[00:00.000 --> 00:01.100]  And thanks for coming to HOPE.
[00:03.260 --> 00:13.700]  Mike Ravnitzky I've been talking with for years as a recurring speaker at HOPE because he is the one person who knows more about the Freedom of Information Act than anyone I know.
[00:14.000 --> 00:17.760]  You have... he has submitted... what?
[00:18.060 --> 00:20.400]  Over a thousand FOIA requests or something?
[00:21.600 --> 00:23.220]  Probably about fifteen thousand.
[00:23.500 --> 00:24.100]  Oh, I'm sorry.
[00:24.640 --> 00:26.200]  Fifteen thousand FOIA requests.
[00:26.380 --> 00:29.220]  So, you know, experience counts.
[00:29.460 --> 00:31.580]  And he knows he has got the process down.
[00:31.740 --> 00:35.860]  If you want to find out anything that your government is doing, he can tell you how to find out.
[00:35.960 --> 00:38.040]  If it's doable, he'll tell you how.
[00:38.280 --> 00:43.320]  So, this is Mike Ravnitzky and Mike Morisy who will tell you about FOIA.
[00:44.300 --> 00:45.560]  A beautiful mosaic.
[00:45.920 --> 00:47.600]  How to use the Freedom of Information Act.
[00:48.220 --> 00:49.680]  Freedom of Information Act.
[00:55.120 --> 01:01.380]  So, these days, everybody knows that nothing important gets out of the government unless it's leaked.
[01:02.960 --> 01:07.680]  So, you got... we have to get leaks for correspondence from Google and the NSA.
[01:08.460 --> 01:12.980]  We have to get leaks about how many Freedom of Information requests the NSA gets.
[01:14.140 --> 01:17.080]  We have to get leaks about the CIA style guide.
[01:19.140 --> 01:26.260]  And that's sort of the perception is that if we want anything, we've got to figure out a way to finagle it out of the government or steal it or get somebody to leak it.
[01:26.760 --> 01:28.540]  But actually, that's not the case.
[01:29.480 --> 01:39.260]  So, a lot of these stories were actually misattributed as leaks but really come from this wonderful tool that we've had called the Freedom of Information Act.
[01:39.380 --> 01:47.160]  Since July 4th, 1966, has helped journalists, rabble-rousers, and anyone else get important information out of the government.
[01:49.840 --> 02:09.200]  And while it's a lot more exciting and a lot sexier to kind of say, hey, these documents were leaked and sort of secreted out and there's some danger and drama in there, something that this relatively benign and boring tool is actually really powerful and a really important and accessible and relatively safe way for anybody to get documents they want.
[02:10.220 --> 02:23.440]  Just two FOIA websites, Government Attic and my site, Muck Rock, have published over half a million pages of previously unavailable government documents over the past few years, including a lot of stuff that's later shown up in the New York Times, the Washington Post,
[02:23.600 --> 02:24.780]  and the Wall Street Journal.
[02:25.360 --> 02:37.120]  Earlier this week, in fact, two of today's preeminent news luminaries, Jon Stewart and Jerry Seinfeld on The Daily Show, reported on a groundbreaking investigation into CIA cafeteria complaints.
[02:37.740 --> 02:42.660]  It's just one example of really the power and breadth of the Free Interformation Act.
[02:44.540 --> 02:46.540]  You can really get some amazing things.
[02:46.840 --> 02:52.980]  And the wonderful thing about FOIA is that it's for anybody and you don't need permission to file a FOIA request.
[02:53.240 --> 02:55.980]  This is a part where the law is on your side.
[02:57.460 --> 03:07.520]  And that's something that we really hope that everybody here today takes home with them and sort of takes as not just a civic right, but a civic responsibility to file requests.
[03:08.120 --> 03:14.200]  But as almost anyone who has ever spent time with FOIA can tell you, it's not a perfect process.
[03:14.700 --> 03:20.920]  Some requests can take months, years, or even over a decade before you see what you get or even find out if you will get anything.
[03:21.660 --> 03:34.940]  Oftentimes agencies aren't helpful or it feels like you're messing around with a black box, and a black box that, even worse, has its own agenda, sending in instructions without knowing if anyone is taking your request seriously or if it's even going to get you what you're interested in.
[03:35.660 --> 03:37.400]  But I'd like you to press through that.
[03:37.780 --> 03:47.780]  We know to understand the broad outlines and even some of the specifics about how our government is taking watching the public pretty seriously.
[03:47.780 --> 03:57.960]  But we, as a public, also have an obligation and an opportunity through the Freedom of Information Act to watch what the government is doing, and FOIA is really a central mechanism for doing just that.
[03:58.540 --> 04:02.600]  So today we're going to talk about... and this is speaking only for myself and not anyone else.
[04:02.700 --> 04:05.140]  In fact, I'm not quite sure I'm speaking for myself at all.
[04:05.280 --> 04:14.540]  But we're going to talk about not only why FOIA is important as a form of civic participation, and we really do believe it is, but also how you can use FOIA to make America a better, stronger, more open democracy.
[04:14.540 --> 04:23.280]  The Freedom of Information Act really is a unique tool where anyone can request documents from their government, and absent a specific reason not to disclose it, they have to give it to you.
[04:23.600 --> 04:32.900]  And these are documents you have literally already paid for to create through your tax dollars, so in a very real way you already own them as a citizen and as a participant in this democracy.
[04:33.140 --> 04:37.500]  This is not to say that all parts of the government are subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
[04:37.680 --> 04:39.820]  In fact, there are broad exceptions to that.
[04:40.220 --> 04:50.820]  In general, the legislative and judicial branches are exempt from the law, although there's agencies within those that you can still get things from through their own version of FOIA, as are parts of the White House.
[04:51.040 --> 04:57.000]  But that still leaves hundreds of federal agencies, components, commissions, boards, and other entities that are subject to the act.
[04:57.540 --> 05:02.060]  State, county, municipal, and local agencies are subject to their own local and state records laws.
[05:02.580 --> 05:08.340]  And FOIA plays an important part in something we've been hearing a lot about recently, which is government secrecy and government transparency.
[05:08.340 --> 05:16.120]  When you send an agency a FOIA request, the federal government is supposed to presume that the records are public unless there's a good reason why they should not be released.
[05:16.300 --> 05:17.080]  That's a powerful tool.
[05:17.640 --> 05:22.860]  Agencies are required to articulate why a certain document should not be released, if that's what they wish to do.
[05:23.080 --> 05:31.160]  Under the president's very first act in office, his very first executive order back in January 2009, he told agencies to presume openness.
[05:31.160 --> 05:33.840]  In fact, when he signed this law, he explicitly said the following.
[05:34.040 --> 05:37.040]  For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in the city.
[05:37.340 --> 05:44.620]  The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, then it should absolutely... then it should not be disclosed.
[05:44.840 --> 05:46.140]  That era is now over.
[05:46.440 --> 05:50.320]  Starting today, every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side of...
[05:50.320 --> 05:54.040]  not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.
[05:54.340 --> 05:56.880]  This was a big change from the previous administration.
[05:56.880 --> 06:12.740]  A couple of months later, the attorney general remarkably instructed agencies, the degree to which they've listened to him has varied, but to release documents whenever possible, even if technically exempt under the law, if their release would not cause what's called foreseeable harm.
[06:13.920 --> 06:16.400]  And so we have this amazing decades-old law.
[06:16.580 --> 06:26.660]  It just turned 48 on July 4th, but it doesn't look a day over 30, with a very new, very clear executive order to release when it will not cause foreseeable harm.
[06:26.660 --> 06:32.260]  So if you're researching the activities of the government, FOIA gives you a lot of ground to work with.
[06:32.900 --> 06:42.000]  One of MuckRock's users, for example, recently FOIA'd and obtained a set of training materials from the Drug Enforcement Administration on its parallel reconstruction practices.
[06:42.640 --> 06:54.200]  Now, parallel reconstruction is an interesting law enforcement practice by which the agency more or less creates a false trail of how it discovered certain information, to shield how the damning information was actually found.
[06:54.200 --> 07:06.700]  Maybe this is to hide certain questionable investigative techniques and keep those methods secret, or if the evidence was illegally obtained, this allows them to still bring it into court, while otherwise it would be unusable.
