ICE Rejects FOIA Request Over Drones Because ICE Has Determined It's Not 'Newsworthy'
from the i-sense-a-conflict dept
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, ICE, has a bit of a reputation around these parts. When it's not dealing with serious morale problems internally, it's censoring websites on no legal basis, holding questionable panty raids and grabbing people out of movies because the MPAA doesn't like their choice in eyewear. ICE also has a history of issuing really questionable FOIA denials (for what it's worth, ICE still won't respond to that FOIA request, many months later...).Shawn Musgrave, over at Muckrock, recently sought some ICE documents via a FOIA request, specifically looking at "Operation Safeguard," a two-week program that ICE ran using Predator drones to police the US-Mexico border back in 2003. Musgrave sought ICE documents about Operation Safeguard, but ICE said that Musgrave didn't qualify as a journalist, thus limiting the power of his request (and allowing ICE to ask for more money to complete the request). Musgrave pointed to many of his published stories, but in response was told his request was still being rejected because the information is not about "current events or that would be of current interest to the public."
ICE also claimed that there was enough info out there already about Operation Safeguard, so no need to release any more:
It really does seem like operations like ICE really are just looking for excuses to reject FOIA requests these days...Having conducted my own online search ahead of submitting the FOIA request, I know foremost that studies from the Congressional Research Service refer to Operation Safeguard primarily in footnotes. Such CRS reports are conveniently posted on the Federation of American Scientists website.
What’s more, Senator Cantwell pressed for drones along the northern border in 2006 by vaguely citing Operation Safeguard’s findings.
But the Center for International Policy came to the most critical finding of all in surveying domestic drones in April 2013: “Unfortunately, Congress never reviewed the results of Operation Safeguard pilot project.”
Such a bounty is enviable, but is no substitute for the documents themselves. And while ICE may not see much news value in the origins of a program currently under intense scrutiny, someone somewhere just might.
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Filed Under: dhs, drones, exemptions, foia, ice, newsworthy, operation safeguard
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Translated
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Everything you have ever done, everything you are doing, everything you will ever do, will always be of current interest to the public.
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Message to the ICE
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Re: Translated
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Re: Message to the ICE
Oh yeah? You and whose army?
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Re:
I see right through them. Unfortunately, a lot of people prefer to wear blinders.
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Transparency, my big butt!
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I take then that FOIA transperancy laws continue to have no teeth.
Isn't it time that we start acknowledging that the FOIA system we have serves as a veneer, to give the illusion that we have a FOIA system that actually works to ensure agency transparency?
When the people cannot see what the state is doing, the state is no longer accountable to the people. Basic Poli-sci.
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Not too mention every XYZ bunch runs on our taxes and most of their existence is spent in justifying their existence - via any means necessary. What's the condition of the state e of education in this country again? Right.
Fuck you, ICE, answer the request. It's high time you over-armed and over-equipped fascists start abiding by the law of the land. Look it up.
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We had it coming.
James Madison's observation of abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments
The corruption of power
We saw all these things coming, but our intellect and hubris were no match for the bestial nature that drives us to apathy and shortsightedness.
We had it coming.
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Re: We had it coming.
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The human species won't change. Only a better system will change this.
It's a problem that's definitely bigger than my brain. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem suggests we'll never run out of incidents of tragic commons and tyrannical majorities, we can only reduce them by treating specific instances, and hoping the fix affects others that would have happened.
The immediate problem with ICE rejecting FOIA requests can be fixed by implementing consequences to FOIA failures and addressing common reasons for rejection (for instance make the punishment for instances of overclassification the publication of the unredacted document, no matter how sensitive it might be to someone somewhere who regards it as sensitive.)
Not that I have any faith that this regime wants to reform FOIA and restore transparency to the people. The people with power in this regime like it the way it is, and don't care that people are miserable and angry. Such suggestions would be for the next regime.
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The Currency of Life on Earth
The actual cause of human grief is one that cannot be comprehended by most humans as the cause because the cause is universally worshipped by humans as the greatest process on earth.
When the reward is wealth, the actions that lead to that reward cannot be avoided.
All of human grief, including poverty, disease, war ... all can be laid at the feet of capital incentive.
Diseases are not cured because there is more money in selling momentary remedies that do little more than mask the symptoms by poisoning the part of the body that reacts to that disorder, while protecting the underlying disease which insures that the momentary remedies can be sold repeatedly to each sufferer who will never be rid of the malady - and in the case of contagious diseases continue to spread the diseases among friends and family, creating new paying customers.
Poverty cannot be ended because the whole system we live under demands a huge work-force be maintained at poverty level to insure their willingness to perform mindless menial tasks, essential to the profits of those with money, who own the machinery of civilization, in return for enough cash to prevent their own and their family's starvation and maintain minimal shelter from the elements.
War is the great business plan, which turns a nation's poor into willing slaves who will work tirelessly for the war effort, in the factories of the rich, for less than subsistence wages, manufacturing products paid for by public taxes, that will be destroyed over and over again, increasing the profits of the rich manifold.
The same poor will also fill the military ranks in order to earn enough money to feed their families and will willingly kill and die to steal a foreign nation's wealth and resources for the rich non-combatants back home.
The chaos of war also keeps the general public unaware of the highly lucrative criminal enterprises of the vastly wealthy that always proliferate successfully under the fog of war.
The promise of the rewards of wealth lead inexorably towards the performance of those actions that create the most return on investment, and no power on earth can sway the human race from following those paths that are proven to be profitable as long as the primary incentive for life on earth is wealth.
None of the other consequent symptoms of human malfunction can be solved until humanity's monetary addiction is cured.
Since the human race refuses to even accept the notion that money could possibly ever be any sort of a problem - except in the lack thereof - it is highly unlikely that any of humanity's social dysfunctions can ever be solved.
I'm certainly not holding my breathe. :)
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Re: The Currency of Life on Earth
An annual, automatically renewed bounty of cash, that size, collected without even the tiniest pretext to its necessity or legality, is like a monstrously huge turd that is absolutely guaranteed to attract exactly the sort of vermin that currently occupies the halls of US power.
If the US public does not actually abolish the Federal Government altogether, the next best thing would be to remove its automatic access to Tax Payer's money and make it ask for and account for in full, every nickel it gets, by law.
Of course, since the currently conquered citizens of 5-I member nation number 2, have no voice and no say in the direction their country is heading, or in the manner in which they are governed, I suppose that's just another pipe dream too.
C'est la vie, eh.
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