FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For
more information contact:
Barbara Elias, Director of the Freedom of Information Project
Thomas Blanton, Archive Director
Meredith Fuchs, Archive General Counsel
202/994-7000
Washington
D.C., March 12, 2006 - The oldest Freedom of Information
requests still pending in the U.S. government date back to 1989,
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to the Freedom
of Information Audit released today by the National
Security Archive at the George Washington University.
In April 2005, the Archive filed FOIA requests for copies of
the "10 oldest open or pending" FOIA requests at 64
federal agencies, which together handle more than 97% of all FOIA
requests. The Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for four
of the ten oldest requests even though the CIA only handles .08%
of the Freedom of Information Act requests received by the federal
government. Other agencies that have requests more than 15 years
old include the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, the
National Archives and Records Administration, and the Department
of Energy.
The oldest pending request was submitted to the Department of
Defense by a graduate student at the University of Southern California
in March 1989 asking for records on the U.S. "freedom of
navigation" program. So much time has elapsed that the requester,
William Aceves, is now a tenured professor at California Western
School of Law.
This National Security Archive Audit was conducted in order to
investigate whether federal agencies had fixed the backlog problem
identified by the Archive in a previous
2003 FOIA Audit. Comparing the data from the two
studies reveals that many of the oldest pending requests identified
in 2003 are still pending in 2005 and most federal agencies are
maintaining the same or even more sizable backlogs in 2005 than
in previous years.
One request exposed in the Archive's 2003 Audit as one of the
oldest in the federal government was an October 1989 request to
the CIA submitted by Lancaster Pennsylvania's Intelligencer
Journal. The CIA responded to the request almost fifteen
years later in August 2004, saying the agency had not found
any documents and was closing the request.
The single oldest request in 2003 was a 1987 letter from San
Francisco Chronicle reporter Seth Rosenfeld on FBI activities
in Berkeley, California, was not provided by the FBI in their
2005 list of oldest pending requests, indicating that the FBI
now considers this request closed. According to Mr. Rosenfeld,
the November 1987 request, which clarified an earlier 1981 FOIA
request he submitted to the FBI, has not yet completely been fulfilled
in 2006.
After conducting several extensive FOIA Audits, the National
Security Archive makes the following recommendations in order
to generally improve FOIA performance:
- Compliance and handling of FOIA requests should be included
as a factor in agency personnel performance reviews and there
should be a specific job classification series dedicated to
FOIA personnel.
- The new Agency Chief FOIA Officer should implement a comprehensive
FOIA tracking system and insist that agency FOIA personnel be
vigilant about tracking and systematically processing all FOIA
requests.
- Congress should require agencies to report average processing
times and provide a date range from the oldest pending request
to the youngest, in addition to median processing statistics.
- Penalties should be assigned for extraordinary (7+ year) delays,
in order to counter the current culture in FOIA offices to excessively
emphasize quantity of FOIA requests closed over the quality
of request processing. Without penalties, complex requests are
left to languish indefinitely.
- Spending on FOIA programs at federal agencies should be directly
tied to spending for public affairs offices and public relations
activities. Agencies spend significantly more money marketing
their own messages than they allocate to FOIA programs that
respond to public inquiries for information.
The National Security Archive Freedom of Information Act Audit
report - A FOIA Request Celebrates Its 17th Birthday is available
online at www.nsarchive.org.
This Freedom of Information Audit was made possible by the generous
funding of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the
HKH Foundation.