[07:08.600 --> 07:16.720]  And we got all these PowerPoint presentations that the government created internally on how to use this sort of shady technique to hide what they were doing.
[07:16.720 --> 07:39.080]  And what this requester received really showed us a lot of new ground and shed light on some things we didn't previously know, including how, why, and when the DEA used parallel reconstruction, and including that written out that the DEA uses parallel reconstruction not only because it might not withstand court scrutiny,
[07:39.080 --> 07:44.200]  but because it might not withstand public scrutiny if the public knew how they were doing their job.
[07:44.380 --> 07:51.120]  They specifically say, Americans don't like it when we're honest about how we do what we do.
[07:51.680 --> 08:02.160]  And this is something that he got, not from a leaked source, not from anybody who sort of had to risk their job or career or going to jail, but he filed a request with the government and they gave it to him.
[08:03.520 --> 08:22.720]  And this included a lot of other really interesting material, including the fact that...so they sort of had one PowerPoint slide that showed, here are the four ways that we primarily go about combining intelligence community stuff with drug enforcement agency stuff.
[08:22.940 --> 08:29.860]  And a lot of times you can get some kind of funny or interesting redactions that are almost more telling about the agency than the stuff that they release.
[08:30.500 --> 08:39.940]  So, for example, this is a slide of four things that they say the public is comfortable with, but they're not actually comfortable releasing the first one of those to the public.
[08:41.920 --> 08:45.820]  So, CJ's request netted 276 pages of government documents.
[08:45.940 --> 08:55.600]  And it did take nearly six months to get those documents of back and forth with the agency, of being patient and persistent, but it only cost him a few dollars and a few minutes of his actual time.
[08:55.780 --> 09:01.820]  And CJ didn't have to worry about protecting his source, he's a reporter, because his source was official government channels.
[09:02.040 --> 09:12.440]  He didn't have to worry about maybe having to live the rest of his life, you know, under...as a fugitive or anything else like that, because filing a FOIA request isn't quite illegal yet.
[09:13.100 --> 09:15.400]  Although occasionally they will come after requesters.
[09:16.100 --> 09:26.840]  FOIA is also an incredibly powerful tool to explore history, particularly the history of our government, especially those important and perhaps controversial events and programs that have not fully seen the light of day yet.
[09:27.620 --> 09:40.060]  Government agencies produce a wealth of documentation and even official histories, many of them internal, just for internal use, which summarize what happened and why, but most of those materials never see the light of day until someone asks for them under FOIA,
[09:40.180 --> 09:45.360]  and they have to find out about them to ask for them, and that's why it's valuable to ask for lists of such things.
[09:45.360 --> 09:54.440]  For example, a FOIA request prompted the release of this history of the FBI and civil rights, which was actually created for strictly internal use to help encourage cooperation with the agency.
[09:55.260 --> 10:07.440]  The document, which naturally enough took a remarkably positive view of FBI history, it describes how the FBI had a long track record of helping and leading the way on civil rights cases.
[10:07.640 --> 10:19.720]  But then someone spotted an interesting reference to the FBI's confidential file room, also known as room 7231, which held masses of stuff that couldn't be stored elsewhere, even within the FBI's own file system.
[10:20.120 --> 10:31.620]  Now, one of the great, truly great FOIA powers is not when you ask for individual records, but when you ask for meta records, things like indexes, lists, databases, and other documents that don't just let you explore one thing but hundreds or thousands of things,
[10:31.780 --> 10:40.440]  and can help create a broader understanding or a lot of times help you discover new things to ask for under FOIA, which is exactly what happened in this case of the confidential file room.
[10:40.440 --> 10:48.120]  So a FOIA request was filed asking for a copy of the FBI files about the FOIA confidential file room, including an index of what was stored there.
[10:48.480 --> 10:59.400]  Ultimately, a few hundred pages of documents were released, and these were mostly memos back and forth, saying what we want to add to the room, what we want to take away from the room now, and just a huge mass of documents over decades.
[11:00.040 --> 11:04.100]  And it described which files were added and removed, and concerns and procedures around the room.
[11:04.620 --> 11:10.420]  The file was pretty messy, and it was formatted in a way it made it very challenging to read or to study.
[11:11.040 --> 11:18.520]  So Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to gather a list of the file numbers and names that showed up in the individual file pages, page by page, and that worked out really well.
[11:19.880 --> 11:29.960]  Typically, files were added to the confidential file room that were extremely sensitive or needed special handling, such as communications regarding interagency security matters, which is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds.
[11:30.120 --> 11:34.080]  And very sensitive activities, and I won't go into details, but even a large quantity...
[11:34.080 --> 11:38.360]  There was even a large quantity of files containing indecent, obscene, or gruesome materials or photos.
[11:38.540 --> 11:40.400]  And the reason they were put there is because they were felt...
[11:40.400 --> 11:44.660]  It was felt that they were unfit for the delicate eyes of the Bureau's female file clerks.
[11:45.040 --> 11:53.180]  So what happened was that over time they kept adding files to the confidential file room, and nobody ever took them out, and the holdings grew and grew.
[11:53.180 --> 12:01.660]  Part of the file actually talked about concerns that there were so many heavy file cabinets crammed with paper that the structural integrity of the building floor was jeopardized in the FBI building.
[12:02.220 --> 12:08.300]  And eventually, the FBI even offered a tour of the room to a reporter from the Boston Globe who wrote a lengthy story about it a couple of years ago.
[12:08.600 --> 12:19.260]  Some of the other information that came out was pretty incredible, including the fact the FBI had secret lists of prominent gay individuals created in the 50s and 60s, and the fact that the FBI had documented its procedures around snitch jacketing.
[12:19.260 --> 12:28.980]  This is a practice in which the agency leaked false rumors that a person was cooperating with the FBI in order to discredit them within the organization they were working with, and so did the vision.
[12:30.040 --> 12:34.780]  And this history isn't limited to just historical interests, but can have a real impact.
[12:35.260 --> 12:43.300]  There's a project called the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, and it's a really wonderful example of using FOIA for something that has a real impact.
[12:43.760 --> 12:54.640]  The Civil Rights Cold Case Project is a team of reporters, editors, documentarians, and family members of those who were victims of unsolved civil rights cases from that era.
[12:55.200 --> 13:10.780]  It follows up on these cases that are literally 40 or 50 years old and uses FOIA, oral histories, and old police reports that they receive under public records law to take a new look at these cases that you can imagine the local police back then just didn't care about that much.
[13:11.320 --> 13:13.400]  And they've gotten prosecutions all these years later.
[13:13.640 --> 13:18.640]  You know, 50 years later, they're finally prosecuting people for murders and abductions and assaults.
[13:18.940 --> 13:33.800]  And every single one of these investigations starts with public records requests, asking for these old FBI files, asking for these old police reports that in a lot of cases they hang onto even though they never actually followed up on, and documents that anyone can go and ask for,
[13:33.920 --> 13:36.800]  but for decades nobody did ask for these documents.
[13:38.120 --> 13:45.880]  While FOIA is used by reporters to help us understand what is going on, FOIA is also, separately, an incredibly important democratic tool for any citizen.
[13:46.140 --> 13:52.280]  If we're to properly evaluate and vote for the leadership and policies that work, we need to understand what our government is up to.
[13:52.460 --> 13:53.400]  It's as simple as that.
[13:53.600 --> 13:55.540]  But oftentimes that can be pretty difficult.
[13:56.120 --> 14:01.980]  Various government agencies have grown fond of putting up open data portals and describing that as transparency.
[14:02.500 --> 14:06.220]  And we see this a lot, particularly at the city and federal level.
[14:06.960 --> 14:16.160]  And those data portals are really wonderful, and they're a great thing to see, and it means that we can now, in a lot of cities, map out bus time and real time.
[14:16.400 --> 14:23.340]  But just as important as what the government is eager to share, is answering the questions that the public has about what government operations.
[14:23.700 --> 14:26.920]  And sometimes those two match up, and sometimes they don't.
[14:26.920 --> 14:28.740]  And FOIA is a great way to remedy that.
[14:29.500 --> 14:34.800]  Over the past two years, MuckRock has been what we're calling the drone census.
