#freedomofinformationact — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #freedomofinformationact, aggregated by home.social.
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How an Atlanta Suburb Ended Up Sharing Flock Data With More Than 2,000 Organizations
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The County Prosecutors Who Became ICE Informants
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/the-county-prosecutors-who-became-ice-informants/
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A FOIA Update, Of Sorts
Last week, a Government Information Specialist at the State Department emailed to ask if I would still be interested in records I requested in 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act. “The Department is undertaking a comprehensive review of its backlog of FOIA requests,” she wrote, and if (after failing to respond to my request for five years) she did not hear from me within thirty days, “the Department will conclude you are no longer interested in pursuing this request, and your request will be administratively closed.”
The request itself concerned the Kalorama mansion purchased by Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic Craig right after the 2016 election, where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump lived during Trump’s first term. (I’ve written several posts about the situation over the years. This one is a pretty good primer.) When Jared and Ivanka decamped to Florida in 2021, the Kuwaiti foreign mission leased Luksic’s Washington, DC property; federal law required State Department approval. So I asked to see the Kuwaiti foreign mission’s written request and the State Department’s Notice of Approval.
I was casting a wide net in order to learn what I could about Luksic, his influence operations, and his international network of business relationships, which now extends to the very edge of the Boundary Waters, where Luksic-controlled Antofagasta plc plans to build the Twin Metals copper and nickel mine.
It was a longshot request to begin with. Is there anything to learn from these Foreign Mission Office records, five years later? Not likely, but who knows? So I replied that I am still interested. I feel obliged to see the thing through, or to see that the Department of State meets its obligation to the public.
While I had the attention, or at least the email address, of someone involved in the comprehensive review, I thought I should ask about two other requests I’d filed with the Department of State back in October of 2018, and which I’ve been trying to chase down ever since. These requests concern the use of the US embassy in Santiago, Chile as a business backchannel for Antofagasta: one asks for records of a 2017 meeting between Antofagasta CEO Ivan Arriagada and Carol Perez, then US ambassador to Chile; the other asks for embassy communications regarding Trump’s nomination of Andrew Gellert to replace Perez. Over the years, the Department has set and missed several estimated dates of completion for these requests. I detailed some of the back and forth in a 2023 post. Since then, or at least for the past couple of years, the FOIA Office has failed to respond to my requests for more information about the status of these requests.
On Monday, this reply came:
These requests remain in process and has [sic] a new estimated date of completion (EDC) of January 31, 2028. EDCs are estimates and subject to change. You will be notified of the results of the Department’s search and review efforts in response to these requests as soon as that information becomes available.
This is just boilerplate, of course; the subject-verb disagreement in the first sentence looks like a copy-paste accident. Still, a few observations.
The requests are said to be “in process,” but in eight years no “search and review efforts” have been undertaken. The new estimated date of completion falls in the last year of Trump’s second term – a year and a half from now – and the FOIA office is not even committing to a response when the 2018 request hits the ten-year mark. I am sufficiently annoyed by this delay that I have to wonder aloud (but without evidence) if there is some directive at State to push FOIA matters, or certain FOIA matters, to the end of this administration.
The FOIA office blames a backlog of requests, and that backlog is real. “The State Department’s FOIA backlog spiked by 6,000 cases to a total of 27,619” this fiscal year, reports Justin Doubleday. Back in June, Minho Kim did some great data analysis for the New York Times showing that federal agencies “accumulated the highest-ever backlog of cases in fiscal year 2025, raising questions about compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.” Not surprisingly, “the problem appears to have worsened under President Trump.” And the backlog problem has been compounded by cuts to FOIA staff, leaving “several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant” at State. One administration official quoted by the Times says the Trump administration chose to “hire ICE officers instead of FOIA processors.” That snide remark alone speaks volumes about this administration’s misplaced priorities, its refusal of all accountability, and its contemptuous disregard for the public interest.
To put it another way: the FOIA backlog is itself a symptom of bad government and corruption, a condition that is only exacerbated by the Trumpist dismantling and hijacking of public institutions and federal agencies.
In 2019, William J. Burns warned against Trump’s “diplomacy of narcissism, bent on advancing private interests at the expense of our national interests.” The events that prompted my FOIA requests in 2018 – the meeting of an Antofagasta executive with Ambassador Perez and the nomination of Gellert, a Kushner friend – fit the pattern. The cronyism and self-dealing of the first term have gotten much worse and much more blatant this go-round. Charles Kushner is ambassador to France! Jared and Steve Witkoff are the faces of US diplomacy. The ambassador to Chile is Brandon Judd, a longtime Trump campaign stalwart and former head of the Border Patrol union. Judd’s main qualification seems to be that he spent some time in Chile in the 1990s, proselytizing for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. José Miguel Insulza put it bluntly: “de diplomacia no sabe nada.”
