Defense Department Screws Over FOIA Requester Repeatedly, Blames Him For 'Breaking' The FOIA Process
from the the-other-FOIA-terrorist dept
The FOIA system is broken. The administration pays lip service to transparency while aggressively deploying exemptions. Agencies routinely complain about FOIA response budgets and staffing levels, yet no one seems motivated to fix this perennial issue. FOIA reform efforts moving forward with bipartisan support are repeatedly killed after receiving pushback from the White House.
Then there's this: a single requester is being blamed for a backlog of FOIA requests at an agency that's never underfunded -- the Department of Defense.
According to its "Chief Freedom of Information Act Officer Report," Nick Turse is the US citizen who has managed to bring the slowly-moving DoD FOIA machinery to a complete halt.
The report, for instance, laments that “despite their best efforts to provide helpful details, great customer service and efficient responses,” some DOD components were “still overwhelmed by one or two requesters who try to monopolize the system by filing a large number of requests or submitting disparate requests in groups which require a great deal of administrative time to adjudicate.” The study went on to call out:If this seems like a lot of requests from one person, it isn't. This is the way the system works. Agencies routinely delay responses (Turse has been waiting more than four years for responses to some of his FOIA requests) when not redacting them to uselessness, forcing requesters to make multiple requests for the same information or related documents, in hopes of actually receiving some information in response to their information requests.
"[o]ne particular requester [who] singlehandedly filed three requests with SOUTHCOM [U.S. Southern Command], 53 requests with AFRICOM, 35 requests with SOCOM [Special Operations Command] and 217 requests with OSD/JS [Office of the Secretary of Defense/ Joint Staff] for a total of 308 cases this fiscal year alone. For AFRICOM, this represents 43 percent of their entire incoming requests for the year and 12 percent for SOCOM. This requester holds over 13 percent of the currently open and pending requests with OSD/JS and over the past two years has filed 415 initial requests and 54 appeals with this one component."
The percentages may seem high, but AFRICOM isn't exactly a popular FOIA target. This focus relates to Turse's ongoing investigative reporting on abusive behavior by US soldiers stationed at bases in Africa. What he has managed to uncover so far isn't pretty, and his reporting on it has won him no friends in the Pentagon.
I made, for instance, a couple hundred attempts to contact the command for information, comment, and clarification while working on an article about criminal acts and untoward behavior by U.S. troops in Africa — sexual assaults, the shooting of an officer by an enlisted man, drug use, sex with prostitutes, a bar crawl that ended in six deaths. Dozens of phone calls to public affairs personnel went unanswered, countless email requests were ignored.That the DoD finds itself swamped by Turse's requests is its own fault. Had it simply returned the requested documents in a timely fashion, it would not have this Turse-centric backlog to complain about. Now, it's using an official report to portray the FOIA process as unnecessarily burdensome on the government and prone to abuse by tenacious citizens. This portrayal is not only false, but it obscures the fact that the DoD still controls every interaction with FOIA requesters. It has held Turse at arms length for several years and now it won't even answer his emails and phone calls regarding requests it has yet to answer. But in its report, it complains that it's Turse that has broken the system, rather than this being the FOIA system's natural state: that it only works as well as responding agencies want it to.
At one point, I called [DoD Chief of Media Engagement Benjamin] Benson, the AFRICOM media chief, 32 times on a single business day from a phone line that identified me by name. He never picked up. I then placed a call from another number so that my identity would be concealed. He answered on the second ring. Once I identified myself, he claimed the connection was bad and the line went dead.
[...]
Today, when I write to the current AFRICOM public affairs chief, Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, I receive similar treatment. I often get a return receipt back that tells me my email to him “was deleted without being read.” This happened to me, for example, on Thursday, September 10, 2015; Friday, October 2, 2015; Tuesday, October 6, 2015; Thursday, November 5, 2015; Friday, November 27, 2015; Wednesday, February 10, 2016 … you get the picture.