[14:35.280 --> 14:39.340]  A large-scale look at how unmanned aerial vehicles are being used across the country.
[14:39.600 --> 14:42.480]  We even came up with a fun little logo for it.
[14:43.580 --> 14:47.800]  And MuckRock served as a platform for our users to file about 700 requests.
[14:48.820 --> 14:58.760]  Actually, one request more or less 700 times, with agencies all across the country, at the state, local, and federal level, asking, have you bought any drones?
[14:59.000 --> 15:00.300]  Do you have a plan to buy drones?
[15:00.480 --> 15:01.940]  Do you have any policy around drones?
[15:02.500 --> 15:06.440]  And we invited anybody to come in and submit an agency that they were curious about.
[15:06.640 --> 15:11.180]  And sometimes people had a good reason to think that agency had drones, and sometimes they're just curious.
[15:12.420 --> 15:14.640]  Mostly people suggested police departments.
[15:15.400 --> 15:17.000]  Where should we file, we asked.
[15:17.040 --> 15:20.360]  And why do you think this agency might have a drone?
[15:20.620 --> 15:22.540]  We had hundreds and hundreds of people write in.
[15:23.400 --> 15:25.400]  Maybe they had heard something from a friend.
[15:25.680 --> 15:27.760]  Maybe they saw something suspicious above their house.
[15:28.440 --> 15:34.240]  One person actually emailed me a video of what looked like they were being chased around by a flashlight inside their living room.
[15:34.860 --> 15:37.520]  But we went ahead and we filed a request in that city.
[15:40.200 --> 15:42.420]  And we found some really surprising stuff.
[15:42.700 --> 15:51.980]  I mean, some of the requests that we thought were a little bonkers at first, it turns out that a lot of these small town random police departments, in a lot of cases, did buy drones.
[15:52.820 --> 15:59.220]  And it was surprising to us, and even weirder, it was surprising to some of the towns and the agencies that we filed with.
[15:59.820 --> 16:06.400]  For example, the Maine State Police, you know, had heard about drones, and one of the police officers there was pretty jazzed about them.
[16:06.400 --> 16:12.800]  So he sent somebody to the local Verizon store, and they picked up, you know, one of those $200 RV drones.
[16:13.280 --> 16:17.060]  And they were playing around with it and planned to use it for tactical purposes.
[16:17.680 --> 16:25.400]  Which is perfectly legal to buy a drone, except you need an FAA permit to use it for anything beyond hobbyist purposes.
[16:26.540 --> 16:27.740]  And they didn't have a permit.
[16:28.380 --> 16:30.760]  And we said, why don't you have a permit?
[16:30.980 --> 16:32.700]  They said, what the heck are you talking about?
[16:32.720 --> 16:33.440]  We don't need a permit.
[16:34.440 --> 16:36.620]  And we explained that actually, yes, they do.
[16:36.720 --> 16:42.060]  And so they said, well, I guess we're not going to be using that for actual missions.
[16:43.200 --> 16:50.820]  And they didn't understand why this pesky reporter was calling up and asking until it was sort of explained to them.
[16:50.820 --> 16:58.040]  And FOIA is a really powerful tool that even when agencies don't realize they're doing something wrong, you can get some documentation to prove that.
[16:58.380 --> 17:03.680]  And that's a relatively benign, you know, a state police officer saying, thinking these drones are cool.
[17:03.780 --> 17:07.580]  And they are cool, you know, and just ignoring federal law in the process.
[17:08.080 --> 17:17.680]  But there was a lot more interesting cases, too, such as the Seattle Police Department bought two drones in 2010 for a little over $82,000.
[17:18.160 --> 17:20.400]  And then did some training for its officers.
[17:21.600 --> 17:24.900]  And then they didn't tell the city council.
[17:25.060 --> 17:26.520]  They didn't tell anybody, really.
[17:26.700 --> 17:28.720]  And they got all this money from Homeland Security.
[17:29.180 --> 17:33.920]  And they bought these drones, and pretty substantial drones, a little more than your Verizon one.
[17:35.300 --> 17:37.920]  And they were getting ready to use it for operational purposes.
[17:38.260 --> 17:40.100]  And then somebody filed a request.
[17:40.320 --> 17:42.120]  And it came out that they had drones.
[17:42.140 --> 17:45.980]  And the city said, we're really not comfortable with you running these drones.
[17:45.980 --> 17:47.700]  You need to not use them.
[17:47.960 --> 17:50.340]  And they said, fine, we won't use them right now.
[17:50.740 --> 17:53.660]  And then somebody, a little later, filed another FOIA request.
[17:53.860 --> 17:57.320]  And instead of not using them, they were trying to buy two more drones.
[17:58.100 --> 18:02.060]  And so after the second FOIA request, they made Seattle get rid of the drones.
[18:04.700 --> 18:07.340]  After they finally said, okay, we can't trust you to get rid of these.
[18:07.420 --> 18:08.780]  We need you to document getting rid of them.
[18:08.780 --> 18:11.520]  And it turns out that they couldn't return them to the manufacturer.
[18:11.520 --> 18:14.060]  So they gave them down to their friends in LA.
[18:17.220 --> 18:19.880]  And this happens time and time again.
[18:20.160 --> 18:27.060]  Where if somebody, if an individual, whether that's you or somebody else, isn't asking these questions.
[18:27.080 --> 18:28.700]  Isn't filing these requests.
[18:29.080 --> 18:30.480]  Literally nobody is.
[18:31.740 --> 18:35.580]  And I think that's really one of the things that I took away from this.
[18:35.720 --> 18:43.400]  Is that so many towns that we interact with at Muck Rock, we might be filing the first request that town has seen in years.
[18:43.700 --> 18:48.980]  And with some federal agencies even, we're one of very few people asking questions.
[18:50.380 --> 18:53.220]  And since these requests, they do have an impact.
[18:53.220 --> 18:55.120]  Seattle police had to give back their drone.
[18:55.280 --> 19:00.260]  A few other departments have had to kind of explain why they lied in document responses.
[19:00.640 --> 19:01.840]  One really interesting case.
[19:01.880 --> 19:03.900]  We filed a request with San Diego.
[19:04.420 --> 19:06.400]  And San Diego said, we have no drones.
[19:06.400 --> 19:07.620]  We've never talked about drones.
[19:07.700 --> 19:08.800]  We don't know what a drone is.
[19:09.180 --> 19:13.800]  Go away, you tin foil hat person, essentially.
[19:14.180 --> 19:22.380]  And then a request to another city came back with a signed contract that the police in San Diego had signed for a drone.
[19:22.940 --> 19:27.220]  So you can find some really surprising things when you ask around widely.
[19:28.240 --> 19:33.600]  And it's great to sort of have these direct impacts on police departments as just a regular citizen.
[19:33.700 --> 19:39.220]  But more importantly, public records gives people a sense of what's happening in their name with their tax dollars.
[19:39.900 --> 19:48.460]  We started doing a similar project with Stingray technology, which are basically these fake cell phone towers that police can put up and grab call and location data wholesale.
[19:49.080 --> 19:56.420]  Crazily enough, the makers of these devices, you know, were kind of worried, even before they started selling them, that people might ask pesky questions.
[19:56.420 --> 19:57.820]  Like, is this legal?
[19:58.000 --> 19:58.680]  Is this ethical?
[19:59.140 --> 20:05.400]  Are the people who use this, who can't even operate a fax machine properly, properly trained to use this surveillance equipment?
[20:05.400 --> 20:14.420]  And so the Stingray manufacturers often put in part of their contract that says they're not allowed to talk about what they buy and how they're using it.
[20:15.080 --> 20:18.500]  But of course, most of those agreements are available under public records.
[20:19.540 --> 20:33.880]  One of the... I should add here that if someone files a request and then someone else files a request, and the third person files a request for some sort of data from a state or federal or local city agency, they pretty quickly get the message that there's interest there.
[20:34.000 --> 20:40.520]  And it does tend to encourage the proactive posting of this kind of data that is of obvious interest to the public.
[20:40.520 --> 20:46.260]  In fact, in the federal law, it encourages agencies to post anything online that they've gotten at least three...
[20:46.260 --> 20:48.960]  Well, they say that they're likely to get more requests for.
