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A federal court judge has ruled that the government can hide the names of Homeland Security bureaucrats from Freedom of Information Act requesters.
Employees working on anti-terrorism projects whose names were made public might be harassed by irate citizens or targetted by terrorists, according to this ruling (.pdf) by D.C. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina.
Additionally, government employees should be shielded from reporters with phones, according to the judge.
The documents released by the defendants will likely be published on the Internet once released to the plaintiff, and it is likely that readers of the plaintiff’s reports, including media reporters as well as private individuals, would seek out the employees mentioned for further information.
The ruling concerns a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which is seeking government records about secret transfers of airline records to the Transportation Security Administration.
This might be a smart rule if you were talking about employees working in Iraq's bureaucracy and its a smart rule for protecting the names of law enforcement agents.
But this is not Iraq. It is highly doubtful that Al Qaeda is going to start targetting mid-level government workers who make decisions about where to deploy the latest x-ray technology.
And it's not as if we've had a spate of assassinations of officials whose names have appeared in the press or testify to Congress.
Knowing the name of the high-ranking bureaucrat who made decisions about making end-runs around Federal law is useful for transparent governance.
I want to know, and the public should too, if the guy who approved a secret data transfer later got a big bonus or a promotion.
Granted maybe the public doesn't need to know the name of every low level employee, but in this case, I think it would be at the very least useful to know the name of the following person (taken from a request I filed that was very similiar to EPIC's).
Posted by Ryan Singel at July 28, 2005 12:57 PM
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