AmbassadorJudd has not exactly covered himself in glory. He caused an uproar just a couple of weeks ago when he criticized Chilean cabinet ministers for expressing serious and legitimate concerns about the new 12.5 percent tariffs on Chilean exports, petulantly adding that there would be no agreement if they continued their criticisms. Judd went on to suggest that Chile’s business leaders should “complain to your authorities to prevent them from making declarations about the relationship with the United States.”
“The ambassador,” said Juan Gabriel Valdés, “does not seem to understand that he is not part of the Chilean political system…. he does not have a role to play in internal Chilean political debate.” And this was not an isolated incident, Valdés noted. It was “the third or fourth time” that Judd had acted more like a colonial viceroy than a diplomat.
For the moment, at least, Chile’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Pérez Mackenna and his team are handling Judd. Pérez Mackenna is a seasoned negotiator. Before joining the right-wing Kast government this past spring, he spent nearly three decades as CEO of Quiñenco, managing the global operations of the Luksic business empire. Make of that what you will.
#corruption #cronyism #diplomacy #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #oligarchy #power #selfDealing #softPower -
ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/ice-dna-collection-fbi-codis/
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RE: https://journa.host/@muckrock/116861712423780727
Signed into law 60 years ago, and became effective the following day, FOIA is an indispensable tool for transparency and for keeping our government accountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_(United_States)
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2026/how-journalists-use-foia-public-records-reporting/
#FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #transparency #accountability
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Effectively USING THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA) - often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.
https://rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com/2026/05/21/effectively-using-the-freedom-of-information-act-foia/
#FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct -
The FCC Received Hundreds of Complaints About Bad Bunny’s ‘Vulgar’ Super Bowl Performance
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.wired.com/story/bad-bunny-super-bowl-fcc-complaints/
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The FCC Has a Fast Lane for Complaints About Trump’s Media Critics
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ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
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#ice to wear body cams.
And so i expect the next bar to be the #freedomofinformationact
If people decide to go on the offensive or more aggressive defensively...
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Trump Warned of a Tren de Aragua ‘Invasion.’ US Intel Told a Different Story
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#FBI paid nearly $1M in overtime to #redact #Epsteinfiles, documents show
@bloomberg reporter @JasonLeopold sued the FBI and #DOJ for the files as part of a #FreedomofInformationAct request.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fbi-overtime-redact-epstein-files/
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The #Pentagon has to provide #NewYorkTimes information about #ElonMusk #security clearances, a federal judge ruled Wednesday—and the #billionaire own #socialmedia habits helped decide the case. In September 2024, the Times filed a #FOIA #FreedomofInformationAct request seeking “a list of security clearances” granted to #Musk, including “any details about the extent and purview of each of the clearances.” #doge #transparency #accountability #democracy #trump #maga #firing #government #workers
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Effectively Using THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA). It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.
https://rosecoveredglasses.wordpress.com/2025/08/11/effectively-using-the-freedom-of-information-act-foia/
#freedomOfInformationAct #FOIA -
Michael Nedd’s BLM Calendar, From Election Day 2016 through the Inaugural Period
Back in 2019, I made a Freedom of Information Act request for the work calendar of Michael Nedd, a longtime Bureau of Land Management official, for the months following the 2016 election through the inaugural period. The documents were released just the other day, six years and four months after I submitted the FOIA request.
Nedd had been promoted from Executive Director, Energy Minerals and Management to Deputy Director at the Bureau of Land Management in March of 2017, just a couple of months after Trump took office. He would have been privy, I imagined, to any discussions of Twin Metals’ canceled mineral leases and the full-court-press flurry to renew them. I thought his work calendar might help me fill out the Timeline I made of that coordinated effort or help me reconstruct what was happening behind closed doors at BLM.
Upon review, these documents do not seem all that helpful in that regard. For example, the Timeline indicates that on February 7, 2017, Nedd forwards a briefing paper on land withdrawals to his colleagues; no surprise, his calendar for that day shows a “Land Withdrawal Proposal Discussion.” In my view, all this does is drive home a point I’ve made many times, that reversing land withdrawals was a priority for the incoming administration. And we already have Nedd’s calendar for April of 2017, when he met with then-solicitor Daniel Jorjani and other officials to discuss “Mining in Minnesota.” Or at least we had that calendar, but the link (to a domain called altgov2) has now gone dead. Well, not exactly dead: it’s a tarted-up 404 Page, occupied by “affiliate marketers.” I’m not going to bother linking to it, but if you want to see what I’m talking about, just go to the entry for April 10th on the Twin Metals Timeline and click the link to Nedd’s calendar.) It’s been a while, and, contrary to popular wisdom, the Internet is not forever.