[20:49.080 --> 20:51.700]  Usually agencies interpret that as if they've gotten three requests.
[20:51.840 --> 20:52.980]  That's public interest.
[20:53.140 --> 21:01.940]  But that will often spur them to do it because it's just, frankly, easier to post it online than to keep handling these annoying requests for the same information over and over again.
[21:02.960 --> 21:03.940]  So what can you do?
[21:04.080 --> 21:08.080]  One of the great things about FOIA is that it's accessible to everyone, not just journalists.
[21:08.600 --> 21:12.680]  Anyone's permitted to file a Freedom of Information request, and the law guarantees that right.
[21:12.860 --> 21:13.760]  And it can be very simple.
[21:14.040 --> 21:19.940]  Here's an illustration put up... put together a couple years ago by Phil Lapsley, the author of the book Exploding the Phone.
[21:20.040 --> 21:20.460]  Thanks, Phil.
[21:20.900 --> 21:23.760]  And I liked it so much, we're going to recycle it today.
[21:24.020 --> 21:28.520]  So take some careful notes because this is what's required for a formal official FOIA request.
[21:28.920 --> 21:30.840]  First, it must state it's a FOIA request.
[21:31.420 --> 21:33.000]  It must describe the records.
[21:33.120 --> 21:36.680]  You can't really ask questions only for something that exists in some tangible form.
[21:36.680 --> 21:40.920]  You should indicate what fee category you're in.
[21:41.040 --> 21:44.360]  Are you an individual requester, which is called all others?
[21:44.620 --> 21:45.800]  Are you news media?
[21:46.000 --> 21:49.020]  Are you an educational or scientific requester?
[21:49.560 --> 21:51.340]  Or are you a commercial requester?
[21:51.900 --> 21:57.020]  And commercial requester get fees loaded on, and individual non-commercial requester don't.
[21:57.140 --> 22:00.940]  And news media requester get even less fees.
[22:01.460 --> 22:03.600]  And you must state a willingness to pay a fee.
[22:03.720 --> 22:13.540]  You can say, I agree to pay fees up to $25 without my further permission, or please notify me if fees are expected to exceed $15, or, you know, you have to put something in there.
[22:13.640 --> 22:14.420]  They expect to see it.
[22:14.420 --> 22:18.740]  Otherwise, a lot of times agencies will say, that request hasn't been perfected, so we're going to send it back.
[22:21.480 --> 22:26.120]  It's good to include a way for the agency to respond to you, such as email, phone, mailing address.
[22:26.320 --> 22:27.020]  That's very important.
[22:30.020 --> 22:33.540]  And my goal today is for you to try this yourself.
[22:33.840 --> 22:42.960]  You can exercise this beautiful right you have to file a Freedom of Information Act request, and dig up some information you find interesting or useful, or you think the world should know.
[22:43.160 --> 22:51.120]  It can be for some historical FBI files, or how your local police department is policing your neighborhood, or for airline inspections of water quality.
[22:51.240 --> 22:53.600]  Here's a traveler pro tip for everybody who flew here.
[22:53.780 --> 22:55.500]  Never drink airline coffee, ever.
[22:56.300 --> 23:04.240]  And we'll make it even easier for you by giving you a few thousand templates that you're more than welcome to borrow or copy as much as you want to.
[23:04.540 --> 23:14.120]  You can browse over 10,000 requests, which are all public, from the very first initial request to the appeal to when we get the eventual documents at muckrock.com.
[23:15.320 --> 23:24.420]  And that recruits requests in every state, plus DC, plus, of course, with federal agencies, all of which have sometimes slightly or sometimes vary different laws.
[23:25.380 --> 23:30.240]  And on the government attic site, you can examine the results of requests through the FOIA logs that are posted.
[23:31.020 --> 23:38.720]  Or go to a particular agency and see examples of documents that have been released by that agency, which often is helpful because a lot of times agencies will say, we don't give out that.
[23:38.860 --> 23:40.220]  We don't disclose that at all.
[23:40.300 --> 23:40.980]  That's totally exempt.
[23:41.100 --> 23:47.700]  And then you show them that not only have they given it out two years ago, but other agencies give out the same thing all the time.
[23:48.020 --> 23:54.280]  And there's a lot of turnover in these FOIA offices, and people are not familiar with what's been released before.
[23:54.400 --> 24:00.660]  And it's somewhat persuasive to show that, yes, you have actually released stuff like this before, and it hasn't caused the end of the world.
[24:02.200 --> 24:07.460]  So the list of documents that have been released, what's called a FOIA case log, is often very helpful.
[24:07.820 --> 24:22.780]  I helped promote the idea of that many years ago, and it's become very popular, which is identifying who's asking for what, and hopefully without intruding on too much privacy, it gives a sense of what kinds of documents the agency has been providing and people have been asking for,
[24:22.840 --> 24:31.060]  which is useful if you get to a point where you say, I want to ask for this, but I'm not sure quite how to frame it or what, how to put it in the form of describing it as a record.
[24:33.620 --> 24:46.480]  Because the black box that is FOIA sometimes has its own agenda or agendas, or it can be a complex structure of agendas, and FOIA is an intricate and interesting craft.
[24:47.160 --> 24:50.680]  It's best done as a participant activity rather than a spectator sport.
[24:50.920 --> 24:55.460]  So we have two workshops on FOIA we'll be running this afternoon in the U Room.
[24:55.460 --> 25:01.140]  It's listed on the sixth floor, but they've moved it for reasons that are unknown to me, to the U Room, which is down the hall.
[25:01.540 --> 25:08.000]  And the first workshop will be FOIA 101, a basic nuts and bolts FOIA workshop from 1.30 to 2.30.
[25:08.140 --> 25:23.160]  And the second is FOIA advanced strategies and tactics from 3 to 4 p.m., in which we'll cover some of the more detailed discussion on how to get into the strategies of answering requests, responses that are not very helpful or deny records.
[25:23.440 --> 25:31.660]  Sean Musgrave from Muck Rock will be helping with the first one, and a noted FOIA attorney, Kel McClanahan, who's here, will be helping with the second one.
[25:31.760 --> 25:37.040]  And we'll be glad to take... we'll be glad to work in more detail with you on those.
[25:37.220 --> 25:39.740]  And thank you very much, and we'll be happy to take your questions.
[25:51.430 --> 25:52.450]  You there in the dark.
[25:53.610 --> 25:54.970]  We can't see anything out here.
[26:06.080 --> 26:06.480]  Hello?
[26:06.900 --> 26:07.120]  Yeah.
[26:07.420 --> 26:07.600]  Hi.
[26:07.740 --> 26:21.660]  I was wondering if there's anything in the law or any amendments that state, like, standard formats that the data is presented in, or can agencies just give you, like, a tape that has no reader and is like, oh, all of our records are on this.
[26:22.520 --> 26:24.280]  They have occasionally done that.
[26:25.660 --> 26:30.400]  They... there's a lot of encouragement to give it in its native data format.
[26:31.060 --> 26:34.440]  Usually that they can export it to an Excel format if it's a database.
[26:35.960 --> 26:40.100]  They usually, if it's email, they usually print out those emails and give that to you.
[26:40.460 --> 26:43.400]  But you can kind of push back and ask for the original native format.
[26:43.580 --> 26:48.860]  I haven't seen in a long time where they've given it to you in something that's completely unreadable.
[26:50.000 --> 26:52.080]  It's happened, but I haven't seen that in years.
[26:52.220 --> 26:53.320]  I've seen a situation of that.
[26:53.460 --> 26:59.400]  It took about eight years for us to figure out how to open up this weird data format on a difficult data cartridge.
[26:59.620 --> 27:12.500]  But we did, and the results of that is airforcehistoryindex.org, which is a compilation of all the Air Force historical research papers, or some hundred thousand of them, from the Air Force historical research center.
[27:12.680 --> 27:18.660]  And actually, they use that as their index more now than their own system, which is very buggy.
[27:18.760 --> 27:24.180]  And they haven't rewritten it, and it's falling apart, and it's protected by all kinds of password protection.
[27:24.180 --> 27:28.440]  So they like the airforcehistoryindex.org very much.
[27:29.280 --> 27:34.760]  In general, the law says that you can ask for records in a form that they're maintained in.
