach Police Department have yet to release any records to KPCC/LAist, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register or KQED.

The Los Angeles County Probation Department, which supervises youths held in detention, has declined to release records, claiming disclosure of records about cases involving minors is prohibited by law. Records from the department, which also supervises adults, could be redacted to remove names of protected individuals.

This is no longer a question of law. Courts have repeatedly held the new law is retroactive, making records generated prior to the beginning of this year responsive to requests. The state’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, has apparently decided to see how much of this year he can spend with his head up his ass. He’s appealing a decision by a judge granting access to records involving the state’s DOJ… which still has yet to release the records it was ordered to release.

Other agencies have been a bit more compliant. The San Francisco PD has released a handful of records on four shootings by officers and the LAPD is continuing to release files on a rolling basis. In both cases, these agencies have upped their staffing to handle the influx of requests — all without complaining publicly about their obligations.

Other agencies have chosen to go the route of antagonistic compliance — following the letter of the law while making it very clear they hate everything about the law and every requester taking advantage of it.

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department charged KPCC/LAist $ 1,655 to redact audio from shooting investigations […]. The department has yet to provide the tapes.

The city of Bakersfield estimated that reviewing the audio and body camera footage related to a single shooting would cost about $ 6,621.60. Footage related to cases from the past five years, when Bakersfield Police shot 28 people, would cost an estimated $ 185,000.

West Sacramento estimated it would cost $ 25 per minute to redact its footage, meaning the material from five shootings would cost $ 25,000 in total.

The best way to close a marketplace you’ve been forced to enter is to price everyone out of it. This is an old school public records tactic, one designed to dissuade the general public from holding their public institutions accountable for their misbehavior.

And this doesn’t even include the list of agencies who saw the legislative writing on the wall last year and started destroying old records before the public could start asking for them.

All of this adds up to a very ugly display of arrogance and disdain for the general public by the state’s law enforcement agencies. There are a few standout agencies fully complying with the letter and the spirit of the law, but for the most part, law enforcement agencies are operating in go-fuck-yourself mode when it comes to public records requests. The end result will be an even greater divide between the police and the policed.

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