Obama’s Transparency Promise: We’re Still Waiting
David L. Sobel, EFF.org: When President Obama — in one of his first official acts — committed his new administration to an “unprecedented” level of transparency, EFF applauded the change in policy. Likewise, when Attorney General Holder, at the President’s direction, issued new guidelines liberalizing agency implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we welcomed it as a “particularly promising development.” But we also noted that it remained to be seen whether reality would match the rhetoric as the new policy was applied, particularly in the context of pending lawsuits — several of which EFF is pursuing — that challenge Bush-era decisions to withhold requested information.
Unfortunately, the early indicators are not encouraging. Last week, the Justice Department told a federal judge (PDF) in Washington that the FBI — despite the new Holder FOIA guidelines — will not be altering its previous decision to withhold a substantial amount of information concerning its massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), which the Bureau describes as “the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information.” The database contains hundreds of millions of records and has been characterized as an “uber-Google.”
The FBI’s refusal in the IDW case to release even one additional word under the Obama administration’s highly-touted transparency policy is troubling for several reasons. First, Attorney General Holder expressly directed that the new FOIA guidelines “should be taken into account and applied” in pending lawsuits, and the judge in the IDW case had ordered the Bureau to say “whether [its] position has changed” in light of the new Obama policy. So the FBI is clearly and unequivocally saying that the Holder guidelines don’t change a thing.
