that developed those amendments was taken over by congressman morehead so moss legacy is certainlythere. he did create the foundation for freedom of information . starting in arthe 50s and wonderful books have been written on the history of the freedom of information act but when it came to the 74 amendments congressman moss was not there. >> line up. >> anybody who wants to have their questions heard must use the microphone. thank you. >> mike rosenberg and tom, that's a wonderful presentation. i wanted to ask you about another significant development in the congress of 1974 because what always struck me as remarkable about

this congress is that at the same time it was strengthening foia, the transparency organizations of the federal vaagencies it was protecting the privacy of americans because the privacy act was adopted in 1974 and senator kennedy played a re-leading role in that as well. too many people this is paradoxical. it's like how can you have transparency and privacy simultaneously but it seems this congress made very clear that we need to make government open and transparent while protecting the rights of individuals and i was wondering if you could say a few words about how you saw w that dynamic as it was playing out. >> it's an easier answer because senator kennedy was on the sidelines of the privacy act. legislation was developed through senator irvine's subcommittee on a

different committee. and while we had conversations between the two , there was not this same mood. we didn't coordinate drafting all but that's one thing. the second r thing is as you know the privacy act does have access to information for an individual for one's own file . notwithstanding this exemption for internal deliberative documents and freedom of information act so in some ways the privacy act while protecting private information for other people's access increased information relating to yourself. that's how i got all these files from the government that were clearly internal files but they had my name all over them. >> thank you for your service , i keep in mind how long

you've been doing this work. was there any discussion at the time of the second congress itself for the foia or legislative agencies as we know the vast majority of states and of course dc which should be a state does have a foia and it's gone just fine for them. most of the time when we discussed this senators don't want themselves to be attached to this but when you discussed it among yourselves was that the consideration? and follow-up, moss apparently introduced this because he was frustrated about not being able to get information out of the government . in your view do you think congress should be using the foia in the years to come for this? >> that's three questions. so question number one, application of foia for

congress. i was on a program on the 50th and reversibly of the freedom of information act and many cast who was staff counsel for senator moss when the foia originally passed all the wonderful story which obviously i would read today. he said when they asked for the yeas and nays on information act to the administrativeprocedure act which is what it was called in the house , members lined up next to congressman moss's desk and they would say is this going to apply to us? he said absolutely not. okay, i will vote for it. lesson learned. there was no discussion, no consideration at all of applying it to congress or the courts. that would have been a clear kiss of death i think from congress . and as to whether

it should apply the answer is certainly in fact i wrote a piece a few years ago for the advisory committee that i think the foia shouldn't apply to congress but congress should adopt its own access to information rules and regulations because congress is the most open branch we have today. so there isn't too much you're not going to get materials, you're not going to get national security stuff but there's more information from congress we should get and we could get. was that her another part of the question? congress should use a foia. i didn't want to answer that one. this is always an awkward thing because members of congress historically have used freedom of information act for their agencies. when

they are not chairing committees, they don't have much trouble getting there requests answered. so i think there will be a lot your wa question is what is the administration going to do about it? are they going to respond to congress like they respond to the rest of us, go pound sand or caare they going to be more responsible, i don't know the answer to that . >> i'm wondering if you could comment on the use of uci, unclassified controlled information and how it's being used to clawback foia information that's been available to the public for more than a decade in our case but we are now seeing this uci, particularly the use of the critical energy electricity information structure is being used to put clawback foia information

critical to public safety. >> that's what courts are for. i can't give you a legal opinion . maybe public, some may not be public. i actually in one occasion i represented the side that did not want information released in the standard format. that is they represented the chemical industry in trying to get some of the data relating to vulnerability of chemical plants . how many people would be killed . we wanted that available to neighborhoods but not online and in fact my testimony said osama bin laden in a cave in afghanistan could see where

the strike was so i don't know details there but ultimately i had faith inthe courts . that's one of the things as ralph mentioned, putting foia first in the hands of what we hope will continue to be independent judiciary is the way to answer these questions and i didn't mention with classification decisions, we do have in the foia today the ability of the courts to do disclosure of information that has been classified. they don't. they defer to the executive branch decisions. they don't consider themselves national security experts and they will give agencies even if they find information has been improperly classified they will let the agencies go back and try again. so i don't have an answer to that question. >> i'm john craig from south

arlington and 1969 my sister worked with ralph nader on automotive stuff on capitol hill so i've been keen ever since that but i wanted to ask you about something about the freedom of information act and the state department today, this relation to gaza. i believe the state department law says you can't give aid internationally if there are health problems or their limiting giving of aid into a country as the israelis are not allowing and i think they said this was the question or a statement that the state department people have made very clear. i don't know if this applies, my question is with the freedom of information act

would it be applicable to some of that? i don't know the information is in the state department but not ratified by the department of state. >> two things, one is if information is held by government, doesn't have to have been produced by government to be subject to the freedom of information act. in terms of whether the specific information would be disposable get morrison to file a lawsuit for you. >> we are going to get to alan. how many more questions do we have? >> i think you answered tom with regard to exemption one which everybody knows, over classification is an epidemic in the moynahan commission, unclassified water coolers in san clemente. so the act has failed with regard to exemption one. in

fact it hasn't done anything. i don't know whether you can do anything on that score with the judges if there confirmed have to be told are you going to exercise review on the exemption or not, that's not going to happen but the second issue i wanted to raise is the difficulty that congress has in oversight function because the executive branch is so ac secret. they throw up seats state secrets, sometimes it's th nothing and i'm wondering the inherent contempt power hethe us supreme court has confirmed saying congress can even put people in prison without any hearing if they refuse to comply with a subpoena for testimony for documents . this goes back to the dowry case that's almost 100 years old . why isn't

that used as efficacious to getinformation in a timely fashion? as you point out a photo request is stolen by the time you win when it gets back. what's your assessment of using the inherent contempt of law ? >> with your first observation on the main case and classification, keep in mind the exemption one refers to classified under executive order . the president writes the executive order. not congress, not courts, not the rest of us know our explanation was always if the president feels as if the administration feels there's too much information likely to get outbecause it's not being properly classified , change the executive order. easier said than done. on the second question .. [inaudible] inherent content. that's great. we mought to use it against eric holder for not providing information to

the republican congress, that was a wild goose chase . given the majority of congress right now i think that's a terrible idea. >> if you working for the day how would you change the current statute? >> i have for at least 30 years been a big fan of some independent ombudsman agency in the government like some of the european countries have area like connecticut has where you have a commission, public officials who can order disclosure from outsideavthe agency without having to go litigate in court . i think litigation is great, and i'm a big fan of having the judiciary have the final say but it's very expensive, it's time-consuming and most people just aren't going to go that route so i would like to see a commission or an article 3 agency or a board with the authority and i

think probably you would have to accept law enforcement and national security information for that. to get it passed . but that would still take you 80% of the litigation. >> i'm sorry. my name is cynthia marshall and i want r to know this is the first time for me hearing about foia. no, it wasn't consumer. the credit bureau was under foia? because i remember it used to be not texas, maryland but they moved the credit bureau and it affects all that after taxes.

>> there is the credit bureau of government agency? >> it was. >> as i think again teresa said every state has the freedom of information law so this, maryland and texas both have, in fact the texas freedom of information act allows the attorney general to sue an agency that withholds information contrary to the law. so that is tilted in favor of disclosure for something like an independent group like the credit bureau that is a government agency . >> thank you . >> great presentation, thank you. this is a big picture question on the whole theme of where is bipartisanship today and i hope for a quote on ralph's great book unstoppable, the emerging right left coalition and how urgently we need that today.

he mentioned the need for a national foia heyday and bruce would talk about the need to combine that with the national constitution day to get economics back or civics back into our high school classes. i'm wondering if you see any hope for something like that, any hope for an emerging right left coalition. ways to do that strategically like the national foia day and how we can make that happen, who's working on it now, what are their needs ? related to that, in n connecticut the loan library and started the idea of a national tv turnoff day and it spread quickly through all the high schools in connecticut . within three or four years 50,000 high schools nationwide do a national tv, now not so much relevant but 80s and 90s. >> there isn't television anymore. >> there was a national tv turnoff day, nowthere would be a national social media

turnoff day . >> there is a national competition day . >> sorry about that. >> the american bar association, was it civics, national center for civics education, at least it doesn't goof around the country but they had some constitution day reminding us that we know very little about our government and its history area on foia, i think your wish might be granted that is this spring and march the center and a number of other groups are getting together, dc open government coalition to have i guess a foia fest they're going to call it. >> there are a number of open open government organizations, coalitions and there are other acts to and

installation oftransparency and we will hear more about that today . we can revisit that . of course no shortage of new good ideas in the united states. thank you for your robust rendition. [applause] >> thank you for mentioning ralph's omnipresent and political role in the passage of these amendments. i would be remiss if i didn't also point out along with all those guys running around the halls of congress so too is joan a brooke . now, our next president emeritus, our next speaker as i mentioned alan morrison was cofounder of the litigation group with ralph

nader and currently the lerner family associate dean for public interest in public service at george washington law school. >> glad to be here and it's a privilege and an honor. some of what i'm going to say is going to go over what all the other people said but that's okay because i find my students don't learn the first time. so as several people have said lyndon baines johnson did not really want to sign the foia law but he did it and he did it over the objection of all the bureaucracies. after all it had a simple proposition. everything is made public unless there is an exception. it does apply to congress, big surprise, does apply to the judiciary and it doesn't apply to the president .

