Obama: The Word 'Classified' Means Whatever We Need It To Mean

from the defining-'classified'-like-a-group-of-blind-men-describing-an-elephant dept

How do we know whether information is classified? Well, because the government tells us it is. But what does that mean? It turns out it means whatever the government wants it to mean, subject to time, place, personnel involved, etc.

Classified material handed over to movie producers by Leon Panetta? Probably not a big deal. Classified material handed over to journalists by whistleblowers? That's a prosecutin'.

No one explains this slippery approach to classification better than President Obama, who was gamely trying to answer questions about an ongoing investigation (Hillary Clinton and her famous emails) during an interview with Fox News.

“There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” the president said.

That clears everything up. Clinton sent, received and stored classified info on a private email server. This cannot be disputed. But some classified info is more equal than others. It all depends on who has it and how the current administration feels about that person.

It's also about how the current administration feels about whistleblowers. It doesn't like them. So, Clinton playing fast and loose with classified info is subject to an entirely different standard than the large number of whistleblowers the Obama administration has prosecuted over the years.

Obama, again, digs deep into his feels to provide a technical explanation of this dichotomy.

President Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that while Hillary Clinton had been careless in managing her emails as secretary of state, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the country.

I believe this is true. Hillary Clinton does love this country -- or at least the part of its she's intimately familiar with: the highly-insulated Beltway interior. She certainly would never do anything intentionally to harm her position of power or her chances of a November promotion. We can tell how much she wants to keep the country safe by how much effort she's put into keeping her communications out of the hands of the public. This is the Administration Way. There's nothing more dangerous to the US government than transparency and accountability. Clinton knows this. Obama definitely knows this.

The problem is, as Trevor Timm points out, violating the Espionage Act doesn't require an intent to harm. Handling classified material carelessly can open one up to charges… provided you're not part of the government's inner circle.

Obama's interview also explained why government agencies redact or withhold information already in the public domain. It all traces back to "classified" being an almost-entirely subjective term when deployed by the government.

“There’s stuff that is really top-secret top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”

Classification: all things to all people, as long as it allows officials and agencies to control narratives and disrupt public accountability. No matter what the FBI concludes from its investigation into Hillary Clinton, Obama has already granted her a pardon.

Filed Under: classification, classified, double standard, emails, hillary clinton, president obama, secrecy, transparency

Canadian Politicians Work Towards Transparency Reform By Keeping Relevant Documents Secret

from the the-first-rule-of-open-records-reform... dept

Following in the proud tradition of governments everywhere who believe a push for transparency is best performed under the cover of darkness, the Canadian legislators behind an attempt to update the Access to Information Act have decided to keep their transparency discussions secret.

The Treasury Board Secretariat has chosen to withhold key memos to minister Scott Brison on reforming the antiquated Access to Information Act.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has promised to amend the access law so that federal information is open by default.

But Canadians aren’t allowed to see the advice from officials on how to reach that goal.

The Canadian Press used the access law to request recent briefing notes and memos to Brison on possible reforms. However, entire pages were withheld for fear of revealing government advice, consultations or deliberations.

The Canadian Press notes the government didn't have to redact these pages. While there is an exemption for deliberative documents, it's purely discretionary. The good news is that the unredacted portions of the documents seem to indicate a desire to strengthen the public's access, rather than weaken it. It also appears the rewrite will expand the law's coverage to more agencies.

But, for now, all other details are still only known to the public's representatives, leaving the people they represent in the dark. It's tough to mobilize support (or express objections) if voters don't know who's asking for what.

Then there's the fact that this reform effort has been in the works for four years now with very little to show for it. The 1983 law isn't equipped to handle a mostly-digital world and, as in every country with a national open records law, the government has become quite adept at exploiting loopholes to avoid having to turn over documents.

Long-standing problems with the access to information law have prompted calls for a substantive change, something the Conservative government, like previous governments, has been reluctant to do.

For example, instances where requesters got absolutely nothing increased by 49.1 per cent over the last five years. And during the same time period, the number of requests that were extended beyond their original 30-day deadline increased by 18.6 per cent — a slower rate of increase than the growth of requests, but still acknowledged as a problem.

