FBI Wants More Than $270,000 To Respond To FOIA Request About Booz Allen
from the pocket-change-for-a-defense-contractor,-but-for-the-rest-of-us... dept
Yes, the federal government has something of a reputation for expecting "padded bills" when it deals with defense contractors, but it would appear that the FBI is trying to do the reverse when someone decided to start investigating the FBI's relationship with giant defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (famous, among other things, for employing Ed Snowden, and for hyping up "cyberwar" for fun and (mostly) for profit).
Looking to explore Booz Allen's work with the government, the government transparency aficionados over at Muckrock asked various federal and state agencies for details of their contracts with Booz Allen (starting well before the Snowden leaks). Back in March, Muckrock asked a whole bunch of agencies for "Copies of contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton over the past 5 years" and "Any final reports generated and delivered by Booz Allen Hamilton to the agency over the past 5 years." Some agencies did respond without question, including the Air Force and the Department of Defense Education Activity.
Other agencies, however, suggested that it would cost quite a bit to get those documents. Leading the list: the FBI. They want over a quarter of a million dollars. Yes. Basically, they want $270,000:
When MuckRock asked the FBI for copies of its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton and any reports the popular consulting firm may have produced for the bureau in the last five years, a records manager responded with an estimated cost of $267,400. That price is just for the labor of finding and reviewing the documents, and doesn’t include fees for copying or placing the documents on CDs.If you've got that money to spare, please let Muckrock know. Now, the FOIA process does allow agencies to request money to cover fees, especially if it involves a lot of work/documents. However, it's also quite common, especially for issues of public interest, to do such FOIA searches and delivery for free. As you can see, in this case, there really are a lot of documents. They claim that they found approximately 95,500 -- and rather than considering this a public interest issue, the FBI has classified it as "commercial use" because (the FBI claims, bizarrely) "it seeks information to further the commercial trade, profit interests of the requester." I don't see how that's actually true. That $267,400 is actually the cost of "reviewing" all of those documents (there's another $840 for the search).
That’ll be an extra $9,540 for paper, $2,855 for CD. The total cost, therefore, would be an estimated $277,780 on paper and $271,095 on CD.
Yes, 95,500 documents is a lot. And you could see why they'd want to review the documents before releasing them, but over a quarter of a million dollars just to find out how the FBI spends taxpayer money? That seems a bit crazy.
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95,500 pieces of paper
At $1 a pen I would say that at least $95,500 will be spent on these pens alone.
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Re: 95,500 pieces of paper
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What are you? Some sort of pirate? Or a communist?
A Pirate-Communist?
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Re:
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In the Not So Popular Press
in more feudal times past a moat.
If .99 cents per month for access to everything
can reduce your readership by 90% imagine the
salutary effects of $2.91 per document.
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In a world where the NSA can store all our information....
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just more 'fee speech'...
hell, the only thing worth anything are things we spend money on, if that information was free, it was obviously worthless; now, its priceless ! ! !
obviously, 'our' (sic) gummint is getting increasingly annoyed with pesky citizens filing FOIA requests, and are slow-walking and otherwise refusing all requests simply because they can...
WHO -and what army- are going to 'force' them to follow the few pitiful laws we have left on the books for the benefit of us lowly citizens ? ? ?
NONE of 'our' (sic) leaders in the administration or kongress, that is certain...
unless/until we are in the streets waving pitchforks and torches, ain't NO ONE in power going to comply with such impertinent requests...
the *nerve*: mere citizens asking/begging for public information, *who* do they think they are, the 1% ? ? ?
seriously, SHOULDN'T all of the actions taken to conform to THE LAW on FOIA be 'built-in' to their budgets, since it is a function they 'have to' do (when they can't lie or worm out of it) ? ? ?
*BESIDES* the factoid (knowing nothing about the original law) that having FOIA requests be 'self-funding' kind of defeats the purpose of them (oh, i get it now, the old 'feature-not-a-bug' trick), i do not trust the feebs (OR ANY GUMMINT AGENCY) to NOT be lying their fat asses off in numerous ways...
there *may* be 95 000+ dox on booz, or there may be 1000 relevant dox, with 94 000+ tacked on for good measure which only tangentially name booz/etc... The They (tm) have been known to drown requesters with tons of papers so they can't find the *one* they need...
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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Commercial Interest
Well, Muckrock is in the business of FOIA requests, so every FOIA request it makes furthers its commercial trade...
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Let's hope that contract gets added in to the report, otherwise the government would have to hire another contractor to do that in an infinite recursion of contractors.
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Pay me
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