unlike many state laws that do apply to the gov.'s and the original foia doesn't apply to the president. presidential records finally became available thanks to richard nixon . when he withheld all his presidential records and d congress stepped in and said you can't do that, we want them all back so you don't destroy them. and at the same time they passed the presidential records act which makes presidential records subject to availability but not until i think it's 12 years after the president leaves office. there are a number of exceptions to it as well. two things about this, one is strangely though one exemption which i find to be the most troublesome undercurrent foia is exemption five which allows internal records to be withheld . it doesn't apply to presidential records. and so you can wait a long

time but you can get that under the presidential records act . the biggest problem with presidential records act is the courts have said there is no judicial supervision of what the president and his staff do while the president is in office. so if donald j trump decides as he's almost certainly going to do to tell everybody don't keep records and destroy them if you do keep them and have these an instantaneous emails that self-destruct after being read, there's nothing the courts can do about that. that is the single biggest threat now as it's not going to be available 12 years after trump goes into office. he served the first time, that 12 years starts to run from january , that 12 years starts to run from january 2021. so maybe we will start to get some of that information . but that's a big thing able should be thinking about and worrying about, the presidential

records. of course as tom sussman pointed out when members were asked does it apply to me, lyndon baines johnson would never have signed the foia law if it applied to him. that's perfectly clear i think. so the key ingredients are anybody can request it. victor kramer who used to run foia activities in georgetown said the shah of iran, you may have heard was a big guy in the mid-1970s, if the shah of iran made a request he would get it so today i would say vladimir putin would make a foia information about himself and they would have to answer that question and deny it. states have different foia rules. virginia in a case that went to the supreme court had a law that saidonly citizens of virginia or

companies for residents , can request access and the supreme court upheld unanimously. that's okay, it's their records, it's kind of silly and claims to violate the privilege of immunity clause, doesn't matter. you've got to look at these states but they are not all the same. the first thing is anybody can request a record. the second is there have to be a specific exemptions for the presumption of records are made public. that doesn't always hold but that's the rule. exemptions are quite specific and in contradiction to the administrative procedure act the burden is on the government to show the exemption applies and the courts are supposed to review these de novo meaning they're supposed to look at both the law and the facts. that theory but of course in practice it doesn't work that way as well.

and therefore one of the things we need to think about is what should we be doing about it? my experience with foia arrived in the same virginia case. i was an assistant us attorney at the seventh district of new york and we had this case, i think was the first case ever litigated . consumers union made the request and the veterans administration said the only exemption that would arguably apply to exemption for confidential commercial information obtained for a person but the problem was the hearing aids were obtained for the person but the va had done all the testing itself so the statute didn't apply and the va wasn't interested in that and the case ended up being litigated and it's the first time i ever heard about . soon thereafter i came with ralph to a litigation group and one of our first jobs was freedom of information act,

foia and they were being turned down right away. so one of the first cases we had was a case that kept coming up again but finally got changed. the house research group had a foia request for the fda. it was not their request, it was somebody else's request, i don't know who it was to get the test data on drugs that had been approved by the nda. one of those that determine was whether the fda was bendingover backwards . they claimed exemption and we filed that administrative court of appeals supporting the requesters, butler pickering was on this side but this was the first of many requests. we brought a

whole bunch of lawsuits and finally over the years the fda changed its position so these things are now generally routinely available after the drug has been approved . pointing out the importance of persistence in foia and not letting it go and the connection betweenthe foia and the substantive areas . lots of lawsuits when i started in 1972 and not only a public citizen but all our ralphs related organizations . there were infinite needs for foia requests. and at one point we had about 1 and a half lawyers working on foia matters and i was told by the government one time i had 25% of all litigation in the united states . i don't think one and a half lawyers would do that these days but there we were and we are suing everybody. i remember it was an

extension of the 74 amendment and he went before i think it was the house committee and one of the members said mr. nader, can you tell us who the worst agencies are so we know what to look for. ralph said not on any door. everybody was terrible . because and i've said this before but it's worth repeating, no federal employee ever got a promotion or an award for handing out documents requested by underlings. it's all the wrong incentives. if the agency wanted to release it they would have released it a long time ago. today they would put it up on their website . these are things the government either affirmatively doesn't want to release or is indifferent to and not concerned to . so there's nobody there to take the other side . among the many cases we had i would say the single most important case for the development of foia was not a

case involving the actual access to records themselves . it was a case brought by bob ford who ralph mentioned earlier. bob was working on civil service reform as he often did and he found there was a big report but a whole bunch of recommendations. so he asked for a copy of the report including all the recommendations and the government came in and had five or six different , they just sort of were rolling the dice to decide which exceptions they were going to claim and they claimed were five of them . and we lost in the district court because we had no way of knowing what the basis was so we went to the court of appeals and on the panel was quite conservative judge who had ed been in the process of legislative affairs, he was in the government, very conservative of course ebut he was also a fair person and he understood kind of what was right and what was wrong. we had ron arguing the case in

the court of appeals, had this argument and he kept saying i don't understand, what's happening, how my supposed to be able to do this he wrote an opinion in which lhe created what's come to be known as the bond index area in which the rule has come down and he just made this up but it was a perfectly sensible rule to make up which he said if you're going to claim an exemption you have to tell us which documents are exempt and on what basis including factual information. that changed the balance of power in the litigation fight. it made it possible to be able to take the de novo requirements of the facts and law and be able to put it into effect so the district judges would have to something to go on. and all these years and eventually it's got most of the report but he didn't get

the recommendation. they were supposed to exempt file but because if you read the report you could tell what the recommendations are because that's factual material. their following 16 conclusions, you don't haveto be a genius and at that point cared what they recommended , we want to know what the facts were so this was a great result that ron and the general had. another case we had nwas representative carl stern. all the time with the nbc reporters. and he had gotten wind of a little operation that jan hoover had been running called co-intel pro. carl came to us because the nbc at the time when television networks for your very important could not afford to spend the money, chose not to spend money hiring their own lawyers so o they came to us to do it to

do the case pro bono. ron handled the case and we got to the district and i forgot who it was that had been do so. >> .. these are some of the most significant documents about invasions of privacy and violations of civil rights in the country. and we won because they didn't have legitimate basis for withholding but we won and didn't have to go through appeals up to the supreme court because the politics of the situation were very different at the time. today, of course, the media is

better represent and understand how important it is to have their own wars and in some sense they are right. at one point the media person said, you know, i'm a little reluctant to have you represent me for nothing but you're also subject whom i write and we have cases and i said, i understand that. we had another wonderful case, is no longer with us, used for to great advantage and he had a bench of requests and i don't remember what it was and interesting thing about it you don't have to remember the details of what some of the requests are, it's so endemic to the process. so we had this case before judge robinsons. judge robinsons let me see the

documents. heaf writes this opinion grantig the relief. i wrote the documents in camera, the only thing i can't figure out why the plaintiff wants these documents are all incompletely inconsequential but i suppose if i were the plaintiff the refuse thal of the government to turn them over was enough of an incentive for me to keep pushing on so i gave them the documents. of course, sometimes you wonder why in the world did they not turn these documents over but that's surely what they did. but that was one example of the many examples of uses before literally any -- any and every federal agency. years after that, this is in late 1970's, submitters of records as tom pointed out applies to any records that government agency has and only doesn't apply for w records they've generated.

as they know businesses and others are submit -- all kinds of -- allte kind of informationo the governmenter often they want something like drug to be approved or project to go forward. and consumer product safety commission had a lot of documents. consumer product safety commission to have these documents stay public and strangely, the commission release a number of them the companies then became reverse cases in which they sued the agency to stop the agency from releasing the documents claiming that they had an actual right to have them withheld. they brought a suit in delaware before consumers got to file in the district of colombia and the case went to the supreme court and i was asked to represent consumer unions in the supreme court and it was an unpleasant

experience that day for me when i argued this case just said to me among other things, three reasons i gave them and he said what's my third and i realized, i picked up on what i was saying. he said to me,e, well, they won the race to the courthouse. companies did and therefore they should win and i said to him, if that's the rule you looked up i will never lose another race to the supreme court because we've got the ten-day rule, we can get the court, they can't get to court until they get denial and that'll take them longer and sure enough i lost the case and the only reason was 9 to nothing because of roosevelt's court-packing plan had failed. anyway, so there was a whole cottage industry of these reverse cases which goes on today but they requestest don't

lose race to the courthouse as a result of this case. well, as we were going on as thomas pointed out the earlier cases when they started going for it, the courts were not terribly friendly. exception 7, but the thing was we brought some of these cases, the cases were going against us and we said, should we take an appeal on a particular case. i think we had more from clarence. this decision was so bad and the congress won't do anything unless we can show not some district judge had ruled against this but the court of appeal had ruled against this. and sure enough, in the days whenas the congress would fix things if they were going wrong, we went ahead and litigated the cases and took them. so congress fixed them.

i'm a little unhappy about exemption one. it's not that it did nothing. you make a request, often the government will come in and say, we will give you a and b but you can't have cd, e, f and g. they do these for two reasons. up with is they don't not really care about these things the and number 2,s they want to look reasonable to the judge and so we do end up getting some but by no means nearly enough, theresa and i had this wonderful case that they had admitted what the content of the documents were but they wouldn't release actual documents before they were classified and the court of appeals said that was okay. exemption 7 we've gotten a whole lot more under exemption 7, the

files versus the records was absolutely right and i think they were right to put the other exclusions in there that it wasn't just all or nothing which was before. exemptions, attorneys fees was also an important addition to 1974 amendment, often forgotten. lawyers often willing to take casese on contingency fee basis. so you had to get real money. the problem has been that the government has a couple of cases in which the court has said, well, unless the judge rules in your favor, the fact that the government turned the documents over to you at the 'of summary judgment, that's not enough you don't get to -- that needs to be fixed in some way or another. tom mentioned the sanctions provision, sanctions provision was very thoughtful and was well

done except one respect. it was written in a way that said it only applied if the government was ordered to turn over the documents and so in most of thehe cases we end up getting documents that -- that the are just the government finally doesn't get ordered, it turns them over for any number of reasons and so the sanctions provision doesn't apply except with respect to document that is have been ordered and in most cases they aren't ordered and in most cases it's higher level person is long gone by that time and so it was a good idea. i think it's worth being here. another wonderful example of the days when congress actually worked as a group called taxation analyst and taxation, tom field has run this group for many years and he did pioneering work in getting the irs private rulings to be made public. it was really important and he was litigating the irs didn't want to have it and the cases