Bureaucracies are never efficient, but it gets even worse when reform efforts target something everyone says they're committed to (transparency) but is actually the last thing they want. Four years and a regime change later, the efforts are still inching forward. Meanwhile, the public is being told indirectly that the best thing it can do is sit on the sidelines and wait for their representatives to decide what's best for them, rather than inviting them to participate in a discussion of great interest to them.

Filed Under: canada, secrecy, transparency

FOIA Request Results In Details Of Administration's War On FOIA Reform

from the presume-openness,-but-don't-you-dare-act-on-that-presumption dept

Do you like irony? Documents obtained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (and shared with Jason Leopold of Vice) through an FOIA request show how the Obama administration and various agencies worked together to dismantle FOIA reform efforts. "Presumption of openness," my [REDACTED].

The documents confirm longstanding suspicions about the administration's meddling, and lay bare for the first time how it worked to undermine FOIA reform bills that received overwhelming bipartisan support and were unanimously passed by both the House and Senate in 2014 — yet were never put up for a final vote.

Jason Leopold has also obtained some documents of his own. These show the SEC and FTC were also instrumental in preventing the FOIA reform bill from landing on the President's desk.

It's an annual tradition. Legislators will offer up an FOIA reform bill, usually with broad support, and it will end up going nowhere. Too many agencies would prefer to leave the FOIA as it is -- intermittently useful but far too often reliant on lawsuits and endless appeals to wrest documents out of the government's hands. Exemptions are abused and agencies further contribute to the general opacity by ever-so-slowly upgrading their digital document-handling capabilities and outdated (and incomplete) search systems.

As Leopold notes, the 2014 effort to reform the Freedom of Information Act passed out of the House with a 410-0 vote. And then it was left to die as agencies like the DOJ and SEC stepped in to halt forward progress.

The administration released its own talking points in opposition of the reform effort, claiming that any more openness would throw the machinery of government into disarray.

The White House claimed it would increase the FOIA backlog, result in astronomical costs, and cause unforeseen problems with processing requests, according to a secret six-page DOJ set of talking points turned over to the Freedom of the Press Foundation along with 100 pages of internal DOJ emails about the FOIA bill.

The DOJ pushed back the hardest. And the administration not only allowed it to do this, but actively supported it in its efforts.

Remarkably, the talking points go on to say that the DOJ opposed the administration's own instructions that called on agencies to act with the "presumption of openness" as stipulated in Holder's guidelines and Obama's presidential memo. The DOJ, they said, would "strongly oppose" any attempts to codify it into law.

Despite its opposition to codifying a "presumption of openness," the DOJ considers itself to be the paragon of governmental transparency.

Last year, in testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Melanie Pustay, who heads the DOJ's Office of Information Policy (OIP), which is supposed to ensure that all government agencies adhere to Holder's guidelines, told lawmakers that the DOJ is doing a great job with FOIA. She graded the agency five out five on "presumption of openness."

A completely laughable assertion. At least someone called out the DOJ for this statement.

"Five out of five, on an effective system in place for responding. Proactive disclosure. Are you kidding me?" Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz asked Pustay. "The Department of Justice gives themselves a five out of five on proactive disclosure. You really think anybody in the world believes the Department of Justice is the most — they're at the top of their game, they got an A-plus, five for five? Do you really believe that?"

No one believes that. Not even the DOJ. The FBI is more secretive than the CIA. And both the DEA and FBI have a long history of refusing to turn over documents to the DOJ's Inspector General, to say nothing about the general public.

Suspicions of administration intervention were raised after then-Speaker of the House John Boehner simply sat on the bill until the last legislative session of the year closed in December 2014. But no one's been able to obtain any solid information to back up theories or confirm the agencies most instrumental in killing the bill. Legislators aren't talking about it. Administration officials won't discuss it. So, the same tool the administration won't fix was used to find out why it won't -- and which agencies fought back the hardest.

