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law was enacted 45 years ago, and I have never seen any
thing so brazen,” Courier-Journal attorney Jon Fleischaker
told the paper. “I think it an outrage.”
The Gat Face Filter Award:
Federal Bureau of Prisons
Kids these days—overlaying cat faces on their videos
and showing the BOP how it should redact media sought
by FOIA requesters. That was the message from an incred
ulous federal appeals court in March 2020 after the BOP
claimed it lacked the ability to blur out or other
wise redact faces (such as those of prisoners and g
guards) from surveillance videos sought through g
FOIA by an inmate who was stabbed with a
screwdriver in a prison dining hall.
The court wrote: “The same teenagers who
regale each other with screenshots are com
monly known to revise those missives by such
techniques as inserting cat faces over the visages
of humans.” The judge made clear that although
“we do not necessarily advocate that specific
technique,” the BOP’s learned helplessness to
redact video footage is completely htIMtek
The Power of the Tweet Award:
Pres. Donald J. Trump
Secrecy nerds know that classification
authority—the power to essentially mark some
documents as secrets exempt from disclosure—
resides with and is largely at the discretion of the
president, who can then designate that authority
as needed to agency personnel. So one expected
upside of a loose-lipped president with an undis
ciplined social media habit was the ability to use
the Tweeter-in-Chief’s posts to target otherwise
inaccessible FOIA requests.
Case in point: Trump’s Oct. 6, 2020 tweet:
“I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any
& all documents pertaining to the single greatest political
CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise,
the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Hard to
argue there’s ambiguity there. But when BuzzFeed News’
Jason Leopold flagged that order in his ongoing lawsuit
for the materials, that’s exactly what the Department of
Justice did. Based on their investigations, DOJ lawyers told
the court, the posts “were not self-executing declassifica
tion orders and do not require the declassification of any
particular documents.”
The court ultimately bought the argument that you
can’t take what the then-president tweets too seriously,
but Trump declassified other materials related to the FBI’s
investigation... on his last day in office.
The Thin Crust, Wood-Fired Redactions
Award: U.S. State Department
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hosted plenty
of controversial meals during his three-year tenure. There
was the indoor holiday party last December and those
bizarre, lavish “Madison Dinners” that cost taxpayers tens
of thousands of dollars, including more than $10,000 for
embossed pens alone. And while we know the full menu
of Pompeo’s high-class North Korea summit in 2018 in
Manhattan—filet mignon with corn puree was the center-
piece—the public may never find out two searing culinary
questions about Mikey: What are his pizza toppings of
choice, and what’s his go-to sandwich?
On the pizza angle, the State Department let slip that
Pompeo likes it thin and wood-fired, in emails released to
NBC correspondent Josh Lederman. But the list of top
pings was far too saucy for public consumption, apparently,
and was redacted on privacy grounds. Same for Pompeo’s
sandwich-of-choice, which the State Department redacted
from emails released to American Oversight. But we still
know “plenty of dry snacks and diet coke” were on offer.
The Self-Serving Secrecy Award: Niagara
County, New York
Money talks. The New York legislature knew this when
it passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1987, which
required, among other public transparency mea
sures, elected officials in 50,000-person-plus
municipalities to complete financial disclosure
forms each year. The public should be allowed to
see who our leaders may be particularly keen to
hear.
All but one of New York’s 62 counties gener
ally accepted that the disclosure forms, created
for public use in the first place, were meant to be
disclosed, according to the New York Coalition
for Open Government. Back in 1996, though,
while everyone was presumably distracted
watching the Yankees or Independence Day,
Niagara County found a quick trick to keep from
sharing its officials’ finances: They made it illegal.
By local ordinance, the records were made secret,
and the county proceeded to reject any requests
for access by claiming that releasing the informa
tion would be a violation of the law.
This local law prohibiting access was itself,
of course, a violation of the law, but Niagara
County managed to keep it on the books for
more than two decades, and it may have gotten
away with it had it not been for the work of the
NY Coalition for Open Government.
In February 2020, the NYCOG, represented
by the University at Buffalo School of Law Civil
Rights & Transparency Clinic, sued Niagara
County, alleging its ordinance was unlawful
(because it was). This past fall, a court agreed.
Five months later, in January 2021, the county began
releasing records that should have been available for the last
30-plus years. ©
The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation
Director of Investigations Dave Maass, Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey
and Frank Stanton Fellow Naomi Gilens; and MuckRock News Co-
Founder Michael Morisy and Senior Reporter and Projects Editor
Beryl Lipton, with further writing and editing by Shawn Musgrave.
Illustrations are by EFF Designer Caitlyn Crites. Creative Commons
Attribution—EFF/Muckrock News.
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