DHS's ICE Group Accused Of Lying To Court About Expense Of Complying With FOI Request

from the but-of-course dept

Thu, May 19th 2011 11:19am — Mike Masnick

Having just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request concerning documents from Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division, you can bet that it caught my attention that ICE is now being accused of lying to a court in claiming massive expenses to comply with a FOIA request for metadata on documents. After some back and forth, a court had ordered ICE to provide the specific data under the FOIA. ICE told the court that it was using a product from a company called Clearwell, but that it ran into technical and monetary hurdles, including having to spend $270,000 in upgrades, and also that it had to suspend security protocols to run the applications.

Apparently, Clearwell's competitors have been having a field day with this, using the filing by the government to bash Clearwell's product, so the company put out a blog post that claims ICE was basically lying to the court:

Neither OPLA nor any other part of ICE paid a dime for upgrades or a new server. In reality, its use of the product for this matter is covered under ICE�s existing license, and we provided an extra server and services for free to help them meet a tight deadline. . . .

In 16 working days, Clearwell was used to process a large volume of information and produce nearly 15,000 pages of Opt-Out Records . . . To help ICE meet its deadline, two Clearwell consultants worked onsite during this period � at absolutely no cost to ICE.

Apparently, it's not a good idea to use such things as an excuse when the company you're claiming was the problem has the ability to speak up itself. Of course, my request isn't for any metadata, so hopefully they can avoid having to spend $270,000 to find the few documents I requested.

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Filed Under: foia, freedom of information, homeland security, ice

27 Comments

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Beta (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 11:33am

psst
"...the company put out a blog post that claims ICE was basically lying to the court...

(I do not think that links to what you think it links to.)
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DCL, 19 May 2011 @ 11:44am

LUCY!!!
you got some s'planing to do!
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Anonymous Coward, 19 May 2011 @ 11:44am

"ice groups"?

Sounds like some seriously dope hip-hop, broceephus. Word.
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DannyB (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 11:45am

Having to suspend security protocols?
But your honor! We got hacked! If there ever were any documents responsive to the FOIA request, they no longer exist.
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Anonymous Coward, 19 May 2011 @ 11:46am

And as always the truth lays somewhere in between...
it cost SOMEONE lots of additional money, in this case the software company.
DHS had to spend some additional money on overtime, additional people, etc.

But it is good to see a group call them out on the untruths.
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DannyB (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 11:56am

Re: The truth DOES NOT always lie somewhere in between
The truth DOES NOT always lie somewhere in between.

Sometimes one extreme end is where the truth lies.

Quote I've seen by a regular poster on Groklaw:

Some people say the sun rises in the East.
Others say it rises in the West.
The truth lies probably somewhere in between.

Is the Moon made of Cheese? Or is it not?
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Chris Rhodes (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 12:01pm

Re: Re: The truth DOES NOT always lie somewhere in between
You say you should eat food.
I say you should eat rat poison.

Now, there's no need for us to be extremists, let's compromise!
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Michael Ho (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 12:11pm

Re: psst
fixed. thanks for pointing that out....
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Mike42 (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 12:15pm

Blurry line
I'm having a hard time telling criminals from the government. Which one steals you blind, lies to the court, rummages through your belongings and takes whatever they want?
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Berenerd (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 12:22pm

ICE didn't lie...
Seriously, the 270k was for their catering a dinner for them and the TSA where they watched bloopers from the past year of Naked nuns and invalids who had their house raided for naked pictures of the pope...
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Anonymous Coward, 19 May 2011 @ 12:25pm

Re: Blurry line
I'm having a hard time telling criminals from the government. Which one steals you blind, lies to the court, rummages through your belongings and takes whatever they want?

And then sexually assaults you for good measure?
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AdamBv1 (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 12:46pm

Re: Re: Re: The truth DOES NOT always lie somewhere in between
OK, as long as we get to eat our rat poison laced food together. Whats good for the goose is good for the gander right?
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CommonSense (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 12:48pm

You mean...
"hopefully they can avoid having to spend $270,000 to find the few documents I requested."

