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March 30, 2006 | More DOJ Subpoenas
The Justice Department made a bit of a splash in January, when Google's opposition to a Justice Department subpoena for its entire index and months of user search queries became public. Now, according to documents unearthed via FOIA by InformationWeek, the feds issued subpoenas to at least 34 companies, ranging from Verizon to Symantec.
Google won its battle eventually, when a judge forced the company to turn over just a wee bit of information.
The Justice Department issued that subpoena, and AOL, Yahoo and MSN soon copped to having been served themselves -- though none fought the subpoena in court. The subpoenas are part of a long running battle by the DOJ to have the Child Online Privacy Act okayed by judges. (The 1998 bill, which was immediately deemed unconstitutional by the courts, mandates that commercial providers of material deemed harmful to minors have to find some method, such as credit card verification, to keep minors off their sites)
Specifically, the DOJ is trying to prove that filters don't work well to protect kids and it turns out that it didn't just want info from search engines. According to InformationWeek's Thomas Claburn:
[T]he Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued to subpoenas to a broad range of companies that includes AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon.Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment because the litigation is ongoing. He also declined to comment on the utility of the information gathered by the government.
The documents presented to InformationWeek reveal that some companies did object to the government's demands. In an E-mail sent to the Department of Justice last July, Fernando Laguarda, an attorney representing Cablevision Systems Corp., characterized some of what the government was asking for as "overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome. [...]
The bulk of the subpoenas were directed at Internet service providers and makers of content filtering software. The effectiveness of filtering technology is a critical issue in the COPA case. If the Department of Justice can prove that filters fail to shield minors from explicit material online, COPA may well be reinstated.
Highlights of the subpoenas, as well as a .zip file of all 54 documents can be found here. (Hat Tip to Richard M. Smith for the last bit of info.)
Posted by Ryan Singel at 12:07 PM | TrackBack
July 28, 2005 | Freedom From the PressA 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 12:57 PM | TrackBack
April 15, 2005 | Bush Not Emailing It InPresident Bush told a gathering of newspaper editors that he doesn't email his daughters because he's worried his email would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, according to this Reuters story.
But when it comes to e-mail, Bush said he avoids it because "everything is investigated in Washington" and as a result "we're losing a lot of history, not just with me, but with other presidents as well."As a result, he does not use this form of communication to talk to his twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara.
"I don't want you reading my personal stuff," he told the editors.
"There has got to be a certain sense of privacy. You know, you're entitled to how I make decisions. And you're entitled to ask questions, which I answer. I don't think you're entitled to be able to read my mail between my daughters and me," he said.
Now, I have no idea how this was received by his audience, but any reporter familiar with FOIA should be laughing.
First, the White House is mostly, and the President totally, exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Second, even if he were not, no FOIA officer would ever release an email sent from a government employee to his or her daughter, unless it were about giving her a no-bid contract to run nightclubs in Iraq.
You just don't get that kind of personal information with a FOIA -- it would fall under exemptions.
Frankly, it's a lame answer to the current problems with FOIAs.
(Though I would like here to publicly thank the FOIA officers at the Social Security Administration for their recent work.)
And, Bush should know, or someone should tell him, that he has more to fear from Mossad snooping on his emails than he does from the few reporters willing to go through the hassle of filing FOIAs that too often result in pages of redacted nothingness.