The balance of power in the government is such that it only takes a few recalcitrant agencies and a few cooperative legislators to effectively nullify the wishes of senators and representatives who passed the reform bills unanimously. That the administration had their back is no surprise. Despite its bogus claims of "most transparent administration ever," this administration has done more to decrease accountability and transparency than any other administration to date.

Filed Under: doj, foia, obama administration, secrecy, transparency, white house

Two Former White House Tech Advisors Tell The President To Actually Be Transparent About Trade Deals

from the what-a-concept dept

Two former Obama tech staffers -- Professor Colleen Chien (who advised the administration on intellectual property issues) and Quentin Palfrey (who worked for years in the Commerce Dept and the Office of Science and Technology Policy on intellectual property issues) -- have written a fantastic opinion piece for The Hill, arguing that the White House has one last chance to actually be transparent in trade negotiations as it moves forward with the TTIP agreement with the EU. The piece notes that part of the reason that the TPP agreement is in so much trouble was its secrecy:

Largely due to the secrecy of the negotiation process, the TPP long bred suspicion. When its terms finally became public last fall, opposition to the process quickly hardened into opposition to the agreement’s terms – which both Democrats and Republicans say need improvement before it can be passed. The text has been 10 years in the making, but only recently did the public get access to its terms. Since multiple leaks made most of the negotiated terms an open secret, why did the Administration wait so long to formally disclose the text?

They admit that the USTR's standard answer -- that trade negotiations rely on secrecy, and you don't want to give up an advantage -- may have some validity, but argue that it's almost certainly outweighed by other factors. They then raise three key points for being much more open and transparent on trade deals (all issues we've raised in the past):

1. Quality suffers when there is no free and open debate.
2. "Exporting U.S. law" is hard and can lead to unintended consequences.
3. Trade policy should reflect our democratic ideals

To be honest, all three of these are basically the same argument phrased differently, but they're all valid points. And they then urge the White House and the USTR to take the (not really that big) step of opening up the negotiating texts of the TTIP agreement. Since it's just between the EU and the US, it's not even as complicated as the TPP where you were negotiating with over a dozen countries. And the EU has been much more transparent in negotiating its trade deals, and has pledged to be on the TTIP as well. So, really, why does the USTR continue to take such an undemocratic, archaic viewpoint in negotiating these deals? The only explanation that makes sense is that it's the best way to sneak in favors for certain industries -- and given the ongoing "revolving door" between the USTR and certain large, legacy industries, perhaps that really does explain most of the issue.

Filed Under: colleen chien, democracy, obama administration, quentin palfrey, secrecy, tpp, trade, transparency, ttip, ustr

First Report From Inside Germany's New TAFTA/TTIP Reading Room Reveals Text's Dirty Secret

from the 24-seconds-a-page dept

Last week we wrote about the only place that German politicians are currently allowed to view the latest texts of TAFTA/TTIP: a tiny room, guarded at all times, and involving all kinds of humiliating restrictions for visitors. Katja Kipping was one of the first to enter, and she has written up her experiences for lesser mortals like you and me, who are not permitted to besmirch this sacred place with our unworthy presence. Even though she is -- of course -- forbidden from speaking about what she read there, a translation of her account, made by War on Want, nonetheless contains some interesting new details:

Once I'd registered, I was sent the instructions on how to use the room. The first thing that I noticed was that the terms and conditions had already been the subject of negotiations between the European Commission and the USA. Get your head round that: TTIP isn't even signed yet, and already individual countries have lost the right to decide who gets to read the texts, and on what terms.

Here's how the actual visit went:

A guard took me in through security and asked me to lock away my jacket and my bag. He checked that I wasn't taking any camera or mobile phone into the reading room, and then knocked on a door. The heightened level of secrecy made me all the more excited as to what I was going to find, but the room itself was nothing special. There were eight computer work stations, and I was only allowed to sit at the one designated for me. A friendly woman sat in the room. She got me to sign the visitor rules -- if you don't sign, you don’t get in, so I signed. There was a thermos of coffee and a plate of biscuits in the corner. Yet no amount of caffeine or blood sugar would have made it possible to get through the 300 or so pages of text in the two hours I had available to me.

