Vote for the Worst FOIA Failure
Biggest FOIA Fail?
- Bay of Pigs History (26%, 68 Votes)
- Snowden Damage (25%, 67 Votes)
- Kennedy FBI File (24%, 63 Votes)
- Secret Surveillance (13%, 33 Votes)
- FBI Drones (7%, 19 Votes)
- Awlaki Memo (5%, 14 Votes)
Total Voters: 264
Loading ...Democracy depends on educated citizens who know what their government is doing. The Freedom of Information Act is the federal law that empowers citizens to get information about the government, from the government. Yet many agencies routinely ignore the law, and FOIA requests often fall into a bureaucratic black hole.
Every year, several hundred frustrated requesters sue in federal court for the documents they have been blocked from receiving. We’ve asked six prominent journalists, open government advocates, and lawyers to highlight the FOIA failure they feel represents the most egregious example of improper withholding under FOIA.
Now we want you to vote on the worst of the worst!
We closed voting at 10 this morning (3/20/15). The vote counts reflected in the poll at right are the final counts. They include votes left on a companion poll by Android users who had trouble with the one on this page. We’ll be posting more on the results soon.
National Freedom of Information Day is Friday, and all of next week is Sunshine Week. These events honoring the importance of transparency and open government to our democracy are great pegs for stories about the Freedom of Information Act, the law that gives the public the right to obtain public documents.
Here’s a couple of ideas from TRAC’s FOIA Project.
We have added 6 decisions of a procedural or substantive nature filed between February 22, 2015 and February 28, 2015. These are associated with 5 FOIA cases pending in federal district court. read more…
We have added 46 documents from 12 FOIA cases filed between February 22, 2015 and February 28, 2015. read more…
Harry Hammitt has joined the FOIA Project team
The results of an extensive new effort by the FOIA Project to annotate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits are beginning to show up on FOIAproject.org.
Harry Hammitt, a widely recognized expert on FOIA and the publisher of Access Reports, has joined the FOIA Project team. He has begun to tag cases by the specific issues involved and to add case and opinion summaries to the Project’s comprehensive collection of every court case in which a federal agency has been sued under FOIA since Oct. 1, 1996. That’s more than 27,000 court documents from more than 8,500 federal district and circuit FOIA court cases.
We have added 13 decisions of a procedural or substantive nature filed between February 15, 2015 and February 21, 2015. These are associated with 13 FOIA cases pending in federal district court. read more…
We have added 26 documents from 5 FOIA cases filed between February 15, 2015 and February 21, 2015. read more…
We have added 11 decisions of a procedural or substantive nature filed between February 1, 2015 and February 7, 2015. These are associated with 10 FOIA cases pending in federal district court. read more…
We have added 7 decisions of a procedural or substantive nature filed between February 8, 2015 and February 15, 2015. These are associated with 7 FOIA cases pending in federal district court. read more…
We have added 117 documents from 14 FOIA cases filed between February 8, 2015 and February 14, 2015. read more…
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