So why put these documents up now? Circumstances have changed. The threat to the Boundary Waters looks even more menacing than it did during Trump’s first term, and we should be paying attention to what’s going on now, not what happened eight or more years ago, right?
What’s more, Michael Nedd was frog marched out of BLM’s office back in May, 2025, for telling employees to ignore a DOGE directive. (Politico has the details here; the Washington Post also has a story; I’ll note in passing that it’s classic Politico to report Nedd’s ouster, which is part of the clumsily executed destruction of modern American government that we’re witnessing, as a threat to Trump’s fossil fuel agenda.) Though Nedd is still listed on the BLM website as Deputy Director, Greenwire reports that Joe Stout has now replaced him as Acting Deputy Director. Things are unclear: there may be litigation underway or some reinstatement in the works. (After all, the DC kleptocrats wouldn’t want to do anything to threaten that fossil fuel agenda).
Anyway, I put these records up now because a) they arrived, so I might as well acknowledge the response; b) they help fill out the public record for a critical period; c) someone else might find these records useful; and d) I have a chance to test out Muckrock’s DocumentCloud plugin for WordPress — which I have not used until now.
In order to upload the 2000-plus-page calendar to documentcloud.org, I had to break it into two parts.
Part 1.
Part 2.
Postscript 30 August 2025: Results from the plugin experiment are mixed. Right now, it looks as if the documentcloud server is returning a 500 error. The docs, if you want them, are here.
Postcript 2, 9 Sept 2025. 1) It turns out the 500 error only shows up when I try to view the documents on Chrome, on my laptop. The plugin works just fine on Safari and Firefox. And when I emailed Sanjin Ibrahimovic at Muckrock to ask about all this, he said he could not replicate the 500 error, even when viewing the post in Chrome. So, who knows? I speculated that it might be an extension I’m running on Chrome. As long as people can access the documents, all is well, I guess. 2) On Chris D’Amico‘s suggestion, I tried looking at the post in an incognito window. And I can see the docs just fine.
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#antiScience #bureaucracy #climateDenial #corruption #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #kleptocracy #Muckrock #publicRecord #recordKeeping #Water #Wordpress
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#DOGE affiliates Kenneth Jackson & Nate Cavanaugh “disabled & restricted access to the Institute's #FOIA system, terminated the employees responsible for processing FOIA requests, & restricted the use of Institute financial resources.”
#law #Trump #Musk #transparency #FreedomOfInformationAct
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-13/secret-service-still-probing-james-comey-s-86-47-instagram-post -
"The FOIA has taken a serious beating over the past five months. The mass firing of federal workers has hollowed out FOIA offices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the US Agency for International Development, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department and other agencies.
Now, add the State Department to that list. I’ve learned that a hiring freeze has stymied the agency from filling critical leadership positions, including roles that administer the agency’s FOIA operations and litigation. Additionally, contractors who review records and have classification authority were suspended through the end of the fiscal year as a result of cost-cutting measures. On the whole, the number of State Department employees and contractors who process FOIA requests has been cut in half due to the deferred resignation program and budget cuts, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News.
These cuts and departures will only exacerbate the State Department's awful track record when it comes to FOIA. The agency currently has more than 23,000 FOIA requests in its backlog, according to the latest stats on FOIA.gov. I alone have more than 50 requests pending at State, 46 of which have been stuck in a backlog for more than five years and 22 that have lingered for more than a decade.
To be clear, it’s certainly not the fault of FOIA analysts. While the FOIA is statutorily mandated, there’s not a single government agency that allocates funding specifically for FOIA operations."
#USA #Trump #DOGE #FOIA #FreedomOfInformationAct #Transparency #OpenGovernment
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Elon Musk Tried Keeping Issues at His Texas Mansion Private, Emails Show - The tech billionaire’s staff were concerned that correspondence about his home in West La... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/technology/elon-musk-texas-neighbors.html #realestateandhousing(residential) #fencesandpropertybarriers #computersandtheinternet #freedomofinformationact #building(construction) #westlakehills(tex) #citycouncils #muskelon #zoning