[27:34.780 --> 27:44.160]  So if they're maintained in a particular form, if it's an Excel file and they dump it out onto fuzzy PDF pages, then you, in theory, can go back to them and say, no, I want it in Excel.
[27:44.260 --> 27:49.660]  And it's good to specify that you want something in a digital or electronic format, because it's much cheaper to get it that way.
[27:49.740 --> 27:53.160]  They're not printing out loads of paper that you're not going to be able to use very easily or scan it.
[27:54.240 --> 27:59.880]  But sometimes they will work with you to, you know, if you ask for it, and give them a couple of choices of data formats.
[27:59.880 --> 28:02.800]  They sometimes can talk to their IT people and give it to you.
[28:02.900 --> 28:05.400]  But they are required to give it to you in format they have it in.
[28:05.520 --> 28:06.380]  So that helps.
[28:06.900 --> 28:07.800]  Thank you for your work.
[28:10.930 --> 28:19.050]  Hey, so I'm a journalist, and I filed FOIA requests, like, both using, like, a service like MuckRock and, like, kind of the old-fashioned way.
[28:19.150 --> 28:31.370]  And I was just kind of curious if you think that there's any kind of advantage or disadvantage to using something that kind of, like, like MuckRock, which sort of just posts everything publicly, like all the correspondence happens publicly, as opposed to sort of,
[28:31.430 --> 28:38.830]  like, you know, something like FOIA machine, which is that new service that kind of just, like, basically links your email to the correspondence as it goes out.
[28:38.990 --> 28:43.750]  Do you, like, I mean, have you seen any kind of advantage or disadvantage to either of those methods?
[28:44.390 --> 28:48.610]  Yeah, I think it mostly depends on what are that sort of person's goals.
[28:48.610 --> 28:59.190]  And, you know, if you were going to get something sensitive like your own files, I don't recommend using MuckRock because we post everything, you know, you probably don't want your whatever the FBI has on you.
[28:59.850 --> 29:10.230]  You know, I think, you know, one thing we've seen is that some people sort of traditionally, a lot of the best FOIA experts kind of treat FOIA like their own personal gold mine.
[29:10.450 --> 29:17.730]  And one thing that I think is helpful is that you have more people, I mean, like, who are sharing things, right?
[29:17.870 --> 29:20.490]  You know, we have these wonderful sites that we can upload documents.
[29:20.690 --> 29:23.470]  We have sites like Government Attic that post everything it gets.
[29:23.550 --> 29:27.510]  You have sites like MuckRock and FOIA machine that encourage publication of stuff.
[29:27.850 --> 29:32.090]  And for some people, I think it depends on the request and sort of what their goals are for that request.
[29:32.310 --> 29:45.750]  There's a big controversy brewing right now in terms of something called FOIA portals, which are government agency sites which administer FOIA and take care of some of the back and forth electronically.
[29:46.070 --> 29:57.590]  Because some people are concerned, especially reporters are concerned, if everything is posted that they're doing in real time, what's the incentive for them to go out and try to dig up a story that their competitors can jump on immediately?
[29:57.910 --> 29:59.370]  They see the need for sharing.
[29:59.490 --> 30:02.750]  They like transparency, but they would like to be able to do their jobs.
[30:02.750 --> 30:11.690]  And there's a tension between the need for openness and reporters wanting to share, but not wanting to share actually right away until they write their story.
[30:12.310 --> 30:24.690]  And agencies sometimes go a little bit overboard and want to post all of the requests with all the information about the requesters right away, and that's sort of causing some concerns.
[30:24.690 --> 30:38.150]  Although people would like to see what's been requested, they also understand that there are certain circumstances where somebody might not want the fact that a personal piece of information is being requested, or they have, you know, a spouse that's trying to find them or something,
[30:38.270 --> 30:39.970]  or there's a reporter who's trying to do a story.
[30:40.510 --> 30:46.930]  So that's a controversy that's definitely in the works right now as the government works toward more of these FOIA portals.
[30:50.090 --> 30:57.090]  So I think, as you mentioned, you can do FOIA requests for your own personal records that any government agency has.
[30:57.090 --> 31:01.490]  You can also do the FOIA requests of dead people who don't seem to have civil rights anymore.
[31:01.850 --> 31:03.410]  And it's a wonderful way to dig up information.
[31:04.230 --> 31:08.130]  You're wondering why, you're wondering about that old story about your grandfather being arrested by the FBI.
[31:08.330 --> 31:09.410]  Well, get his file.
[31:09.890 --> 31:12.410]  Well, there is a website that was started up.
[31:12.550 --> 31:16.770]  I was one of the co-founders of that, getgrandpasfbifile.com.
[31:18.610 --> 31:19.970]  I had no idea, really.
[31:22.450 --> 31:25.110]  And getmyfbifile.com, which is the companion site.
[31:25.270 --> 31:27.510]  And it deals exactly with that issue.
[31:27.710 --> 31:29.910]  It doesn't cover all the agencies.
[31:30.270 --> 31:33.410]  It gives you sort of a starting point for people that have no idea.
[31:33.610 --> 31:40.850]  It was intended as a meme to spread through the genealogy community and other people who are interested in finding out about what's there.
[31:41.250 --> 31:42.490]  But it's more generalized.
[31:42.750 --> 31:51.650]  I mean, if you're a reporter interested in history of a certain area and you want to get the FBI file of some famous person that died, that's a useful, quick way to create the letter.
[31:51.870 --> 31:53.570]  And you don't have to put in any personal information.
[31:53.570 --> 31:57.290]  You can just print out the forms and they're all blank and fill them in manually if you want.
[31:57.390 --> 31:59.790]  Or you can do it online and have it print out a nice letter for you.
[31:59.950 --> 32:07.850]  And if you are going to do that, I recommend, if you're curious about that sort of thing, don't wait until next week or next month or next year, because documents get destroyed.
[32:08.030 --> 32:09.670]  I mean, that's something we are seeing.
[32:10.550 --> 32:16.850]  There's a massive document destruction taking place because the FBI was running out of room, for example.
[32:17.050 --> 32:19.570]  Other agencies don't need to keep things forever, they feel.
[32:19.710 --> 32:28.770]  And they've been mining this stuff to either send selective items to the National Archives or to get rid of it entirely.
[32:29.030 --> 32:37.250]  So there's some things that are being saved for historical preservation, but the vast majority of material from the 20th century is being destroyed.
[32:37.510 --> 32:40.050]  And so if you want something, it's good to ask for it right away.
[32:40.890 --> 32:47.070]  How often do you find that the documents that you get, in your opinion, are overly redacted?
[32:47.070 --> 32:48.650]  And how do you handle that situation?
[32:49.210 --> 33:00.930]  If there's any national security implication at all, I mean, that's one of the big shifts is that post 9-11, everybody loves claiming national security for everything.
[33:01.830 --> 33:08.670]  I work in Boston, and a reporter in Boston filed requests for parking ticket data in Watertown.
[33:09.390 --> 33:15.830]  And the Watertown police said that's national security after the bombings.
[33:15.890 --> 33:16.930]  And it's like, what?
[33:18.230 --> 33:20.570]  And you see ridiculous stuff like that.
[33:20.610 --> 33:22.210]  But you can push back on it.
[33:22.270 --> 33:23.730]  I mean, we got stuff on...
[33:23.730 --> 33:25.330]  You know, we have found...
[33:25.330 --> 33:27.490]  You can get a lot of really interesting material.
[33:27.930 --> 33:33.190]  One of our users just filed a request for Project Aurora documents recently.
[33:33.510 --> 33:37.210]  And we got all this stuff about government testing cyber attacks.
[33:37.650 --> 33:40.750]  And I was surprised that we got a lot of that.
[33:40.830 --> 33:41.610]  And a lot of that was unredacted.
[33:42.090 --> 33:44.630]  And that's talking about critical infrastructure material.
[33:44.810 --> 33:48.010]  And it was all reviewed, and they did redact certain pieces of it.
[33:48.010 --> 33:49.710]  But they gave us a lot of that stuff.
[33:51.250 --> 33:56.450]  If you're talking about NSA or CIA, you're almost certainly not going to get much.
[33:57.130 --> 34:04.170]  Although one of our users, I don't know if they're here, has had really good success getting some NSA contracts.