Even though this reading room for German politicians has finally been opened -- two and a half years after the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations began -- numerous obstacles are placed in their way to make that opportunity as inconvenient as possible. First, the texts are only available in English -- imagine if US politicians were only allowed to read the French version of the negotiating texts. Moreover, the German visitors to the room are completely on their own: they cannot take even security-cleared specialists with them in order to decode the highly-abstruse wording of the documents. Finally, as Kipping notes above, she had just two hours to get through 300 pages -- roughly 24 seconds per page.

Even racing through the pages made available to her, Kipping says that she was unable to find anything that allayed her concerns about the proposed agreement. And despite the blanket prohibition on giving things away, she does reveal one dirty secret about the TAFTA/TTIP texts:

the documents are simply crawling with typos. The word 'and' is regularly written 'andd' and 'the' often appears as 'teh'. Either the negotiators are really shoddy workers or this is one of those famous security measures we've heard about.

She is doubtless right that these errors are fairly unsubtle attempts to create unique copies so that any leaks can be traced back to their source, since visitors to the reading room are directed to a particular computer when reading the text. And she is also correct in her conclusion:

Anyone who was going into these negotiations to enhance environmental protection, consumer protection and labour standards would have nothing to fear from transparency. Anyone who's engaged in selling out democracy, on the other hand, is obviously going to want to avoid public scrutiny. If [Germany's Minister for Economic Affairs] Sigmar Gabriel and the negotiators are really so convinced of the benefits of TTIP, why don't they just make the text available to everyone online?

It will be interesting to see what other snippets of information escape from the little room as the negotiations proceed, and as more German politicians visit it -- and whether they, too, still encounter texts that are crawling with highly-suspicious typos.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: eu, eu commission, katja kipping, secrecy, tafta, transparency, ttip, ustr

UK Government Spends Three Years And Large Sums Of Money To Avoid Revealing The Number '13'

from the pollutant-of-publicity dept

As we pointed out last month, the UK government is hoping to hamstring the country's Freedom of Information laws to make it much harder to dig out facts and thus hold politicians to account. In the meantime, it is going to absurd lengths in order to avoid responding to even the most harmless of requests, as this story from the BBC's Social Affairs Correspondent, Michael Buchanan, makes plain. Here's the background:

Back in 2010, the [UK's] coalition government were trumpeting a new red tape-busting cabinet panel, the Reducing Regulation Committee. I suspected that it was all froth and no action, so in 2012 I asked how often they had met since the committee's creation.

Nothing very threatening there, you might think, but the UK government refused on the basis that disclosing this magic number would "impinge on cabinet collective decision-making". So Buchanan appealed -- first, to the Cabinet Office, the department he had made the request to, where he was turned down, and then to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which oversees this whole area of government transparency. Here's what happened:

Merry hell ensued. The ICO found in my favour, the Cabinet Office appealed, lost, appealed again, won, the ICO appealed for me, won, etc. Back and forth it went for three years. At one point, the government called in the fearsome-sounding "Treasury Devil", the so-called Star of the Bar, James Eadie QC [Queen's Counsel], to argue their case.

The "Treasury Devil" may or may not be fearsome-sounding, but he is certainly fearsomely expensive -- think top-class corporate lawyer expensive. In other words, the UK government was willing to spend many, many thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money in order to keep the number of meetings of an obscure committee secret. An earlier post by Buchanan reveals one of Eadie's devilish attempts to fend off the FOI request. The government's lawyer argued that:

publicly revealing how often a cabinet committee meets would harm the workings of government by introducing the "pollutant of publicity".

But in the end, the UK's Information Rights Tribunal was undaunted by the Treasury Devil and his artful alliterations, and it rejected the government's final appeal, going so far as to issue:

a strongly worded judgment which described the Cabinet Office's approach as "irresponsible", its key witness as "evasive and disingenuous", and her evidence as "of no value whatsoever".

And so, a mere three years and five months after he submitted his FOI request, Buchanan could finally write:

I'm now in a position to exclusively reveal to you, dear reader, that between 2010 and 2012, the Reducing Regulation Committee met on a total of 13 occasions.