were in the courts and one day i got a call from tom saying, tomorrow morning being saturday morning can you come up we are going to meet with the joint committee on taxation to iron out these amendments and sure enough we sat down there, larry and i and tom and i bunch of other people, with the people of the irs and the joint committee, sat down there and worked through line by line with the these amendments and they got past and it's wonderful for the taxpayers, the irs is content with the result, but it's an example of things when they actually worked out. another very, very important in foia law was written after when world of records were paper records. we had a case called armstrong against the national security

council against bush and i varis other people involving the question whether electronic records particularly e-mail records were subject to foia or not. when the case got started these were pin peal records not subject to presidential exclusionld or their agencies ad but it applied, of course, across therm board and first thg came back we asked for all these emails, the national security archive i guess it was at the time and asked for all these emails and the answer was, well, there's nothing in these emails we print out all the emails, most of them are just things like can you come to lunch tomorrow or how aboutti settingp a meeting, nothing of substance in them and understand to be complete -- i won't say lie, it was a misunderstanding of the part of council as to what was going on, lack of communication and so the issue was are these subject to foia and the answer

through judge richie and eventually the court of appeals was resoundingly yes, there were limits on what we could do about them and get them, but that changed the whole world of foia and most importantly they had to produce them in the format in which they showed up, originated so you could see what changes had been made and you could see what saw them, printed out emails wouldn't show you much of anything at all. public citizens clients, david, his colleague su long began to use electronic records to do miracle work in terms of what the justice department was doing and not doing in terms of how they claim their allocating resources, all this wouldn't have been possible without it. now let me just talk about a couple of limits on foia today, one of them and wiseman and i

have been fighting for years, access to the opinion of legal could believe by people outside the government. the opinion of office of legal counsel are some of the important documents in the government. they are the official interpretation of what the -- whates the justice department believes the constitution requires and what they believe the proper interpretations of the statutes are. many of us believe that these are records which ought to be affirmativelyhi published on the website and otherwise made available to the public. the office of legal counsel and we have been fighting how long, six or eight years now to try to make them affirmatively available and the answer is, if you want to have a record available, if you want to test the legitimacy, excuse me, could

i -- thank you. if you want to claim that they are being improperly withheld, sue us about a particular record. well, there was only one problem, they don't make the index of the records public so you don't know what records they have so how do you know what to sue and some of the records are classified as the titles of the records are as well. this is a really important area. it should be a bipartisan area and it should be an area that congress ought to be interested in because it's how -- how the executive branch in many cases is undermining the world of congress by interpretations of the law and if you don't know what the law is, you can't possibly go about doing it as well. i won't bore you with all of the history about what's going on about that, but it's another area that's very, very important and people ought to be looking at. >> last thing i want to mention is privacy act which is mentionedd before.

anyway, privacy act had a lot of good ideas. it was not very well drafted. and the results that the remedies portions are virtually useless. the supreme court has very grudgingly interpreted and problems with the statute the way the statute was written. the biggest thing you can do is get people -- can't get the agency tod destroy your records or to -- that are corrective records very hard to do that. thisth is the most important thing, written in 1974. the world has much changed then. the it was written for paper records and not for electronic records. and it's an area that really needs to be brought. i've been trying to get the administrative conference in the united states to do something about it for years. i think it's probably too big a

problem for them but it really needs to be looked at today in terms of how government manages records. everybody is concerned about the private sector managing records. i'm concerned about it too but i'm concerned about the governmentnd managing records. okay, well, that's my saga history, i'm glad to answer any questions. [applause] >> thank you. line up so you can get heard and did anybody lose a tablet? >> quick story and then a question, the story you mentioned opinions, when i left llc, i asked them could i see my personnel record and they said, no that's classified. i'm cleared for highest level of classification. one of the things you didn't

mention is a lot of litigation led to not just disclosures of the records requested but long-term proactive publication agency manuals field guidelines, sec opinions, irs, across the government that now obviously the world is full of information readily available to the public proactivelyhe disclosed but only because of the success of litigation like yours. >> yes, correct. >> i'm not sure how much it applies to your work or other people's work but i wanted to raise piece about two years. including the most die-hard

quote, unquote, they will not say, yes, israel has nuclear weapons. empirical fact. there's a dictate telling government people that they can't talk about it. it's not clear to me this f that dictate applies directly to members of congress - or members of congress just simply take the cues from the state department and so on. it's grown in importance because of all of theal analysis around gaza and syria, discussion of israel's nuclear weapons is basically, largely explain the great dealve of what's happening in terms of what's happening in syria and russia basically and everybody else, sort of hidden the issue. it's kind of the elephant in the room is not discussed and it's largely, i think, partly the result of the -- of such

dictate. >> coming from the state department? >> i believe so. i should have had my article in front of me. >> some agencies -- >> yeah, that's correct. >> if the members of congress receive this and advised that are classified information, that are obligated, they are obligating not to break the classification and so they would say go t back to the -- whoever the agency is and make a foia request for documents. in some of these cases we brought cases where just to get them to admit that they won't have them, that will go a long way towardin establishing that,n fact, it'ss the truth of the matter because after all, there's a doctrine to refuse to affirm or deny whether they've got the weapons. if you ask cia, tell us the name

of the kremlin, they won't have to give you that. so, that's what i would suggest you do but there's nothing, you can't request from it congress, you can request it but it won't be answered. >> the dictate itself is confidential is my understanding. i think i don't know how common the maneuver is in this world. is it? the word dictate is a little hard for me to pause. if you want to make a foia request to the state department for communications relaying to whether or not, communications between the state department and members of congress as to whether israel has any nuclear weaks or not, you can probably make a foia request to find out whether there is such a dictate

and that would be the first thing of doing it. >> we know that there is, we just don't know its content. >> ask for it. >> i mean, you could do it. >> basically saying, you members of congress do not discuss the subject -- >> apply what government can or can in the say or must say. >> members of congress presumably have first amendment rights. >> well, but suppose they got top secret information -- >> presumably most people know israel has nuclear weapons you can and cannot say. >> members of congress have first amendment right. >> suppose they got top-secret information.

they cannot say it is a top-secret amendment right to disclose it, can they? >> presumably most people know that they have nuclear weapons. it is not where the troops are in the time of war. >> are there questions for alan? >> i just had a question because the thoughts around record-keeping, electronic record-keeping, this idea that perhaps there could be within reading it disintegrates and we cannot actually have a record of it is pretty interesting for me because some factors because everything is electronic there is always metadata being created in this idea of federal agent these is to keep all of these records on premises.

energy around this are there groups that are really focused and technical record-keeping. >> the answer is to step in. in part because the president is not an agency and subject to the act. even in respect to the federal agency i looked at the cases recently, but the general tone is they will not step in on individual determinations. if the fbi said we will not keep any more records of meetings

between us and the state department, for example, we will destroy them, the court may step in for that situation. it is very hard to step in. supervising how agencies operate the records being kept in what was being destroyed. it was pretty hard to mandate that people keep records of the meetings. if you go to a meeting someplace to mandate that they keep a record, you can keep a record, but the question is, what you write down. i tell my students from time to time, more people have gotten in trouble for writing things down and meetings for not writing things down a meetings. when they subpoenaed your notes, if they can read my handwriting,

they would find not so much in their and probably for good reason. >> great. thank you. i think that there may be a realm of possibilities because everything is recorded whether it is someone manually doing it or not these days. thank you so much for your talk. >> okay. >> any questions? >> hi. good morning. my name is kevin. agency counsel i did appreciate your comment. no federal employee ever got a motion to release in response to a request. bringing up the sunshine awards. however, i have also been very sympathetic to the fact that afterwards there is a presumption and, unfortunately the practices often rebuttable. it is typically because we would rather not disclose that. >> so, thinking about the way

that agency policies are constructed around how to implement that presumption which we have had some version now. >> griffin bell, actually. >> attorney general under carter try to do that. did not have any success. supplement. >> given the challenge in attempting to, i guess, sort of change the incentives to open this as more of a think that agency leadership or management react in this setting you would think, are there any good ways of doing this? is there some sort of a way to have a statutory or regulatory or just a standard affect may do something different with that? or we just sort of stuck? >> i suppose, one thing, if i were this agency, i would say that i want to see all of the denials in the next month.

i want to look at them and see whether i think they have any basis for it. that would shift the attention, i think, up to a higher level. it may not be the agency had but maybe the deputy had in the agency with a mandate to say we will look at these things. nothing would stop that from ever happening. they could, agencies could create their own internal advisory committees or external advisory to advise agencies on whether they are properly denied if you wanted to release more information at the agency level, you could find ways to do it. it is sort of like the golden rule. if you actually wanted to do something, doing it for yourself , if the benefit were to release the document instead of withholding it, could you create incentives for doing so and the answer is, yeah, you could, if you wanted to do it.

i am not saying that it is easier with the president saying we want to release all of these documents. at the low levels of all of these other agencies, it is a lot harder to get those general broad and good statements translated into real action. >> it is probably important to point out. just because there are exemptions does not mean that the agency has two. >> with limited exemptions, yes. >> thank you. [applause] >> okay. we are moving on. we are almost up to time. we will keep this rolling here. the next topic is challenging the freedom of information act litigation. we have an adjunct professor of dw law school and outside litigation counsel for nonprofit organizations seeking to bring greater accountability to the

federal government. thank you, and the mac will, rest assured that that is who i am. first of all, i want to thank you for including me in this program. it is really an honor to be among so many luminaries and i say that in all seriousness. we are seeing people that have been with us for decades and, hopefully, some people who are new because they battle and it continues. i agree that it is fitting to honor the 15th anniversary of the 19th 74 amendments because they really breathe life into the statute. they changed it from, i think a hopeful vision of government transparency and accountability to a powerful tool to achieve those goals.