[34:04.190 --> 34:05.530]  And it seems mixed success.
[34:05.810 --> 34:06.950]  Sometimes they'll give it to you.
[34:06.990 --> 34:07.850]  Sometimes they won't.
[34:08.430 --> 34:13.690]  But, you know, that can kind of say, oh, we're working with this security firm, for example.
[34:13.690 --> 34:16.150]  So it's possible, but it is trickier.
[34:16.430 --> 34:30.550]  I would say that I've observed that, in general, if the request is actually processed, which is a big step because a lot of times agencies use a set of criteria to toss it back if they don't feel it meets certain criteria, whether it's justified or not.
[34:30.670 --> 34:41.890]  But I would say 70% to 75%, maybe 80% even, of the requests can be received and have what people would consider a reasonable response.
[34:42.850 --> 34:47.710]  In the cases where it's not, it's a good idea to use the administrative appeal process.
[34:47.890 --> 34:50.010]  And it actually does work and you can identify...
[34:50.750 --> 34:56.130]  For example, you can show the agency where they've given out things like that before and they haven't blacked out these things.
[34:56.250 --> 34:57.370]  Or other people are...
[34:57.370 --> 35:02.070]  You can find different ways of showing that what they've claimed is not necessarily the case.
[35:02.190 --> 35:08.570]  For example, if they're claiming privacy and the person has been dead for 20 years, then maybe it's not such a necessary thing for them to claim.
[35:08.570 --> 35:16.990]  And I should say also, for national security information, there's a separate track besides FOIA that's called mandatory declassification review.
[35:17.110 --> 35:18.310]  I'm not going to go into details here.
[35:18.450 --> 35:19.710]  It's a totally separate track.
[35:19.830 --> 35:21.070]  You sort of have to pick which one you want.
[35:21.150 --> 35:21.810]  You can't do both.
[35:22.250 --> 35:27.290]  And the same document requested under FOIA, if it's classified, the agency says it's classified.
[35:27.530 --> 35:29.010]  It stays classified on appeal.
[35:29.210 --> 35:34.070]  Maybe even if you go to court, the court might agree because the courts don't look too carefully at that kind of thing.
[35:34.730 --> 35:38.650]  If it goes through FOIA, there might only be a 10% chance you'd get it.
[35:38.830 --> 35:41.590]  If it goes through MDR, there's like a 90% chance.
[35:41.730 --> 35:45.070]  This is the same document being reviewed by people who are using the same criteria.
[35:45.490 --> 35:46.070]  So that's strange.
[35:46.210 --> 35:54.410]  And the explanation for that is the top appeal level for mandatory declassification review is this interagency committee that's been pretty good about declassifying things.
[35:54.550 --> 35:56.870]  Whereas for FOIA, you have to go to the courts and the judges.
[35:56.870 --> 36:05.230]  They say we allow the agencies basically to make their decisions and we defer to their decision-making on classified materials.
[36:05.450 --> 36:09.430]  And this can be classified stuff that's 50 years old, 60 years old, 70 years old.
[36:09.590 --> 36:14.090]  There's classified stuff that's 100 or more years old, believe it or not.
[36:14.470 --> 36:21.410]  So you should be aware of that MDR track, which is what it's called for classified-type materials, if you think it's classified.
[36:24.070 --> 36:26.630]  Where do you see MuckRock in the next few years?
[36:26.850 --> 36:29.490]  What kind of features and enhancements are you thinking about?
[36:31.970 --> 36:40.330]  So when we built MuckRock, I was a broke journalist at the time, and so we built it to be very lean and last a long time.
[36:40.990 --> 36:47.030]  Because we started four and a half years ago, and we have requests that are four years old at this point and still pending.
[36:47.430 --> 36:50.470]  And Mike has had requests going back a decade.
[36:50.470 --> 36:58.210]  Well, there's one that's in appeal that was started in 1998, and there's one that's still in its first part from 2002.
[36:58.510 --> 37:01.670]  So sometimes they hang around a while, but that's the exception.
[37:01.790 --> 37:04.690]  That's not what you should necessarily expect, especially today.
[37:04.870 --> 37:11.870]  Agencies have to publish now their top 10 oldest requests, and that sort of keeps them aware of the backlog that they face.
[37:11.990 --> 37:14.930]  Sometimes they sort of shoveled that under for a while, and it got lost.
[37:15.250 --> 37:18.610]  But so our number one feature is always being around.
[37:18.610 --> 37:24.730]  We've been threatened with jail, we've been threatened with lawsuits, we've been threatened with Beyonce, and all these other things.
[37:25.970 --> 37:26.830]  Long story.
[37:28.330 --> 37:31.310]  You know, so our number one feature is just stick around.
[37:31.890 --> 37:37.190]  But I think after that we've got a mobile site coming up that we're really excited about.
[37:37.910 --> 37:41.890]  And then our big feature is, A, letting people clone other requests.
[37:42.030 --> 37:47.510]  One of the things our amazing users have done is sort of say, hey, you filed this really interesting request in this city.
[37:48.250 --> 37:50.710]  I think it would be really amazing to file that in another city.
[37:50.710 --> 37:51.870]  And so we want to make that easier.
[37:52.430 --> 37:53.410]  And then analysis.
[37:53.790 --> 37:59.630]  I mean, I think FOIA is a wonderful tool, and I've become obsessed with it over the past four years.
[37:59.630 --> 38:02.530]  But to me it's only interesting because of what you can do with it.
[38:02.970 --> 38:10.290]  The FOIA law itself, no offense to any wonderful FOIA lawyers in the audience, doesn't really interest me beyond how it gets me the documents I want.
[38:10.530 --> 38:18.510]  So we're really looking at ways to help our users unearth interesting documents and share those with the world and then analyze them.
[38:18.510 --> 38:24.250]  So when you get a 700-page or a 7,000-page document, make it easier for people to understand what's in it.
[38:24.390 --> 38:31.850]  The thing that's amazing to me is when I look at the MuckRock site, there's a huge amount of material there, huge.
[38:32.530 --> 38:35.750]  And most of it hasn't been examined very carefully by anybody.
[38:35.750 --> 38:40.650]  I think it would benefit from a better search engine and better availability of the materials.
[38:40.850 --> 38:42.810]  So Mike has his work cut out for him.
[38:42.930 --> 38:43.910]  Yeah, if you want to build it.
[38:47.610 --> 39:00.670]  Yeah, my question relates exactly to that, to the amount of documents you might receive from a request and that it is very difficult to make sense of it.
[39:00.810 --> 39:12.190]  And I got hooked up on the story you told about this crazy secret FBI room and then Mechanical Turk was used to make sense of these documents.
[39:12.190 --> 39:33.450]  and I wonder how often this happens because to me this sounds like a very weird story ethically when I think that Mechanical Turk workers who might be, I don't know, sitting in an Internet cafe in Pakistan helping us to execute our luxurious first world political rights.
[39:35.130 --> 39:41.050]  So, yeah, I'm interested in that point, how this can be made or how you see this relation.
[39:41.210 --> 39:43.490]  Well, I think that example was an extraordinary example.
[39:43.490 --> 39:48.870]  I haven't heard of that being used for any other FOIA work, although there may be reporters who have tried it, but I doubt it.
[39:49.930 --> 39:52.010]  ProPublica uses Mechanical Turk a lot on FOIA work.
[39:52.010 --> 39:52.490]  Oh, they do.
[39:52.670 --> 39:57.990]  I think that the emphasis has been on electronic digital solutions, OCRing, better data mining.
[39:58.250 --> 40:10.050]  And when I went to a National Institutes of Computer Assisted Reporting conference, there was all these reporters there working with this kind of exact problem and they were talking about some of these electronic tools that were out there and they were remarkable,
[40:10.190 --> 40:10.930]  absolutely remarkable.
[40:11.390 --> 40:16.870]  So, I think the Mechanical Turk was just an interim solution for one particular case, which was very difficult to use.
[40:17.410 --> 40:32.750]  But in the whole, I think that the idea is to persuade agencies to provide records in a more useful format, in electronic formats that they themselves use, and so it's easier for them to provide and it's easier to use them for whatever purpose you want to use them for.