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Filed Under: africom, defense department, dod, foia, nick turse
Reader Comments
The First Word
“All that said, without spending a bunch of hours dredging up reports and comparing them (and making my own FOIA requests) I'm pretty sure there were just a bunch of folks that didn't want to deal with this guy. If someone's out to 'get you' and is pestering you with requests, I'd expect a logical person to have exercised their first strike capability and say, "Hey, this guy's a problem" before it gets down to, "Just don't answer his calls." We talk a lot about perceptions and stuff in the DoD, down to the point of young folks getting hemmed-up off duty for dressing too ratchet out at the club despite the fact that they're off duty and on their time. I'm pretty sure this is someone that's just violated a chunk of integrity and did more damage to the Public Trust than would've happened if he just answered the dang phone calls
thanks for listening.
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Absolutely pathetic.
Professionalism doesn't exist in the government apparently.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on May 4th, 2016 @ 4:42pm
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Who is Sam you might ask, just search for Samuel Falvo.
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Shooting your own foot
It's no wonder they've been stonewalling him so much, that's pretty much the only thing they've got left at this point.
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Sorry, but that is a lot of requests from a single person. What it looks like from over here is someone fishing for information, and hoping to get different versions of redacted documents to try to put together some grand conspiracy - which is pretty much what he confirms.
32 phone calls in a single day? Obsessed much?
You have to consider the hard numbers. 415 initial requests and 54 appeals. Let's see. If each one generates even 100 responsive documents, and each one much be redacted and reviewed before being given out, you are looking at 40,000 to 50,000 pages. Now if each page takes 15 minutes to locate, review, and put in the package (and likely takes longer) you have 10,000 man hours of work. If you wanted to accomplish this on a reasonable scale (say 3 months) you would need 20-25 people working full time just to answer this guys requests. That doesn't consider management of the people, the space to put them in, and any legal verification that would have to be made to get the documents out the door.
Do you honestly think anyone deserves to have a personal staff of 20 or 30 people looking for his conspiracy?
FOIA requests really should work on a much more specific scale. Too large a scale, and the system fails, plain and simple, and denies other more sane requests the time to get processed.
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32 unanswered calls in a single day? Evasive much?
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Answer: NOPE. He's not working for the reporter. The Media guy has a job to do and it's not answering this guys endless questions over everyone else.
it's the perfect example of why this one guy is pretty much breaking the system. When it gets to the point that they are screening calls to avoid dealing with his endless demands, then yeah, the system is broken. Don't blame the victim, blame the abuser!
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urine idjit, kindly leave the gene pool...
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Yeah, it's not like it was his job or anything.
Oh, wait...
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By itself, this does not meet the standard of stalking in any state in the US.
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It does if Whatever says it does!
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As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
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Great quote.
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1871 employees per request
So the entire defense department (presumably including the NSA) receives 716 FOIA requests per fiscal year? And this has totally overwhelmed the DoD's 1.34 million employees? With 1,871 employees to process each request?
I always heard government employees were lazy, but even I'm surprised.
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Re: 1871 employees per request
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Like trying to stall FOIA requests.
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Re: Re: 1871 employees per request
But it seems realistic to think that DoD could find four full-time persons, out of all those 1.34 million, to spend a WHOLE DAY answering each FOIA request. Wouldn't you think?
I mean, just think about it: 240 work days per year per person x 4 persons is 960 requests per year. More than enough for this overwhelming massive surging flood of FOIA requests. So DoD's inability to find four persons to deal with FOIA requests is pretty indicative of their priorities.
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Re: 1871 employees per request
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All that said, without spending a bunch of hours dredging up reports and comparing them (and making my own FOIA requests) I'm pretty sure there were just a bunch of folks that didn't want to deal with this guy. If someone's out to 'get you' and is pestering you with requests, I'd expect a logical person to have exercised their first strike capability and say, "Hey, this guy's a problem" before it gets down to, "Just don't answer his calls." We talk a lot about perceptions and stuff in the DoD, down to the point of young folks getting hemmed-up off duty for dressing too ratchet out at the club despite the fact that they're off duty and on their time. I'm pretty sure this is someone that's just violated a chunk of integrity and did more damage to the Public Trust than would've happened if he just answered the dang phone calls
thanks for listening.