And he adds:

Ministers are currently pondering whether to put restrictions on the Freedom of Information Act. In the meantime, how much it cost in legal fees to refuse my request for three years will be the subject of my next FOI request.

Well played, sir.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: foia, information commissioner's office, journalism, michael buchanan, red tape, reporting, secrecy, uk

Court Says USTR Can Continue To Keep The Public From Seeing The Trade Agreements They'll Be Subjected To

from the our-national-security-depends-on-it,-apparently dept

Towards the end of 2013, IP-Watch -- along with the Yale Media Freedom and Access Center -- filed a FOIA lawsuit against the USTR for its refusal to release its TPP draft documents. The USTR spent a year ignoring IP-Watch's William New's request before telling him the release of draft agreements would "harm national security."

What trade agreements have to do with "national security" is anyone's guess (especially since the USTR has cloaked the entire TPP proceedings in opacity), but the conclusion being drawn by this refusal is that the USTR feels the public has no right to know about trade agreements that affect the public.

A ruling has finally come down in the FOIA lawsuit and the court has granted the USTR the right to remain opaque.

As government negotiators dig into perhaps the final round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations this week in Atlanta, they may take comfort in knowing that nothing they are doing has to be shared with the public they represent until years after it is over. That’s because a federal district court in Manhattan decided this week, in a closely watched Freedom of Information Act case brought by Intellectual Property Watch, that draft texts of the trade deal can be kept secret.

The very small upside of this decision is that the court did find some of the USTR's arguments for secrecy suspect. While it did side with the USTR's arguments on the withheld draft agreements, it found the agency did not present credible justification for its use of some FOIA exemptions in regards to requested communications.

First and foremost, USTR’s declarations rely purely on conclusory statements from the agency itself, which simply proclaim that disclosure would complicate USTR’s future efforts. Even the sole piece of evidence meant to represent the views of actual private-sector actors comes from the agency’s declaration, and this too is vague and conclusory…

Critically, none of USTR’s explanations are document-specific, nor even category-specific. They are blanket assertions meant to cover all withholdings made under § 2155(g)(1) and Exemption 4…

[The] USTR’s bare assertions reporting secondhand concerns from the private sector constitute only weak evidence, at best.

The court also noted the USTR's arguments in favor of withholding information under Exemption 4 were undercut by wording in the agency's own policies.

In response to Plaintiffs’ argument that the withheld commercial or financial information is not “confidential” because it has already been shared among all ITAC members, USTR argues only that ITAC members are sworn to secrecy and cannot use information they receive via ITACs outside of those committees. But the obvious reply, absent from USTR’s briefs, is that USTR’s own Operations Manual states that information subject to Exemption 4 withholding will be kept from other ITAC members.

And if the USTR can't keep its own secrecy arguments straight, there's a good chance it has not performed the thorough examination of the contested documents it claimed it had.

As Plaintiffs argue, USTR’s failure to make this simple response raises questions about whether the agency has wrongly withheld information under Exemption 4 that has already been shared with other ITAC members. Finally, although the Court does not question USTR’s good faith in responding to this FOIA request, Plaintiffs are also correct to point out the troubling nature of USTR’s first round of responsive disclosures here, which apparently withheld 149 pages in full and redacted portions of 413 pages improperly, despite sworn declarations attesting to a line-by-line review of all the documents.

That being said, the court still won't be ordering the USTR to release draft TPP documents. The only thing it has done is order the agency to present documents explaining its withholding of certain communications under two FOIA exemptions. The bulk of the trade agreements will remain hidden away from the public -- this time with the court's blessing and thanks to the administration's advocacy on behalf of continued opacity.

Filed Under: foia, secrecy, tpp, transparency, ustr, william new
Companies: ip watch, yale

Wall Street Journal Scores Very Limited Win In Fight With DOJ Over Sealed Surveillance Documents

from the here's-a-modicum-of-government-accountability,-will-that-do? dept

The Wall Street Journal has obtained a nominal "win" in a Stingray-related legal action aimed at unsealing electronic surveillance orders, but the decision reads more like a loss. Jennifer Valentino-Devries reports:

In the order, made after a series of legal motions brought by the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of the Southern District of Texas found that Dow Jones has a legal right to see government applications for surveillance, an idea the U.S. Justice Department had fought. But she agreed with the Justice Department that the requested documents shouldn't be disclosed yet because the 14 applications, dating from 2010 to 2013, all relate to continuing cases.