[40:34.630 --> 40:35.670]  Do you have to be a U.S. citizen to file requests and do you have to be resident in the U.S.?
[40:41.230 --> 40:46.350]  No, but some states require you be a citizen of that state if you're filing a state or local request.
[40:46.690 --> 40:53.910]  There was recently a big fight over some states who have that in their law, which says you have to be a citizen of that state, residing in that state to use it.
[40:54.090 --> 40:55.690]  They had an exception for some journalists.
[40:55.870 --> 40:58.370]  There was a big fight, it went all the way up, I think, to the Supreme Court, perhaps?
[40:58.370 --> 40:59.410]  It was the Supreme Court, yes.
[40:59.410 --> 41:02.710]  And the Supreme Court said, yep, they can insist that you be a resident of that state.
[41:02.730 --> 41:05.070]  I think it was a very poor decision, but that's what it was.
[41:05.890 --> 41:09.870]  For the federal law, that may change, and people use proxies, by the way.
[41:09.930 --> 41:12.490]  It's not hard to find someone who will file a request for you in that state.
[41:12.550 --> 41:13.330]  It's just an annoyance.
[41:14.690 --> 41:16.790]  For the federal law, you can file a request.
[41:16.930 --> 41:18.390]  Anybody in the world can file a request.
[41:18.550 --> 41:26.210]  But if they think you're asking as a representative of a foreign government or you're a fugitive, they will refuse your request.
[41:26.390 --> 41:34.610]  And you may have to prove that you're not a fugitive or a foreign intelligence person, foreign government agent representative.
[41:34.830 --> 41:36.950]  But those are few and far between.
[41:37.130 --> 41:42.010]  Generally, the agencies do respond to requests from non-citizens and people in other places.
[41:43.230 --> 41:43.670]  Yeah.
[41:44.150 --> 41:51.370]  I mean, one of the big things we've, at Muck Rock, been doing over the past two, three years is building a proxy network.
[41:51.990 --> 41:57.210]  Because, like, Virginia and Tennessee are very much against outsiders interloping in their affairs.
[41:58.310 --> 42:06.930]  But, you know, if they throw up red tape, you can always find more red tape to throw back at them, and they usually back down because they want to get home and watch Jeopardy.
[42:06.930 --> 42:14.590]  I know we're going to talk about details of how to strategize with FOIA later, but I want to mention one thing that's very interesting.
[42:14.750 --> 42:25.190]  And Kel McClanahan mentioned this before as well, has mentioned this in the past, is that when an agency comes back and redacts a whole bunch of stuff and says non-responsive, that means they don't want to provide a reason they don't want to give it.
[42:25.250 --> 42:27.070]  They just think it's not really relevant to your request.
[42:27.190 --> 42:30.130]  But they took the time to black it out within the pages they're giving you.
[42:30.130 --> 42:36.390]  People have gone back and asked for all the non-responsive material, and that works to... serves to get you everything you want.
[42:36.850 --> 42:40.110]  So there are strategies you can use to get around some of the agency hurdles.
[42:40.530 --> 42:40.650]  Yeah.
[42:42.590 --> 42:44.130]  Just one little quick plug.
[42:44.270 --> 42:57.990]  We have... MuckRock has an API that nobody's used besides us, and if anybody's interested in mass downloads or playing with a huge FOIA data set or just agency data set, get in touch with us and it's free, and you don't even have to have an account to use it.
[42:57.990 --> 42:59.670]  That should be on your slides.
[43:00.250 --> 43:01.110]  It should be.
[43:04.130 --> 43:18.750]  So I was wondering if there are categories of responses that designate the unavailability of documents, and specifically do they have to tell you that something exists or not, if you're asking for a vague piece of information?
[43:18.950 --> 43:19.930]  Well, that's a good question.
[43:20.070 --> 43:32.570]  A lot of times the thing that keeps people from asking for certain records is they don't know it exists and the agency isn't necessarily inclined to make a proactive effort to let people know about that data or what format it exists or what records exist.
[43:32.810 --> 43:35.450]  The FBI has something interesting called special locate.
[43:35.590 --> 43:42.310]  If they can't find a file in their system, and they have lots and lots of files, so there's things they can't find sometimes, they come back and they say they've put it on special locate.
[43:42.510 --> 43:46.230]  Someone once asked for a list of all the special locate files, and the FBI said they had no such record.
[43:46.230 --> 43:47.810]  So I don't quite understand that.
[43:48.390 --> 43:54.130]  But I don't know if Mike has anything to add to that.
[43:54.890 --> 43:55.790]  Sorry, I missed the question.
[43:57.310 --> 44:02.510]  I think that it's hard to ask the agency whether it has records or not.
[44:02.730 --> 44:11.330]  You can ask them whether they have records or not on a certain subject, but they will basically decline to answer questions because that's not what the purpose of the law is, and they're very picky about that.
[44:11.930 --> 44:14.790]  Yeah, I would just say there's so many resources.
[44:15.310 --> 44:18.690]  Government Attic, looking through, they have FOIA logs for so many agencies.
[44:19.390 --> 44:22.450]  Muck Rock has almost half a million pages at this point.
[44:23.010 --> 44:41.210]  Document Cloud is another website, and sometimes before I file a request, I just search on there and I look for what forms agencies use, and I find something that's related or maybe the cousin of the document I want and points to it or reading sort of regulatory filings is a really good way of sort of cornering them and saying,
[44:41.330 --> 44:43.030]  oh, we don't have any reports on this.
[44:43.150 --> 44:46.630]  And I say, well, by Congress, Congress mandates that you have a report on this.
[44:46.730 --> 44:48.910]  And then they'll go back and like, oh, yeah, we do.
[44:49.070 --> 44:57.450]  The agency FOIA officers would like us to probably say that each agency in the federal government has a FOIA public liaison whose job is to answer questions of this sort.
[44:57.490 --> 45:00.990]  And you can call them up and you can say, I'm interested in asking for something along these lines.
[45:01.110 --> 45:02.450]  Do you guys have this kind of thing?
[45:02.570 --> 45:03.650]  And, you know, it can't hurt.
[45:03.830 --> 45:04.490]  Sometimes it can...
[45:05.050 --> 45:07.790]  Most of the time it's useful to ask that kind of a question if you can.
[45:09.910 --> 45:13.370]  Have you ever had any luck getting information from the NYPD?
[45:15.830 --> 45:16.310]  We...
[45:16.790 --> 45:18.230]  Yeah, we've gotten...
[45:18.230 --> 45:21.190]  We recently got their FOIA guide after they claimed...
[45:21.190 --> 45:21.850]  Is Sean in the room?
[45:23.590 --> 45:25.970]  So, yeah, we've filed a lot with NYPD.
[45:26.210 --> 45:26.910]  They are...
[45:26.910 --> 45:33.810]  Police departments, when you're talking local level, police departments are pretty much the worst as far as transparency goes.
[45:33.810 --> 45:36.570]  They're great in a lot of ways, but they're the worst in transparency.
[45:38.370 --> 45:44.030]  And NYPD is the worst of the worst when it comes to transparency in that respect.
[45:44.830 --> 45:46.690]  Tell them about the FOIA guide that you mentioned.
[45:46.690 --> 45:51.790]  Yeah, but we filed a request for their FOIA guide because they just weren't giving us anything.
[45:51.970 --> 45:56.030]  And so we said, okay, help us understand how you're not able to do your job.
[45:56.610 --> 45:58.690]  And they said, well, we don't have a FOIA guide.
[45:58.850 --> 46:01.770]  And then another request got their FOIA patrol...
[46:01.770 --> 46:05.870]  Or their patrolman's guidebook where they actually somehow...
[46:05.870 --> 46:06.830]  I think they had...
[46:06.830 --> 46:08.350]  Somebody else had sued and gotten it.
[46:08.450 --> 46:12.850]  And then we filed a request for an updated one and pointed out that they had released the old one.
[46:12.950 --> 46:16.510]  And then the updated one, it had their FOIA guide in the middle of this other guide.
[46:18.430 --> 46:23.190]  And one of the requests we filed was a lot of records retention schedules.
[46:23.350 --> 46:26.610]  Each state and a lot of agencies have a records retention schedule.