and, now, standing on the precipice of a new national order and i think that the need for this kind of tool could not be more acute. certainly, the experience of the first trump presidency was that there was a huge increase in requests and in litigation and i certainly anticipate that that will be what we see in the next four years as well. i agree wholeheartedly with the theoretical value and promise of this as brought to life by the 74 amendments. but, today, as a practitioner who has been in the trench for decades, i have a much more jaundiced view of the reality. for a long time, i thought the

answers to the problems i was observing through litigation, that the answers really lay with congress, that there were problems with the statute that congress could fix. that there were loopholes in the statute that congress had not anticipated, but that it could fix. i have a very different view of it now. yes, i still think that there is a role for congress, but i think a lot of the blame lays at the feet of the courts. and, let me tell you why i say that. this is a problem i think when congress enacted the 74 amendments. you could never have anticipated it is very interesting. in my day-to-day practice, the biggest concern that i hear from my clients, i hear from other groups is the enormous amount of time that it takes to get a

request process completely. that is before you even get to the issue of exemptions. and it is interesting that the legislative history of the 74 amendments shows that two of the concerns that congress had way back then was one bureaucratic delay and responding to requests and, too, a lack of priority by agency leadership to implementing. .... ....

adapters of the 74 amendments understood the problem and they placed the burden of proof on the agency and they think as tom mentioned and this is extraordinary. i can't think of another civil litigation where i come in as a plaintiff and defense has the burden of proof and i think this is because of the clear asymmetrical ss2 information. in litigation and the government has all the cause. it knows where to look at knows why it looks it and we don't really get to see behind the curtain. we don't get discovery and so when you see a statistic like this that nine out of every 10

cases, the government when some or all part of it that tells me that this presumption of disclosure and this placing the burden on agencies is not working. and it isn't working i believe because of how congress -- and i'm see how the courts have construed foia because after all the answer is in the 74 amendments. presumption disclosure government has the burden of proof. so i think this evidentiary shift has really made it almost impossible for foia requesters to win. and also courts routinely get agency so-called do-overs. that is you didn't meet your

burden of proof and we will let you do it again. the second declaration still doesn't quite pass muster and we will let you do it again. again how can you reconcile these judicial actions with the statute that says there is a presumption of disclosure and that's where you start and you don't overcome that presumption unless you have met your burden of proof and yet the starting point for too many judges i have seen is the presumption of secrecy because they are they are concerned that some unintended consequence not necessarily one that the government has identified if they allow the disclosure of government information. i think another way that the courts have really made it difficult is that they strayed

from the text in interpreting the foia's exemptions. congress in the 74 amendments put guardrails in place for these amendments. take exemption five. for exemption five to apply a test to be an inter-or intra-agency communication. this is a sort of the guardrail because all communications are covered just inter-or intra-agency but what of the courts done quite well the supreme court is created out of whole cloth the consulting corollary that says well you aren't in agency and that's not an inter-agency communication. we will give the deliberative process. congress is not in agency and yet to protect communications

between agencies and congress the courts have said well we don't think congress intended to give up control. they created this control test and once again it's not in the statute but it's a judicial reaction to a concern that they need to protect something that otherwise shouldn't be out in the public. i saw this control test abused in my view when i filed multiple lawsuits to get secret service clause. these are records that the secret service and agency create during one of its core functions, protecting the president. and yet even though these are records the secret service creates performing its statutory responsibility that are stored on agencies computers the court said well the white house when

he gave them information about its visitors did not intend to give up control and therefore these are not -- so again i don't thank you can reconcile these holdings with the language of the statute. the problem is not the congress did not do a good enough job. especially in 1974 when it enacted the amendment. the problem is with the courts have done since then. they have strayed beyond the scope of language and they have not used this statutory language of the congress use. we can also see this with exemption seven. tom tauke lot about the law enforcement and all of the vigorous debate there was around the language about files and yet even with this change they didn't make it through i think

many courts have given an extraordinarily expansive view of law and force meant and when you have an agency that has a significant law enforcement function courts are inclined to extend the exemption to all of that agency's records even when they are outside the scope or parameters of the law enforcement function. again an example the problem is not that the statute. congress worked very hard to on the language of law enforcement but the courts have gone beyond that. another example is the foreseeable harm requirement. in 2016 we got a green -- great amendment out of congress. they codified but it's been an

administrative practice at agencies discretion to say if you're going to rely on it not only to show the exemption applies but you left to show they would be foreseeable harm and by foreseeable harm what they meant was they would be something very specific from the release -- release of this information and what happens foreseeably in the future. i had a case recently which i think is extraordinary and you may disagree. the government it was just as thomas in both their declaration gave only passing reference to the challenge that and said that is not at the level of specificity that the courts require and the judge agreed. but then the judge did the

extraordinary thing of saying i looked at the documents and it's my judgment, not the agencies, it's my judgment that they would be harm to the agency so i'm finding the harm requirement is met. i think this is an extraordinary overreach by a judge. unfortunately i wasn't in a position to appeal because the most i would get out of an appeal would be a remand and the judge is given the agency the roadmap. here's what you need to show me if you are going to satisfy it so even in this post chevron era he is better suited he thinks to tell the agency harm from the release of deliberative material when the agency hasn't been able

to articulate that harm so these are the kinds of actions the court has engaged in that really i think have undermined foia in very critical ways. so i think the net effect of all of this is that while on paper the foia appears to be a pro disclosure statute, in reality agencies control what happens at the agency level and courts control what happens at the judicial level and they seem to start all too often with a presumption of secrecy and not disclosure. another area where he think courts have really strayed his extraordinary deference given to agencies who come in and talk about what they can and can't do to determine the process. if any of you are litigating foia right now you know that our biggest battle is not over the

steps for their biggest battle to get the agency to process the request in the processing time ranges from weeks to years. ahip occurring case where the estimated completion date is decades away and that's not sadly unusual. the agency justifies it. they come in and they say well our normal practices are this and courts don't push back. so the best that we seem to be able to do in the district court in d.c. is a processing rate of fiber pages a month and in some cases we are stuck with 360 pages a month and you can see what the big volume request that extends out to years and years and years and the courts simply

accepts from the agencies that this is the best they can get in the problem is there's no incentive for the agencies to better fund their foia because you can be sure when there is, and there had been a few courageous judge's who have said the agency no, i want this done and i wanted done it in this timeframe in the agencies are able to come up with the resources because they are facing a court order. if the courts are not willing to exercise their authority and impose higher processing of agency, the situation is never going to change so yes we need money from congress that the problem is not presently in the statute, it's the courts refusal to use the authority they have two require agency to come up

with resources because the foia is a statutory convenience. it says agency val show. so it's essentially an unfunded mandate. so what solutions are possibly on the horizon? i think congress there is a role for congress certainly. i've been part of groups but for various changes the accepted wisdom if you get a foia reform every 10 years i do think in light what i'm talking about that's going on judicially that congress could make clear, make

it explicit limits on its civility to flip the burden from the government. i think as i said in this post chevron era and may not like where we are at but in the foia context we really need to have some constraints on the judiciary and i think that's a new way of thinking about the problem. typically we are talking about legislation that will constrain the agency and what i'm suggesting, that may be necessary. beyond that i think we need legislation that makes it clear to the courts that they the authority to fundamentally change the balance. what i would advocate for in terms of foia reform the wood

eliminate exemptions altogether. it's a source of much of the litigation we are in. certainly a minimum it would eliminate -- which i believe that's aligned with the purpose of foia. if you've done foia litigation and you are familiar with foia tells its government it's designed especially to put a wall between what the government is doing and the public. the stuff i want that i can't get because of this privilege i know the final decision but what's behind it? why did we reach that decision and what else do we consider?

this is information we need to find out what government is doing in the deliberative process will seemingly prevent that from happening. i think there should be serious concern given to eliminating it. i challenge anybody to come up with an example where deliberative material needs to be held from the public. i think joe biden was good at that. the suspend a common request, i have become in favor of line items. there is no such thing right now. often the money from foia comes from public affairs so it's. i think the fear if you have a line item is it can be

eliminated and frankly i don't think we could be any worse than we are now. so i am in favor of that. obviously i think congress passed to provide more funding. i have yet to see any reform package that congress is seriously considering that also includes funding. another idea i've been discussing with others is somewhat radical but i will put it out there. i think we could should consider a foia court. a cord of judges who are versed in the subject matter and committed to the goal because right now a lot of the judges in d.c. where much of it is brought they don't view foia litigation favorably.

and it's only gotten worse. january 6 prosecution in d.c. i think set all civil litigation way back and foia is sort of at the bottom of the priorities of the court. so i think you had a cord that was dedicated to actually dealing only with foia. i think it could improve the lot and i think it would make things more timely and work more quickly. it may force agencies to move more quickly and it would highlight it. right now i don't see there's there is much of an incentive to fix this problem. for those of you who litigate it hearkens back to ralph nader. we need a ralph nader right now. we need people to come up with some creative high impact

litigation to force the courts to make the statute true to what congress intended. one possible vehicle that some of us, more and more people are using is the idea of getting creative and we need to get creative on a fundamental level. courts you are shifting the burden and away that is directly contrary so we should be thinking is there a law that we could bring? i know there are a lot of creative and smarter minds than me in this room and i urge you to think about that because i think we have to start pushing back not just an individual case-by-case basis where we are fighting for a specific document that we have to think about some

of the cases that allan talked about the broader indices that forces the court to make the statute work in a way with what congress intended. consistent with all of these intents that thomas susman described. i don't want my cynicism to overshadow my report for what was intended by the amendment because in many ways it was extraordinarily visionary but i think we need a fundamental reason. i had a client who is a journalist and author and he said to me you know it's just broken. i can't get anything in time.