Yes, the WSJ has a right to see these files… but not until the DOJ decides these investigations are really and truly over -- a determination that has yet to be reached for files zooming past the half-decade mark.

The oral arguments delivered in June provide a little more insight into the DOJ's thought processes -- mainly that it should be the sole arbiter of document releases. The DOJ went past the constraints of its earlier argument -- that "open" investigations are not subject to "common law access" -- by claiming that documents used in the course of investigations, even closed ones, are not public records.

I think our position is that "ongoing" is perhaps the wrong word choice in order to determine where the common law right of access and the First Amendment right of access applies. What we would say is that there is significant authority for the government's argument that pre-indictment investigations and the warrants and the applications and the orders that are contained in the context of pre-indictment investigations are not subject to the common law right of access.

Dow Jones had asked the government to provide periodic status updates on these supposedly "open" investigations. The DOJ ignored these requests until prompted by the court, at which point it declared the files to be beyond the reach of the public. Here's the judge's recap of the events:

Dow Jones then filed earlier this year the motion for an updated status report requesting various things: the government to update the report regarding the status of the investigations, and then making public certain versions of the status report, and the sealed appendix. I believe then the government responded as I said, basically saying no updating is necessary here because there is no common presumption of access or First Amendment right.

The court didn't necessarily agree with this assertion but it did find the "balancing test" favored the government's interests. Dow Jones' legal counsel has asked for some additional transparency in docket filings, which would both provide the public with more information as well as assist the WSJ in determining the accuracy of the DOJ's assertions. (It could potentially aid in sussing out the form of surveillance being used as well.)

I would just make the one small addition that, you know, a lot of these applications have a bunch of different requests kind of all pulled together. We've got pen register, trap and trace, we've got D orders, we've got subpoenas, we've got statutory search warrants. And so I would think that an entry ought to reflect that, particularly as it relates to ongoing access issues.

You know, one -- some of these cases in which we've sought access are called In Re Sealed Application, some are called In Re Pen Register. The last one -- the most recent one is In Re Search Warrant. Well, if it's In Re Search Warrant, then the government's argument that these aren't search warrants looks a lot different. And so I think that the more specificity with regard to the basis of the application would help guide the Court as well as anyone who is seeking access to these to try and determine exactly what types of access might apply.

The DOJ, unsurprisingly, isn't a fan of this idea. The surprising part is that -- in arguing against Dow Jones' proposal -- it basically admitted it deploys multiple investigative tools and techniques using a single, apparently non-specific judicial authorization.

[F]or efficiency purposes, we've tended to bring a lot of these actions under one single document so that we don't have to keep coming back to the judge to get separate authorizations for different types of investigatory techniques in the same investigation, so we've just found it expedient to do that at one time.

There are your parallel construction and your Stingrays d/b/a pen registers, etc. And this slips by the court unquestioned.

As it stands now, the DOJ owes the Wall Street Journal a status update in two weeks… and that's about it. The paper may have won the right to unseal these documents, but apparently any future transparency will be left to the discretion of the government.

Filed Under: doj, foia, secrecy, stingray, surveillance, transparency, wall street journal, wsj
Companies: wall street journal

Amnesty International Told That GCHQ Spied On Its Communications

from the because-of-course-it-did dept

Amnesty International has been heavily engaged in fights against mass surveillance, recognizing that many of the people it communicates with need an expectation of privacy in their communications with the group. Last year, Ed Snowden revealed that the NSA specifically spied on Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. And, while Amnesty International was unable to gain standing by the US Supreme Court, since it couldn't prove that the NSA had spied on its communications, the story appears to be somewhat different over in the UK.

Last year a legal challenge was filed in the UK via the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) concerning Amnesty International. And now, the group has been informed that, yes, it was spied on by GCHQ in the UK.