[46:27.250 --> 46:29.690]  Which says, these are the documents we have.
[46:29.830 --> 46:31.310]  These are who's in charge of them.
[46:31.470 --> 46:33.250]  These are how long we have to keep them all.
[46:33.430 --> 46:34.790]  And those are a great resource.
[46:34.790 --> 46:37.170]  Because then when an agency says, we don't have X.
[46:37.250 --> 46:40.430]  We say, well, your records retention schedule says you have X.
[46:40.910 --> 46:42.810]  It says you have to keep it for six years.
[46:42.990 --> 46:44.770]  So I want six years worth of X.
[46:45.770 --> 46:50.010]  And that has been very helpful in getting NYPD to slowly push back.
[46:50.490 --> 46:57.550]  But there's a lot of lawyers who are very happy to discuss pro bono suing NYPD just because they have such a terrible record.
[46:58.150 --> 47:09.730]  But each agency that we've filed with has a page on our website, and so you can see where we've been successful, where we haven't been successful.
[47:10.150 --> 47:25.110]  But I think starting with the records retention schedule, starting with the FOIA guide, it was a really amazing document we got that kind of detailed every single type of document we had, and they gave us a lot more help in getting anything out of them.
[47:25.250 --> 47:40.870]  Yeah, the records retention schedule, I can't stress how valuable, how golden that is as a tool to figure out what to ask for, because it gives you the entire records set of the agency in general categories, sometimes quite detailed, though, in how long they keep it and where it is and who administers it.
[47:40.870 --> 47:50.470]  In fact, the National Archives quietly, about a year ago, I guess, they just published online the records retention schedules going back decades of all the federal agencies.
[47:50.850 --> 47:55.210]  And it's really a roadmap to the entire record-keeping system, and it's quite useful as a guide.
[47:56.230 --> 48:02.490]  NYPD is interesting also, and we can get on to the next question on this, but they created their own fake classification system.
[48:02.490 --> 48:07.210]  They hired a bunch of ex-CIA people, and the CIA people are like, you know what we miss about the federal government?
[48:07.870 --> 48:08.690]  Classified documents.
[48:08.970 --> 48:10.850]  And so they made up, like, this stamp.
[48:10.990 --> 48:13.550]  They just bought a stamp that said Secret and started stamping stuff.
[48:13.750 --> 48:15.750]  There was no legal backing behind this.
[48:15.750 --> 48:20.050]  There's no state classification system, and they just started classifying stuff.
[48:20.330 --> 48:26.610]  And it was very frustrating and amusing when they started saying, oh, you can't, we can't release that, it's class...
[48:26.610 --> 48:27.630]  What are you talking about?
[48:27.710 --> 48:28.950]  That's not a thing for you.
[48:29.750 --> 48:30.870]  So you gotta be careful.
[48:31.150 --> 48:34.790]  But then getting documentation on how they just made this process up was pretty amusing.
[48:36.550 --> 48:45.390]  So thanks to the Snowden leaks, we have a lot of classified records, a lot of detailed information on these classified programs that I assume they probably wouldn't have released to me under FOIA.
[48:46.230 --> 48:52.230]  But I'm interested if there are ways to seek, like, techniques for seeking unclassified records or footholds in those documents.
[48:52.530 --> 48:54.310]  Yeah, that's a good question.
[48:54.490 --> 48:58.570]  So I think they won't talk about something like the drone program.
[48:58.570 --> 48:59.650]  They wouldn't talk about.
[48:59.890 --> 49:09.490]  And when they don't, when the administration doesn't officially acknowledge something, it's very, very difficult to get something out of there, unless you can prove unofficial publicly acknowledged this program.
[49:09.730 --> 49:27.650]  But once they started, once they spoke out publicly about the drone program, once they created IC on the record, is a Tumblr account that the intelligence community runs, and now that they've started publicly talking about this, that means something was declassified.
[49:27.650 --> 49:38.170]  And using that, reading IC on the record very closely, and looking at what they've released previously, the EFF has done a really good job of suing them continually for documents.
[49:38.630 --> 49:46.270]  That kind of opens a window, because when they start talking about these programs publicly, that means that there's at least some material that's been declassified.
[49:46.270 --> 49:57.930]  So the Snowden leaks are a very useful guidebook, but if you want to file FOIA requests and get some traction, I would point to what they've released and use that as your starting inroads.
[49:58.110 --> 50:09.170]  Sometimes it's good to look at the historical record, and each of the agencies has published, intelligence agencies, for example, has published hundreds of historical documents describing what they did.
[50:09.170 --> 50:14.110]  And NSA, for example, has been quite good, as opposed to others who we won't mention haven't been very good.
[50:14.310 --> 50:25.230]  But NSA has been excellent in releasing some of these historical documents, which don't provide viewpoint on what the current situation is, but they give you a good window on what happened before, which is often helpful.
[50:25.850 --> 50:29.590]  So I think we have time for one more quick question, and please come to the workshops.
[50:29.590 --> 50:32.570]  I have two quick ones.
[50:32.710 --> 50:38.990]  One is about NYPD at Wall Street protest.
[50:39.290 --> 50:43.970]  There's a big truck there, Turco, whatever it's called, surveilling everyone there.
[50:44.070 --> 50:45.750]  Have any of those records been made available?
[50:45.910 --> 50:54.830]  And then you made a reference to having been harassed, threatened with lawsuits, and some sort of Beyonce reference.
[50:54.830 --> 50:56.950]  I wonder if you could clarify that.
[50:56.950 --> 51:00.130]  Yeah, so there's been a lot of good lawsuits briefly.
[51:00.790 --> 51:05.150]  We've gotten some Occupy Seattle documents, or our users have.
[51:05.630 --> 51:11.290]  And there's been a lot of lawsuits against NYPD for Occupy and Wall Street documents.
[51:11.490 --> 51:13.390]  So yes, there's been some stuff released.
[51:13.390 --> 51:14.770]  I think a lot of stuff released.
[51:15.130 --> 51:17.750]  I think there's probably a lot more stuff that hasn't been released.
[51:17.950 --> 51:20.890]  But a lot of that had to be sued over.
[51:21.670 --> 51:29.610]  And as far as Beyonce, so when Obama was inaugurated for the second time, the second inauguration, Beyonce performed.
[51:29.670 --> 51:33.790]  And we filed a request for her performance materials.
[51:34.150 --> 51:38.370]  So there was the big lip-syncing controversy where...
[51:38.370 --> 51:43.790]  And we said, well, if it was lip-synced, that means there had to have been recording that was done by the Marine Band, which is a U.S. agency.
[51:44.230 --> 51:49.250]  And so we got a bunch of tracks from the Marine Corps Band, not actually including Beyonce.
[51:50.270 --> 51:54.290]  So a lot of... Beyonce apparently is not subject to FOIA in any capacity.
[51:56.210 --> 51:58.190]  And which was weird, because I kept reading.
[51:58.310 --> 51:59.550]  I'm like, why aren't they giving it?
[51:59.570 --> 52:01.150]  It was recorded by the Marine Corps Band.
[52:01.270 --> 52:04.190]  But they said, no, but we'll give you these other documents.
[52:04.550 --> 52:08.550]  But if you post them, it was a score composed by John Williams.
[52:08.550 --> 52:15.430]  And the music was performed by the Marines, but the musical arrangement was under copyright.
[52:15.630 --> 52:18.370]  And they said, we'll give it to you, and you can listen to it all you want.
[52:18.590 --> 52:23.030]  But if you post this on your website, the John Williams estate will likely sue you out of business.
[52:23.270 --> 52:24.550]  Or not estate, since he's alive.
[52:24.850 --> 52:25.150]  But John...
[52:25.150 --> 52:25.670]  Thank you.
[52:25.710 --> 52:26.730]  Thank you all very much.
[52:27.050 --> 52:27.490]  And...
[52:31.190 --> 52:33.710]  ...are probably going to be on the sixth floor.
[52:34.010 --> 52:39.930]  Not in the U room, but check the sign, is the bottom line.
[52:39.930 --> 52:41.210]  So, the foyer workshops...
[52:41.210 --> 52:41.490]  Oh.
[52:41.490 --> 52:41.590]  Yeah.
[52:41.810 --> 52:41.890]  Yeah.