unfortunately i share that view. i think that foia is broken so we need a fundamental reset in the courts, and the agency and through legislation because i think if we don't have that the statute will never live up to its promise as a primary tool and preserving our constitution and i think the threats that are coming to that democracy properly have never been greater and as i said earlier i think the need for this tool has never been more acute so we really need to fight for its survival. i think we need a strong and vigorous freedom of information act if we are going to survive. so i think it's well and good to honor the achievements of the 74 amendments but i think it's the

status quo. those achievements will be overwritten by noncompliance and the judiciary is focused on preserving it not examining transparency and accountability. [applause] thank you. we'll take some questions and once again lined up at the microphone. i'd like to ask a question but you have a vision. he think congress should be covered by the freedom of information act. it's never been passed because everyone would want reassurance. >> absolutely however i would never threaten positive changes to the existing foia. i wouldn't sacrifice that.

i think in a perfect world it would and as people pointed out state statutes routinely cover their state government and i'm not aware of any major problems from not so yes. >> your foia courts would you have the courts talk about adequacy of searches and sometimes it's frustrating you pointed out how much weight they give to the judges to dual for like agencies like the cia might claim we looked and it knows a major world event we couldn't find any records higher low. >> that's a really good question. the specialized foia court will be particularly good at handling those kinds of issues. i litigate those issues routinely and it involves a lot

of actual records and we asked the court to get in the weeds about what the agency did then why shouldn't have done an all too often they didn't have the patience for that so i think that's an illustration of the special foia court would be particularly useful. >> i'm bob becker and i have a few where there are problems in the courts are the result at least in court of our own failure. what i mean by that is the justice department u.s. attorneys federal defenders regularly communicate with judges outside the courtroom about the issues that they are involved with not on a case-by-case basis. generically. have we ever taken the time to try outside a case to educate the judges who deal with foia

cases of what the importance of this is now that should. if we haven't and i don't believe we have that we have failed. >> i agree with you. i think we should part i know for sample in d.c. i think it's pretty routine for the civil chief to meet with judges. i don't think they talk about specific cases. i'm sure they talk about more broadly the issues and i do agree. we have a range and i'm mostly familiar with d.c. which is where practice in the district court and the judge is there, there's some like judge lamberts for example is really invested in foia. he took senior status along time ago and he continues to put himself on the list for foia cases. certainly he is a friend of tom's. >> i have litigated the lot before him and when it comes to foia you can't get much better than a judge who not only interest and zoloft but the

purpose of the statute. but you have other judges to judge mcfadden wrote a decision that called out non-profits including one i used to work for his bearing the blame for the backlog and not really understanding that the majority of requests, commercial work rosters are not versed in the aclu so will education health? i don't know but i do think we should try. >> thank you. i'm wondering if you could comment on the use of the doctor and of official acknowledgment for fighting the clawback of foia release documents. >> that's been a very frustrating area to litigate in because they think courts have

construed official acknowledgment very narrowly and so all too often a judge uses that unless an agency is the publicly he uses specific words. it hasn't acknowledged something. so it's a problem because agencies, agencies when they want to defend especially controversial ones, they say a lot of things publicly but in other circumstances wouldn't in the classic example is defending a controversial policy. i went to olc and olc said i could do this. can you say oh great i'm going to get that olc opinion. good luck you know and it's done under the auspices of technology

essentially. hi. i'm agency counsel now. three years ago i was in finance council. i'm sympathetic to a lot of positioned to have taken in litigation. there were a couple of points he made that i'd like you to examine one of them involves you're off the top framing that nine out of 10 cases or government at least in part. i think then number of you cited was 2017. >> 2019. >> i was curious if you are diverging from that. >> i don't have access to the latest statistic however have no reason to believe it's it got much better.

that the thing that i was thinking of anecdotally at least there was one good one that came out by the department of labor that was 80 pages long and you had a judge who is skeptical. there has been a lot of pushback and in that case he was very explicit that the judge was very explicit that they weren't going to be patient for multiple repeats serial declarations and one more of the apple on certain points but with the new standard is moving the needle a little bit. >> i think generally does and i agree with you. that's why was so shocked that the decision i got and that was the judge. i think it's just so at odds but

the whole point the legislative history to be foreseeable harm standard indicates congress is especially concerned agencies were abusing exemption five in the delivery process and some of said you can use privilege so to then flip to excuse and agencies complete inability to meet the burden and substitute your own judgment as to harm to an agency than you have no relationship to it. i thought it was really extraordinary but i agree but i will say this also about the foreseeable harm standard. when it was first enacted the department of justice fought it tooth and nail. they took the position that didn't change anything and simply codifies our discretionary practice before that you now unless there was

harm we would not withhold. so to do so while to get to where we are. >> and i have one other really quick one. on the topic of productive agency but there is one large case that a lot of folks appointed to in the space of that. i don't remember the caption for it but it involved fda approval of certain standards of the judge in texas who ordered the production rate that started several hundred thousand pages. there had been a number of motions filed in d.c. saying the fda can't process other foia request. is there a way to balance that between every judge has their

own interest in controlling that docket and sooner or later other than a race to the courthouse steps to get an order saying after looking all these records first is there some way to balance that? >> i don't know because i think courts tend to view foia litigation with their own bailiwick and i haven't been successful and convincing the court in d.c. that would come anywhere close to what the texas court did or the judges in new york did with several thousand pages a month. the real hard thing is if you litigate in d.c. is suggested we don't have the resources and they throw their hands up and say well they don't have the resources and what can i do? again the problem is the more

you face the status quo is not going to change so maybe they don't over -- order 100 pages or 100,000 pages. tried 2000 pages a month. that's certainly better than 500. it's a problem and if you can come up with a reasonable solution i'm all ears. >> thanks very much. >> thank you professor wiseman. my name is caleb rogers and i was hoping you might expound on one point that you had mentioned. you mention some of problems that the foia process comes from courts or agencies and their opportunities for both institutions and we got to talk on this earlier but i was curious to your thoughts on the technological solutions that either have worked recently or could work in the future the

accident waiting -- the most obvious one is ai and in the foia request community for many of us are frightened of ai. because we fear it will be a substitute for discretion on the part of agency and if you have an ai program not only it identifies responsive records but also says you should be exempt and it will be tempting for courts to accept this independent assessment. but i do think because we are seeing such delay in finding and processing responsive records that's where ai can play a really critical role and i'm hoping that we can get some kind of idea leak government wide

coalescing around the use of ai. at least identify and call for responsive records. >> thank you so much. in 2019 a lot was past called the evidence act which allows positively allows agencies to share administrative data amongst each other under what is called the presumption of defense on your conversation about the presumption of disclosure is giving me a glimpse into what it will be. when you're talking about a presumption that disclosure or a presumption of secrecy if you were to implement what would be some things you might recommend and that entrenchment of

productive agency is specially among implementors. >> first of all you had to get by in from the top and you know i used to be at the justice department for many years and i was there and i can say my experience with her for example was that she had the reno memos that implement the foreseeable harm standard and she really believe this. she was really committed to it and i think if you don't have that it's going to fail from the outset because you had to get buy in from the top. that's often the trickiest thing. i just think and tom mentioned this or maybe was alan we went from a paper world to an electronic world and that means

we have access to a much wider universe of information and much more readily digitally but it also means that a lot of information gets shared that in the past never would have so i think that has created this tension between the desire for information and transparency and a concern that there's so much information out there and there could be information that's going to harm us in unintended ways. i think this is potentially playing out again and again and again. i don't know that directly answers your question that we could start with first principals. >> did you say nine out of 10 cases of foia -- >> no, i think i was nationally. >> thank you. [applause]

>> one answer can be to litigate outside washington d.c. that even if that statistic is true nationally on the exam of persistence and making those foia request because sometimes the document are released before you go to court and how to litigate it. if they are all released your lucky so if you make a request sometimes you should just file the lawsuit and the documents come pouring out. he had that happen several times. okay we are so fortunate to have our next guest speaker roberta baskin and she's talking about using the information act as an investigative journalist which is an award-winning one and she's worked with media including abc news, cbs and pbs. roberta. [applause]

>> good morning everyone. this has been a fascinating conversation and i've learned a lot from the other speakers. i am roberta baskin a recovering investigator reported. i started out -- i more than 30 years working at abc and cbs and pbs and starting out in local news in chicago and then in washington d.c.. this was before we had to present who called the media take news and dishonest and corrupt them before the invention of labels like alternative facts. and bali names about reporters like calling a "new york times" journalist.

it was before the corrosion of public trust. in my reporting i would say foia was one of the most crucial tools that are used on a routine basis to chase down information and get documents on all manner of things. it was also her frustrating tool because as ankarko and others have stressed the delays that you go through and when you are a reporter he wanted deadline so waiting six months or in one case 10 years to get the documents is definitely a very frustrating experience. i'm going to start with investigation that they did well before the internet was invented. at the time it was september of 1979 but a year earlier i had been reading obscure things to find out what was going on

behind the consumer's backs. most of my reporting was about corporate misconduct and government malfeasance and stories about health and safety and environmental issues. and in an obscure publication called brewers digest i read a little paragraph about how the had discovered a dangerous carcinogen in their called nitrosamines in nitrosamines are well studied cancer-causing agent and you don't want them in your food. you don't want them in your. i filed a foia a year later and just because in the brewers digest story said they alerted american brewers to the problem to the u.s. brewers association and everybody was scrambling on

how to fix fix it. i waded a year and filed a foia with the fda figuring that the fda had done some testing and wanted to get it but i also knew would take forever so i played a game of just having different numbers. and because sometimes i have more luck than talent and landed in the laboratory where chemists and i will just use his first name, don, had just finished tel he sounded enthusiastic about it but he wouldn't tell me what the levels were. i was looking in chicago in the local news and i wanted to do my own testing at the same places that i knew the u.s. brewers association was doing testing a place in massachusetts so i would have the same results that the brewers had and there wouldn't be any confusion about laboratory results. so don kept saying you got to file a foia and i said don iof

filed a foia. in the local news reporter and i need for you to give me some idea just one level. i was calling him every day and i said look don i'm sending a bunch of on monday in local news reporter and i need help and is not a scientific survey. i just want to have the results be useful and i said please were up on the table, sneeze do something, give me a sign and he said i'm sorry, i can't help you. you had to wait for your foia and i said please don anything can help you, sorry. all i can say is weekends were made for it. and that was the jingle for one of the companies so i had one that i knew was going to be high. this is at a time that the u.s. department of agriculture had