I think you mean, "hopefully they can avoid having to lie about spending $270,000 to find the few documents..."
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Anonymous Coward, 19 May 2011 @ 12:57pm

Perjury is legal when you're the government.
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NotMyRealName (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 1:17pm

rather than spend a quarter mil, would it not have been easier and far far cheaper to just say "meta data is a pain in the ass, here's everything relevant, do your own meta analysis." and back up a trailer full of reams of copies, or top pages or whatever.

granted, i only read through the top layer of links, so im not really sure what the request was actually for, but in my experience, evoking a tl;dr is effectively the same as not putting out any info at all, and they could still say they actually exceeded the terms of the request.
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Anonymous Coward, 19 May 2011 @ 1:19pm

"ICE told the court that it was using a product from a company called Clearwell, but that it ran into technical and monetary hurdles, including having to spend $270,000 in upgrades, and also that it had to suspend security protocols to run the applications. "

and why should that be anyone else's problem? When the governments job is to provide us with documents, whatever costs they encounter are their problems, not the requester.

Say I buy Internet access for $30 a month on a yearly contract. Now all of a sudden my ISP's computers crash as a result of some third party software that they use. It costs them $100,000 to fix. What, are they going to tell me that I must now pay $50 for the duration of the contract and change the terms last minute? No.

Granted, this is not the best analogy (and there are some appreciable differences here), but the point is that their internal costs are not my problem. Their job is to provide this information upon request.
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Thomas (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 1:29pm

lying..
to the courts is second nature to the federal spooks, be they DHS or the FBI or any of the others.

The days are long past when there was any honesty in branches of the government.
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freak (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 2:02pm

Re: Re: Re: Re: The truth DOES NOT always lie somewhere in between
Turns out the truth is somewhere in-between that . . .
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Togashi (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 3:14pm

Re:
I'm not entirely certain on this, but I think that might be part of the contract of the FOIA requests in the first place. Too lazy to actually find out though, since I don't intend to file one any time soon.
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Bergman (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 4:53pm

FOIA Compliance is MANDATORY
The Freedom Of Information Act requires that government agencies be prepared to comply with FOIA requests. This is a normal cost of doing business for all government agencies subject to FOIA.

ICE has basically stated that they never made preparations to comply, and that it would cost them over a quarter million dollars to enact their mandatory compliance that for some reason they hadn't done before, despite it being mandatory for them.
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TwoWords (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 5:59pm

Untruths
This is just a sham from the software company trying to blame the government for their bloatware, bad coding, costly upgrades, bad updates, etc... There is no way our intelligent intelligence organizations can and are this stupid and ignorant. Spitting, sputtering, coughing�..Oh wait for a minute I was drinking bad kool-aid again. They spin stuff like a bad out of balance washer.
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Rekrul, 19 May 2011 @ 11:20pm

So they're admitting that they can't easily pull up specific requested information from their files in a timely manner. Gee, that makes me feel so much safer about them being in charge of protecting the country...
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The eejit (profile), 19 May 2011 @ 11:47pm

Re: Untruths
They knowingly interfered wioth a possible terrorist, and incited him to commit a terrorist act on home soil (or at lkeast, try to).

Their stupidity is orders of magnitude higher than almost any other brach of US government.
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Anonymous Coward, 19 May 2011 @ 11:53pm

Re:
It costs them millions of dollars just to put two facts together. Yet, securing us requires them to put multiple tends of thousands of facts together ...
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Hephaestus (profile), 20 May 2011 @ 8:44am

Personally, I would have filed an FOIA request, for that relevant billing information, the day after they said it cost $270,000.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jun 2011 @ 8:18pm

It does not matter, you are illegal in tucson and are arrested for any reason,you will have a detainer and be arrested by ice it all has to do with stats....Janet is not the most reliable source
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jun 2011 @ 8:43pm

The dhs really is worried about future crimes.something they could be sued for.. So even you were arrested for driving on suspend. License and dhs ignored you, you might commit a more serious crime in the future dhs does not care what your arrest is for or how long you have lived here if you are here illegally, you will be arrested. The dream act really does not matter. You all should do more research on this matter. You should start at secure communities.
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