Quotulatiousness

October 26, 2011

Giving the government even more weasel-room on FOIA requests

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

A proposed rule change would allow the US government and its agencies to lie about the very existence of requested records in Freedom of Information Act requests:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist — even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal — part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice — would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

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