In a shocking revelation, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) today notified Amnesty International that UK government agencies had spied on the organization by intercepting, accessing and storing its communications.

In an email sent today, the Tribunal informed Amnesty International its 22 June ruling had mistakenly identified one of two NGOs which it found had been subjected to unlawful surveillance by the UK government. Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International Ltd, and not the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.

As you may recall, a little over a week ago, the IPT had ruled that the GCHQ had erred in holding onto emails too long -- but had named that Egyptian organization as the one whose emails were held. However, that's now been corrected to Amnesty International.

The actual email sent by the IPT basically says that GCHQ told them that the IPT made a mistake. What you won't see anywhere is an apology from GCHQ. Amnesty is rightfully incensed about the whole thing:

“How can we be expected to carry out our crucial work around the world if human rights defenders and victims of abuses can now credibly believe their confidential correspondence with us is likely to end up in the hands of governments?

“The revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK’s surveillance legislation. If they hadn’t stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to by internal guidelines, we would never even have known. What’s worse, this would have been considered perfectly lawful.”

Both issues raised here are significant. The only reason Amnesty now knows about this is because GCHQ held onto the emails too long. If it had done its usual purge, then the IPT likely would never have revealed that, and Amnesty's communications would have continued to go on being compromised without anyone knowing.

Filed Under: amnesty international, gchq, ipt, secrecy, surveillance, uk
Companies: amnesty international

UK Officials Hoping To Change Freedom Of Information Law To Include Less Of Both

from the information-wants-to-be-withheld dept

The UK's short-lived, awkward relationship with its Freedom of Information law appears to winding its way towards an acrimonious divorce. Not fully implemented until 2005 and disowned by its co-creator (former PM Tony Blair) in his memoirs only five years later, it has apparently now reached the point of irreconcilable differences: those being the public's interest in what their representatives are doing and their representatives' extreme disinterest in sharing their feelings emails and documents.

Not that it ever was a fully-functioning Freedom of Information law (it was pre-sabotaged by automated email deletion programs before it ever went into effect), but it was at least somthing. But, sadly, it appears the UK government's "embrace" of transparency is every bit as sincere and warm-hearted as its embrace of free speech.

Michael Gove, the justice secretary, is considering making it more difficult to procure information from government bodies, including allowing officials to count “thinking time” when calculating how much it costs to retrieve information. One plan is to make it easier for ministers to veto publication of certain documents… Another is to change the way the cost of finding information is calculated so that officials can more readily turn down requests.

The first aspect would hand final veto power over to acting prime ministers. This is viewed by Gove and others as "needed" because the government was unable to prevent Prince Charles' correspondence from being released to The Guardian. As is almost always the case with contested open records requests, some embarrassment resulted from the publication of the released documents -- which showed that member of royalty pushing his personal perspective on issues like defense spending… or homeopathy... on a variety of legislators.

The second aspect is more related to Michael Gove's own FOI problems. Gove has previously been investigated for using personal email accounts to conduct official business. The 90-day automatic email destruction policy the UK government instituted is somewhat helpful in keeping the public uninformed, but what if someone wants to retain these official records longer for personal reasons, but doesn't feel particularly compelled to share them with FOI requesters? Well, that's where the discussion of fees comes into play.

Currently, citizens can request anything as long as the costs incurred by government bodies doesn't exceed £600. Considering many files are stored electronically, can be easily searched and resulting documents sent electronically, costs of fulfilling requests continue to decrease. So, Gove and others are suggesting a couple of changes: lowering the £600 cutoff point and/or padding invoices. The latter would see such intangibles as "considering" potential document releases billed at an hourly rate. Redaction efforts would also be billed.

If these changes are put into effect, FOI releases will slow to a trickle and some requests will meet with an almost un-challengable refusal, thanks to executive veto power. David Cameron promised a "complete revolution in transparency" during his term. Depending on your opinion of Cameron, this is either the antithesis of his goal, or exactly what he had in mind.

Filed Under: foia, freedom of information, michael gove, secrecy, transparency, uk