cited some companies for having nitrosamines levels that are considered a health hazard. interviewed the head of the u.s. brewers association and i don't know if i can use the word light but didn't tell the truth but he said the levels are very low and he called a minute in fact and he said that it was a mystery and they didn't know how they got in and how to get them out. i was able to do an interview with a a scientists a scientist suzette oh know we told the americans about not just about the problem but how to fix fix . you to change your molting processor that costs money. out of the 16 that i tested all but one had high levels are the only that didn't have any levels took out full-page newspaper ad in "the wall street journal" saying the was no nitrosamines

in it. many of the have levels that were clothing -- equivalent to the eating dozens of slices of bacon at the maximum level. i didn't get my foia answered because of all the publicity that was generated all over the world. the fda decided to release the result exactly what i asked for were than a week of my doing the story and the center for science in the public interest filed a petition with the fda asking in six months to get nitrosamines out of and outlet that happened. i think "the wall street journal" full-page ad did help encourage the industry to do the right thing. over the years i've had a very challenging relationship with the food and drug administration. the public information offered

to put a regular roadblocks in terms of getting information. i was in local news and their priorities was networks and they were just very unhelpful. the public information officers would get really agitated with me because i would go directly to the source as they did with the chemists in the laboratories if they aren't going to give me information i'm going to find somebody who will. at one point ahead of the public information office berated me in a very loud voice-over the phone. he said you know, you had to follow our policy. our policy is that you need to go to the public information office with any questions that you have. you cannot go directly to the scientist and sources.

and i said that's your policy. my policy is when you start giving me information that i pledged to go through you but until that happens i'm going to keep calling anybody who i can get answers from. so this heated exchange led me to file a foia about what the cost of the public information office staff was. this is in the early 1990s and as luck would have it began i have a lot of luck, i found myself here at the national press club in the ballroom down there sitting next to commissioner david kessler at a luncheon. he leaned over to him at one point and said you know i have an idea for you about how you could save money at the fda.

he looked pretty bemused that kind of went along with the new said what eu suggesting? i foia the cost of the public information staff in its $2 million. you could really does have a voicemail system that said fda press office, i'm sorry we can't help you today. [laughter] and he did something very brave, very courageous. it goes down in my history of my favorite fda commissioner. he took this with extreme grace and he took a cocktail napkin in the wrote down his home phone number on it. and i was so impressed by his courage without i never used it and i never bothered him. they continued to have a very

fraught relationship with the fda press office, not all of them but some of them. i did have some successful boy as on filings about adverse reactions, reports to medical devices. another foia that i did sell phones and airplanes were emitting radio waves that could affect navigation in mitigation with the pilots and this was before it was widely known and that was adopted quickly. another story that is so wild ride was not the fda. it was with the department of transportation. i filed a report that i had heard there might be something with the inspector general's office and report said there were about 16,000 pilots with

drunk driving convictions who had licenses to fly airplanes. that was interesting. they compared the national driver's registry to the pilots -- pilots licenses. why filed a foia with the national transportation safety board asking if there were any cases of pilots with drunk driving records who had also been involved in plane crashes. the case but i ended up focusing on was one pilot in the chicago area. he had driven and had been charged with drunk driving three times in chicago. and he lost his license to drive on the ground. he moved to wisconsin. he had another three drunk driving convictions driving in

the milwaukee area. then he was arrested for driving drunk without a license in the milwaukee area and he was put in jail. his airline which is a great carrier petitioned the judge to let him out or work release program to fly their airplanes. his pager went off in milwaukee went through chicago o'hare's busy airspace on his way to atlanta and he flew into kentucky mountain and when they did the blood test, he died, he had 12 in him at the time. so that was a really interesting story that came out of getting results from foia including i was able to then do a story like

a whole local news series where i found two psychiatrists one in baltimore and one in laguna beach california that were handling 800 alcohol at pilots in their practice. really interesting story. one of the things that interested me a lot was going into the history also because history is written by a person and not always what you think it is. it's not always what we believe and so i had an interesting one that came out of the national archives when a pile of documents was declassified and

it showed during world war ii volkswagen had maintained what was called a -- eight miles from the factory and they had women who they had basically, these women had been kidnapped by the from poland and ukraine and russia to run the factory during world war ii. these records were incredibly detailed. there were 365 babies that died in that time. there were only two babies that survived and i was able to track down these documents of the mother of one of the babies during a bombing raid. she had run eight miles.

she's had stolen her baby and hid in the forest and when the allied forces came in it was like a month before the allied forces came in but she rescued her baby and was able to track her down through foia. she still lived in wolfsburg which is where the factory is and where did your son work? at the volkswagen plant. it's an interesting deep dive into the history. another one and not give you one mark sample. there was a story about 72 workers who were enslaved outside of los angeles in an apartment house that had barbed wire around it. they were working under an armed guard to make clothing for sears and target and other companies. i talked to what was then an

immigration officer who had sat in a department house for three days and noticed all this fabric was going in and clothing was coming up that he never saw people. he went to his bosses and said i think their people being held hostage making clothing and they said well you don't know whether they are illegal or not he that's a labor department violation and that's not under us in another three years went by where they were trapped in this apartment house. eventually the law lone person to come in and the department of labor federal officials fbi and ins came in. there was video of this so i got

the video as i was working at 48 hours mack for cbs and they needed the images in order to tell the story. i actually even as. janet reno was at that point the tourney champ to say i filed a foia and they are saying in a waited for her at the national press club and she had her fbi agents around here and i'm trying to get video and they are saying i can't get it because of litigation and she just didn't really respond. but i ended up getting it by filing a foia in california with the department of labor because they had a copy because they had shot the video so was able to get the video that way and it made the story.

you could see all these women 72 women and one of them had to pull out her teeth when she had an infection. just stuff that i was able to do interviews with them. one of them had drugged to the guard with cold medicine and escapes to a buddhist temple and that's how it led to the bust of this apartment house. i will give you one more quick example and that is was working at abc news and at that point is the senior producer for 2020 off the air. bill moyer wanted me to go back on the air with bill moyers but i was supposed to start in two

weeks that i call from him asking me if i could do a story and go over to the center for public integrity where they had a copy of the draft of the patriot act, a new version of the patriot act which is going to be even more onerous on the public. i said okay but at the time i was packing up my office. he said if he could go over there right now and do the interview and if you could turn it around and what they used to call the story i said i don't start with you until next week and he said if you could crash it for friday and this is wednesday i want to get in on the air. so that was not going to be an opportunity to file a foia but i

had filed the foia with the doj and earlier time and what i found over my 30 plus years as a reporter is that a lot of it is relationship building. i would find people and agencies who would block my foia request so i could get it in a timely manner. it just takes too much time. so i went that night and i went to the doj senior officials home without calling at 10:00 at night and i knocked on the door. he came out, what do you want? i said i just want to show you this document that i have. i don't know where it came from, they won't tell me and i want to know if this is a real thing or

it's just somebody typing up something that's not real. he wouldn't touch it but he said that's making the rounds. i said well i'm supposed to do the story for friday night and it's wednesday. is there anyway because i don't have time for foia this time so is there anyway you could get me a copy of some kind of distribution list that shows who is has seen it and who signed off on it and where is this document going? he said i don't think so but maybe i will try and they said if you do could you get it for me tomorrow he said what you just drive by 14 straight here at 10:00 tomorrow and if i have

it we will see. so i drove by the next morning and i rolled down my window and tossed in came the distribution list and it showed it had gone to chaney's office. it showed certain people on the judiciary had seen it. grassley hadn't seen it and i thought that was interesting. i knew there was some kind of republican retreat that was going on and i went to union station and waited for grassley to come along to get on the train and said senator grassley i have this document that i want to share with you that the new patriot act and they see some of your colleagues have signed off on it and you didn't know anything about it which is amazing. so that was helpful. it ends up crashing the story

that i did the next day. i had to pull an all night or to get it done and ended up crashing the senate web site and the next morning and was on the front pages of the "washington post." bill called me the next morning and said can you do that again? i just want to say that i have the deepest respect for the history that we are celebrating today, 50 years of shedding light in the dark or resources of government and i believe the freedom of information act is one of the most impactful tools that i've used in terms of getting information in my investigations. it's not always easy and it can be very frustrating. you can take too long and sometimes it happens after you

do the story as if it was their story but they were sitting on the results and replace them within a week of my doing the story. i hope the foia world remains a vital part of how citizens can access information about how their tax dollars are being and it bears repeating that is u.s. supreme court justice lewis brandeis famously said sunlight is the best disinfectant. we need openness and transparency to have a healthy democracy and i would add now more than ever. [applause] >> roberta is taking questions. please line up at the microphone.

anybody? >> no questions, that's amazing. i spoke too soon. >> i'd mention the role of the enacting the freedom of information act originally and then throughout. we don't see much anymore of media litigation, maybe a couple these days. i think there is no hope of achieving some of the goals that alan and ralph and the people you mention would like to see without more gaetz. somebody and maybe a test of the social media are influencers to

give us some ideas of what could happen to help increase the visibility and the nature of efficacy for improving the freedom of information act. >> i to use the word media because i think of it in terms of journalism and now it's really the media. anybody can declare themselves a journalist. i have incredible oversight by lawyers and everything. they were looking over my shoulder to keep me out of trouble and there were always concerned with the kinds of reporting that i was doing especially in terms of corporate taking on big corporate companies. i had lawyers and i appreciate it it because i wanted to be able to answer their questions. i would say i personally do see

that there are pockets of really amazing journalist like propublica who is extraordinary and what the guardian does is extraordinary. there are now bloggers that are doing interesting work. one of the organizations and i served on the board a long time ago investigative reporters and editors more than 7000 investigators and journalists and at the poynter institute teaches journal is kind of a tuneup terms of tools. there's a place to talk about foia there and it's a great idea to have some kind of seminar where it journalists through the poynter institute for through irt. i think one of the things that is problematic for journalists is just the length of time that

it takes. you have a deadline and you need to get information fast. although i filed more foia; remember but i also found people within agencies who were sources who would help me either walk through it or give me the information that i needed. not usually from the press office. it takes tenacity and it takes time. i was given time to do my stories and i think it's so much harder now. i don't think i could do the kind of reporting that they did over those 30 years when i was given the resources that i need to go to germany go to asia and sweden and vietnam columbia. it's a business that is very

troubled and in flux. i think it would be interesting to advocate. tom i would say if you're you are available to do a seminar at the poynter institute are when i area has its convention of reporters which thousand show up and now under their own dime. you don't have television and newspapers paying for that kind of professional training anymore. it just doesn't happen in another organization is the women's symposium also has a so-called camp for we have trainers come in and talk about different resources. i learned a lot in new orleans in september or october about artificial intelligence, ai. i highly recommend perplexity.