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If spotted, you can very much expect that nobody wanted to deal with him.
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Apparently DOE's FOIA office even had a special category for Mr. Hansen's numerous requests - but they never stonewalled the way I see various agencies doing these days, nor did they ever claim that he 'broke' the FOIA process.
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Way too nebulous
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Yet you never see him describe antidirt in the same way despite being far less cordial and much more harassing. Hm.
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Who's Da Boss?
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Pro-DoD - There are lots of great guys in DoD FOIA - people who care about the work, recognize its significance, and get the job done. I have nothing but respect for Jim Hogan. I have known countless individuals where the only thing stopping FOIA requests is limits on manpower and resources - you can't requisition additional hours in the day to get everything done.
Anti-DoD - DoD is enormous. For FOIA purposes, that means it's decentralized. As such, you get a wide variety in the quality of people doing FOIA, but, once you find the right people, you know it's being handled by people who understand the documents, culture, etc. When the FOIA guy knows the subject matter expert personally, and sees him on a daily basis, there's a good chance the FOIA guy will get what he needs to do his job (if there's an uncooperative subject matter expert, there's not much the FOIA guy can do).
That all wouldn't be a problem, except that FOIA is resourced at the local level. And, as you can imagine, most military brass doesn't have FOIA as a priority: it doesn't kill sumbitches; it doesn't keep sumbitches from killing our sumbitches; and it provides yet another avenue for anti-military assholes to harass our boys. Now, those are all good priorities for military leadership - you want brass that cares about protecting our boys, winning our wars. But it means FOIA gets neglected. Often, FOIA becomes yet another collateral duty for the secretary/coffee boy/office bitch, often times explicitly defined as 10% of their duties - so about 45 minutes a day, and rarely the aspect of job performance that gets any attention on their performance review. And that's before we even touch on offices getting necessary supplies - there were times when we had to wait an entire month for printer toner to be in the budget. To summarize: FOIA is often underfunded and undermanned (training is a joke), and there are a few too many FOIA guys who just don't care.
And avoiding the requester like that is simply inexcusable (assuming we're getting the full story, which is a reasonable assumption).
Pro-Turse - Nick's a good guy, and does important work. A lot of what he looks into needs to be looked into. And, at the end of the day, he's a guy doing his job, just like everyone else.
Anti-Turse - And here's where you expect me to rip into him. I'll admit, his requests are no fun - they tend to be broad, sensitive, and he's almost always asking for much more than he really wants. But, in my experience, he's been eminently reasonable when contacted to clarify or narrow the scope. But then we get to the general problem of requester negotiation.
An ideal sort of negotiation:
Q: I want the moon.
A: That's effectively impossible. It would require a century of dedicated engineers to determine if there's even a feasible approach, and trillions of dollars and decades of research developing and testing prototypes before we can even attempt such a mission.
Q: How about some moon rocks?
A: That's an intensive and cost-prohibitive task. It will take at least 5 years and billions of dollars.
Q: Well, how about some space dust?
A: ... It will take a couple years to prep and deploy a collector unit to low-earth orbit.
For context, this is a less-than-ideal negotiation:
Q: I want the moon.
A: That's effectively imp-
Q: FUCK YOU I'M SUING!
You get too many of the latter and you get gun shy. Especially when the risk analysis shows that most requesters are unlikely to sue, and most who do sue tend to wait longer if you simply don't respond. The risk appetite leans toward "If they're going to sue, let them sue." And, to top it off, few generals would impede an otherwise excellent soldier's career because he has less than stellar FOIA performance.
So how do we fix this? Well, that's the million dollar question, now isn't it?
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