Pretty good article from Justin Elliot about the demise of FOIA, the import law that is supposed to make the government transparent to its citizens. Things weren’t great under Bush but somehow got worse under Obama.
Newly uncovered documents (made public only through a FOIA lawsuit) show the Obama administration aggressively lobbying against reforms proposed in Congress. The Associated Press found last year that the administration had set a record for censoring or denying access to information requested under FOIA, and that the backlog of unanswered requests across the government had risen by 55 percent, to more than 200,000.
Elliot blames incompetence and neglect for most of the FOIA problems. I do hope that government transparency is something that gets fixed. That said, our front runner has some obvious issues on that front so I’m not sure how much the Clinton administration will try and fix the problems Elliot lists. But FOIA is important.
[FOIA] has been essential in disclosing the torture of detainees after 9/11, decades of misdeeds by the CIA, FBI informants who were allowed to break the law and hundreds of other stories.
Hopefully, we care about this.