it's a great tool because it shows where the information is coming from. he doesn't just give you information, it gives you the sources and the links to where the information came from so it's really helpful. perplexity, i highly recommend it. >> thank you. john clay from arlington and i found this fascinating talk. one idea that came up to me and i'd like to get your further comment is about the power of stories. when he told the story about the women fleeing it just riveted me. and with your overview of 4500 global stories written in more than 100 countries. i was just thinking so much is about you say people remember

statistics for 30 minutes and arguments for 30 days and stories for 30 years. maybe that's an exaggeration but maybe the comment on global education and i think the stories could be coming with education too. >> thank you. i was always seeing companies doing bad things and that's what i got out of bed in the morning to tell you about it at some point i thought well who is doing it right and where they? and it was in 2015 when the u.n. hadn't even voted on the sustainable development goals. the 17 global goals laid out what needs to happen in the world by 2030 but i was really inspired by them and i thought well how can you have an impact with them in the business community so i started this thing called aim to flourish at

aim to florist.com. and i got some professors in business schools to join me with it in terms of teaching what i thought about as the next business leaders there about the 17 goals and two write the stories to find an entrepreneur, ceo, somebody doing in some ways profitably so doing good and doing well at the same time. and to ask these business school students to go out and find that person and interview them and write up what inspired them to do something that is hoping to achieve one or more global goals and that would go to their professor and professor would review it and grade it and then it would come to ahead a group of journalists probe ono who

were helping to make sure the stories that came to us all matched our criteria. only half of them didn't so we only published half of them. but it grew. it now has more than 4500 stories written by business school students in more than 100 countries and it flourishes. it doesn't cost money. if the professors like it in the students like it because it gets them out of the classroom and gets them to meet someone that they admire and have a relationship with. in my fantasy about it was that it would encourage the students around the world to think about what kind of business do i want to work for in terms of doing good or what kind of business do i want to create that in some way is hoping to achieve one or more of the global goals.

also i award 17 flourish prices each year. i've learned to live and that sort of my old age product of what about doing a 180 flip going from who the bad guys are too are there any good guys out there and there are. >> thanks so much. go journalists. my name is rob and i'm the director of the library of renaissance project which is founded by ralph nader to protect and promote the library. 23 out of 26 libraries have been rebuilt to aruba -- or expanded. my observation is that both the left and the right both sides it seems to me would be very interested in understanding why

our government forests and bias in that we pay for can keep secrets from us. i think both sides resent that deeply. so there might be a really strong structure they are in a progressive movement and i want to participate if people would like to help organize it. >> thank you. i appreciate that. i love libraries and yes before the internet i would go to libraries in like a stamping get information and was all old-fashioned shoe leather. i think it's easier in some ways now but it's also you can get. you can just be sitting at the computer and i would say i always got so much more by going and interviewing in person.

it was so much richer to see the environment and explore and find myself asking questions that i otherwise wouldn't have thought up just from being there. so yeah these are complicated times that we are in and you would think that since we are all taxpayers that we have a right to information that the government agencies collect. it's for us so i hope and i'm a bit about it even though i'm an optimist, a realistic optimist i guess. i do feel slightly worried. i lie awake at night worrying about what's happening. hopefully really as tom said using it cannot getting it out there that people are using this

important tool of go rent that is crucial and you are inspiring me to think about, i know hundreds of journalists in these organizations of journalists who talk about why foia is so important. and to have thomas's speaker. thank you so much. this has been really illuminating for me. [applause] >> i'd like to make a plug for libraries to because the american library association, a lot of reading organizations are big fans of the efforts for freedom of information and transparency. so we have two more speakers who come from the same organization. they will come up here in a minute.

i'm going to start a discussion as i promised at the beginning to talk about the citizen advocacy center for more than 30 years in outside of d.c. in my home state of illinois. just like in d.c. were sometimes the climate such as watergate we learned was a big help in getting amendments passed the legislation and so too does that happen in other places. back in 2009 in my state of illinois with another governor leaving office amid corruption allegations and later a conviction illinois then have at least three of the last eight governors involved in corruption scandals during their tenure as governor. these created this statistic and definitely created an atmosphere

that something was wrong and something needed to change in the culture and a lot of people looked at the illinois freedom of information act and how to make it stronger. at the convergence of preparation opportunity at the efficacy center placed us an ideal position to impact come to have an impact on major reforms in the l. and i fully have just released under leadership and extraordinary executive director at the advocacy center for many years a comprehensive reform for the illinois foia. the state itself convened in illinois a reform commission to do her review and convene public hearings on the broad range of issues. this testified and provided materials and soon after the illinois commission released its

report in the attorney general of illinois called us and contacted us to become a member of their steering committee as well as some of the other good government groups and alumni to ask what could be done. the lesson here was it's always important to have a list in your pocket it how you want to reform the foia or whatever state statute you have to make it stronger because we started with a list and most of those became included in the next iteration of the illinois freedom of information act. that list contained certain requirements like the statutory creation of an ombudsman to mediate and enforce the foia. the production of electronic records in terms of a shortened response time limited copying charges added requirement that bodies get more details for the reasons for their denials as well as make settlement agreement works as a.

and we asked for making mandatory the attorneys fees in successful litigation and training for public officials. it was a public access counselor which has been in operation for more than a decade. we were trying to make the decisions that come out of that office publicly accessible because a runner glee you have the foia the decision. and i see you are smiling because you know what's going on from those offices. here to talk to us today is that alison cole of general counsel and is a senior counsel. of the energy and policy institute. and i can't wait to hear what

you are going to say what's going on at the state and local level. >> i think we will go back and forth a little bit. we are happy to celebrate the 54th amendment with all of you. i'm alison cole and with mike colleagues in on the council for energy and policy. talking about the influence really quickly. after the passage of the 74 amendments of foia there was a slew of legislation that enshrined public access to records. before this time there was, right of access and some did have laws on the books that inspired this movement for disclosure of the public document at the state level.

the last speaker talked about the public records on action and whether you are familiar with their own state public records law he benefited were heard stories that have been rooted in access to state and local public records. in recent history some stories that come off the top of your head in any given week are shining light on the radical right attempt to overrun the public school system. and police misconduct and led to reform. and state public records have an impact at the federal level with nominations in hearings especially for those that have positions of power and are

heavily involved with the state. so we are going to talk about and they can be different across-the-board. and we will make a pitch that you can and should utilize your state public records laws to round out your federal stories or just to learn more about your community so just a few facts to get us started some more closely resemble that statute and others have some nuances and that is partially because some of the statute enshrined the right of access to common law. it's the right of public inspection. in a lot of states you can go when with certain parameters for

you review records rather than wait for copies you can go and you will go up as and a rank that as a powerful tool. especially when we are talking about long wait times in the federal context. another example that is similar yet different or the exemptions are carveouts and state public records law. some of the exemption language mirrors the federal foia. states often have throughout other parts of their statutes specific exemptions that are usually problematic extensions with a particular industry like agriculture or energy infrastructure. that can create a black box around important health and safety data on. my colleagues on me to talk about these more interesting nuances so yeah.

>> i will talk a little bit about differences between the federal foia and the public records laws the differences among the states and things to be aware of when you are sending requests to local agencies. one thing there's a lot of riding and what bodies are subject to state records laws. we discussed congress is not subject to federal foia but some states do have their legislatures with foia but more and more states are changing that. state legislatures are deciding to change that and most recently in 2023 the arizona legislature decided we don't want to be subject to our public rec red laws anymore. indiana has a law or they are technically subject to their public records law but their claims of privilege are not just visible through the courts can determine whether those

privileges are correctly applied or not. they can basically do whatever they want. on the other hand some states have broad definitions of what public bodies or otherwise. going back to arizona other than this recent state legislature thing they have a broad definition of what a public body as it includes any public or decision support in whole or by part by money from the state or any political subdivision or expending money provided by any state or local subdivision. that's anything. bayard governmental bodies and there's a lot of availability out there. one other thing that is pretty unique among states is available in some some places is the idea of civil penalties. for example georgia has a statute that says that you can sue individual public employees in their personal capacity for neglecting to follow the law so

in addition to suing or suing them in their official capacity and suing an agency for failure to apply to public records law correctly you can sue them in their personal capacity and that's a way to hold them accountable and make them try to do better on the front end. another thing that varies state to state his different states have mediation or administered of appeal processes that can make make challenges marks as a bonus just having to file something in a state court where you need an attorney who is barred from that state. the statute varies in terms of how effective they are but one good example is the pennsylvania office of open records which is an administrative appeals process or you can have almost anything reviewed and it may not go in your favor but it's good option that looks at the withheld record.

other differences between the states and the federal and among the states is that deadlines can run the gamut but some states have very short deadlines that may be only a few business and some have big deadlines. they just say as soon as possible are promptly. you kind of have two just make sure you stay on top of them. i recommend that with federal foia request to but especially in states where it's important to stand top of them and make sure that they really are working as quickly as possible to provide records promptly. some states have what are called denials which is if they don't provide records by the statutory deadline it tonight and you are able to appeal at that point. so that's something to be aware of.

some things to look out for in states though our day are the related positions. some states have strict requirements for what they are able to charge for. michigan tells you exactly when they need to provide their cech elation. it makes them justify what fees they are charging at different points. .. basically looks and charge whatever they want to charge that could be hundreds or

thousands of dollars per request. there's not a whole what you mean to challenge that. that is something to be aware of. contrite to make your request more narrow as a result. a lot of the states has c waiver positions. but many of them don't. many of the states do have provisions is entirely discretionary. that makes it really difficult to challenge it. you should be requesting waivers whether it's in a statute. the statute. it does not hurt. definitely make an effort to do that. another fee related issue as many states don't have the shifting positions. many people talked about sue in federal court you can seek attorney fees if you prevail but that's not true in a lot of states. especially if you need to go find an attorney who were barred

and that statement if you are not barred there you have to hire someone else they're probably not going to want to do it for free. doctors note the shifting position makes a lot more expensive and a lot more difficult. and i think dean morrison mentioned in virginia have to be a citizen of virginia to file a public records request and arkansas yet be a citizen of arkansas to file a public record. proxy class for you. it's a lot more difficult than something to be aware of. >> some sort of making a pitch even though there are these places making a pitch to engage

your state level with public record so, one positive it can have a faster response time in the states about what is an unreasonable amount of time or promptly. sometimes courts will strike a balance in say three months is actually too long. which is a wild idea with how long we wait for federal requests. the other thing that is different and may be refreshing for people are the accessible officers. even when there's an official officer there's a person responsible and local or state body to respond to your request but you can follow up with them, usually reach them more easily more than the centralized. you can revise your requests. you can ask questions how to organize your documents? how going to write a request in this way they'll get me what i

want and in a way you will understand it. just more back-and-forth process. and then after you receive a determination you get more details about what went wrong. what's the basis for the denial if you choose to challenge it can be really helpful. then other is the mediation or adjudication process that are alternatives to how you can enforce a right to the state level. so far it seems promising. the national freedom information coalition conference this year so that the ohio mediation program which is an official mediation program in the court of claims, over half receive documents after engaging with this mediation program. so far those bodies are at helpful people are finding those helpful in the state.

the other reason to file state request as noted, there often connections between a federal work and state work through enforcement. through the siting of energy projects there all of these ways to get at questions around with the federal government is doing through the stage. always be looking and ask yourself of the state angle on your projects. some final thoughts and advice especially if you are looking at an issue from a national framework. there are a lot of great resources out there. one is muck rock. has a state-by-state guide short overview of the loss as a lot of examples of what's been done in the states. that's a great resource. you will see stories that are the result of extensive public

records results in the states. when you're challenging denial or getting pushback the press and organized. by the same way by each state regent mostly by local practitioners. with duties and obligations and their rights. on the state attorneys general often unpublished guides. it's powerful to bring a report from the state 82 the state body and say this is what the legal and your state senses your responsibility. not just when i say it. sometimes those are written in a way for pushback.

and then when you are looking for friends and the state press association of freedom of coalitions they operate at varying levels of activity you can consult the website and then go directly from there to your state freedom of information coalition. filing as a quick tips thing deadlines, be persistent and follow-up. call the office. call the public body more often than not before filing, after filing. and practice for do not be afraid to file. thank you for having us. [applause] [inaudible]

cooks hi, thank you so much for your time. i was wondering, if you talked t quasigovernmental agencies people in arizona sounds like it's extremely wide ranging. in one gets funding from the government too. so that's crazy to me. i was thinking about some other states like forgetful universities that it's a public university. could you speak a little bit to any other sort of organizations you have seen that a straddle that line and specifically universities. if you file a foia for university get information? thank you. >> yes, public universities are subject to public records laws. it gets a bit more complicated with private universities. and really the best resource is to look at the open government

guides but they haven't divided up by topics you can scroll and find what bodies are subject to the state public records law. you can look at and each individual state or go to that question and scroll through each state to see what each state allows. you can do some googling and say foia this entity. usually there's a requirement that indicated on their website somewhere. it may be kind of hard to find but if you have a mention of it somewhere that's a good way to figure it out. and then i would say it doesn't hurt to send in a requester. let them tell you they are not subject to the law. >> it is true. most will have some steps of procedure how they want to do it. for the universities it's easy to question some of the exemptions are exemptions for

universities your student file or personal file. an issue that comes up in the context are that use of corporate funded centers at universities. courts have found that they are in the same goes for foundations. it was the other thing? for universities to there's an exemption carveout for a certain kind of research. talk about the agriculture industry or things like that. things can get a little tricky there. none of these things should dissuade you from trying. >> okay for. >> and jon craig from arlington. thank you for a fascinating presentation. i wanted to see the purview of this conversation your activities. it says here you were an assistant district attorney for

the philadelphia district attorney's office in conviction, integrity unit. i want to raise this case that i think 17 years ago a judge in philadelphia was sending to present that were private citizens. and some way it was getting fantastic kickbacks. just recently he was granted clemency by joe biden. i did know if you could comment on that situation, is that appropriate for this discussion? >> i can just say really quickly that people probably heard the recent pardon of cash for kids a judge. so that is this case. because it was a federal case is why biden was able to commute his sentence. so if anything related to that to the federal foia not pennsylvania's right to know law.

the courts are not subject to the right to know law. and pennsylvania in particular has very strict rules related to criminal information. it's hard to get any information related to criminal cases. >> i would be interested in your perspective about the top three states in terms of foia and why. thanks. >> we have practice in all 56 but we do engage in some states as the research requires. take enjoying the provisions in georgia that have a civil penalty any of these places that do have mediation bodies, they give official opinions it can

help build a body of law that's lacking in the courts because of the lack of statutes. we will, but issues there won't be anything said. i think this is the best places because they provide extra incentive for compliance in any extra point of access for researchers and hard-hitting issues you're going to get pushback on where to go. cooksey think it can vary based upon what agency you try to get records from. what records are trying to get and how protective they are trying to be of those records. something that's really useful with multiple states as you target the states that have shorter deadlines for providing

records. states that have good administrative appeal or mediation. you can more easily challenge any withholding. soon top of recent developments like alabama recently revamped their public records law it's important to the republican governor and they have a deadline for responding to records when they did even a year ago. there are always changes to be aware of. it can change what you do. cooks thanks. back to the university part he benched in the foundations for this might apply out applied to that lot will have a nonprofit set up to the university it's clearly our university. is that a large way around that?

>> it does depend subject to disclosure of the record. ways to get around brainstorming touch points of entities they have so much engagement with the offices within the universities that deal with that foundation directly. you can end up getting through those touch point you are in a state to support the idea that naturally it should extend to the records. it's usually a glut good place to start. >> any other questions? there you go. one of the big topics of conversation there was about the proliferation of quasi-

authorities like university adjacent foundations we were just discussing. how that's prevailing white paradigms it's brewing and some state legislatures, rolling back foia laws and response to election kind of conspiracies and requesting of materials from election officials, harassment of election officials in response to some of that misinformation and disinformation out there. i'm wondering if you are seeing any of that backlash at any of the state level and what might people in this room freedom of information advocates how they might respond to that. >> think a lot of advocates been accused of a requester here and

there. i think one of the troubling impacts is around exemption on the federal level and as i said before summer almost the same at the state level around personal privacy information. and where you would have flits an entity that's doing business with the state. sometimes extremely cozy relationship. just kind of the records freedom of information act and the freedom of information laws would want you to know about the identities of the people doing business with the government is now being held back because of privacy concerns. we are real threats to public officials. a cultural shift in the application of these pre-existing exemptions.

as to the legislatures they've never been all that easy to work with. when they were subject they have at their disposal carveout just for the legislature also. experience with those. cooks just the kind of things. will often limits the scope of the request that can even be answered by them. or give us a bill number or we won't answer your request. so it has not changed all that much in our experience of advising researchers. >> one thing i advised people to do especially for getting people on the phone is to be nice to them. it makes it a lot harder for them to say you are harassing

them if you come across and say i'm just not that familiar with this law can you explain to me but the problem of my request isn't wise not specific enough what other information you need from me in order to process this request? then they have to try to be the bad guy instead of it being like oh, they are just annoying. they are doing things inappropriately. ask if you are like explain this to mean, i'm just trying to understand. i'm trying to submit a request that i am entitled to submit and understand what it need to do in order to comply with the law. that is what he recommended people. >> really believe in transparency. they believe in their role in providing records. sometimes the request sometimes your language in their language don't always add up.

some of the great things of working in the states there are times that we have these conversations. it took so quickly add the person you're talking to, probably most of the time is not the person who was the hold up. i previously worked in a local agency handling public records request before starting to do it on the requester side. and most of the time people were mad at me for not giving thanks it wasn't my doing. i was not the delay. there's also something to keep in mind. >> be nice but don't give up. >> yes. be persistent but don't be a jerk. >> okay, any other questions? thank you. [applause]

i want to make a few closing observations and announcements of. i was asked by socha week to remind everyone sunshine week is march 16 through the 22nd pretty go to the website and learn about the activities for that. i wanted to tag along on what roberta rapkin's said about what foundations using money and helping to finance the big stories that come through this persistent use of the freedom of information laws around the country. i know in our case it's an advocacy center the joyce foundation and the mccormick foundation the joyce foundation the study of the act of the mccormick foundation training individual journalists and groups journals to not go away. believe it or not even though

you think that is an instinct. they have to know the laws and there standing on the right path in the right foot in order to get this kind of information. pincus and wiseman who said we need another or ralph nader for this time. you like to point out that we do have one. but what i think we really need is everyone to summon their inner ralph nader and learn themselves how to use the freedom of information laws in your state, the federal level, hunter bring the litigation and train the lawyers the enforcement of these laws. when did conclude by thanking the center for responsive law and everyone who has participated in making this event such a long and thorough observation of the 1974 amendment to the 1966 freedom of information act two. thank you and thank you for that

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