and we were successful. that is amazing. that is not the kind of thing you necessarily see today. the second thing that was so amazing was the justice department didn't appeal. wow! we didn't realize this was important, but the justice department appeals can stretch it out ten years. that's nothing. so, if you want records in anything besides an historical researchers -- they didn't appeal. amazing. so, irs had to produce those. wow. they weren't terribly happy about it. and there were a few problems. they did produce it. by that time that statistic which were bound volumes back

then, internal use only. old stats, we asked for the current copy. we went back and asked for the next one because it was no longer current. we couldn't have it. we made another request for that and turned down. we could see this is going to take forever. we found out through a lot of hard work and lots of other names of documents of a broader nature and filed another one and turned down. we filed suit. we appear in court and guess what? justice department attorney said, you know, your honor, i'm inclined to agree my client should turn it over. i said, well, you know, we have a problem here. each time we need a new one, we have to go through a court process and get a court order to

get it? this can't be the case. the judge peered at the justice department attorney and he said, you know and he said i'm sure we can discuss that. and i immediately here on pro se. i run out this proposed order requiring the release in the future of not just those named documents. i knew they just changed the name and numbers and the court order did not mean anything. there is no time limit. guess what? the justice department attorney signed it. he didn't even change it. i didn't realize how astounding that was. not only, you would think he would have gotten his hand slapped. the next time that came up when

this more sweeping one came along, he signed it, too. guess what? that is what is guaranteed access to us. we had to go back into court thanks to public citizen litigation group. i really have to stop and acknowledge the wonderful depth in the more recent years with the pro bono support they provided. it is essential to get legal assistance and others as well have stepped up to the pro bono attorneys for us. it is absolutely critical. anyway, that's different. today, this does not happen. justice department in general, we did a report and it is out there attracted and despite the really impressive words of

president obama and the impressive words of our attorney general talking about not defending agency withholding unless it really was consistent with the purpose of foia, there was real harm potential there or that the law just didn't give them any discretion. it's not worth the paper its written on. absolutely no implementation. that's a really, really sad commentary about how things have changed. today in the way the court process works, the good thing is you can get attorneys fees. i also learned a new wrinkle in getting attorneys fees in the suit by public citizen to enforce that court order. the process is the check is written to you and you sign it over to the attorneys.

guess what i got from the irs? i got a 1099 miscellaneous income this year for all those attorney fees on which i owe taxes. so, you know, the irs is having the last word here. this is not fun. let me tell you. not good. anyway, it is wonderful to have attorneys fees. but the court process and the critical nature of the justice department's role which just is simply being the hired gun currently for whatever the agency wants to withhold has created an environment after 40 years with no real sanctions teaches disrespect for the law. teaches contempt for the law. so after 40 years, you know, it's really sort of amazing

that, in fact, there are federal officials that actually pay attention to the law because there really is no real enforcement mechanism here in the law itself. if they really want to go to the mat and withhold something, there are a lot of wonderful fr foia officers that can make a difference. if it is against an agency, they do that at real personal cost because that is not the way to advance your career. then there are other agencies and we tend to deal with law enforcement agencies. they are used to pushing people around. they are very powerful. why should they pay any attention to the law? it is just very dismal. so, that's kind of my 40 years ago and today. however, i have a vision of the future. i think that, you know, it would be wonderful if congress wanted to pass real sanctions.

i'm not going to bet on that. it hasn't happened in 40 years, i think it is very doubtful. i think the web and social media today provide an entirely new enforcement mechanism. that's through "a" transparency and "b" public shame. what would it be like if every time a foia officer responded and reached a decision whether that is the administrative or on appeal and they reached a decision where it was instantly the correspondence on the web for all to see. number two, all of the tracking databases for which the statistics which are

questionable that everybody is bragging about in doing a good job. what hap data for each of the cases were also public and the little chec description of what was being asked for and how they responded was availableli to see and to question, if, in fact, which has been our experience that there is a lot of inn acucuraciey accuracies? f the public had tried to get information could upload that information if it was in public. their own youtube video to tell what the significance of this was either to them or to the public interest? so, it's available on the web. then you have the marvelous

search engine which could find all of this stuff for you easily. whatever topic you wanted. if you were thinking about making a request, you could go in and find what other people asked for and how it was handled and compare and ideas about what records might be there that would be responsive to your request. and you could look at records and say, look right there. every time they are doing this. this is not good. you had really hard facts behind it or you could look at it and say and region a, they respond this way. region b, they respond this way. they are 180 degrees apart. what would happen then? well, i predict that that really -- based on 40 years of experience when you are trying to get that record out -- it is not the lawsuit. you know how long that will

take. you have to use these other mechanisms. now we really have this possibility. so, a year ago david and i launched foiaproject.org. it is on the web site. obviously it is a huge thing to do everything that i described. we started with court decisions so we update daily tracking all of the foia cases. we just added an upload facility. hopefully people can, particularly attorneys or requesters in litigation, because we have to pay fees. it is non-trivial. this is through the cs funds support. we asked for more money to extend that series. we have various search mechan m

mechanisms. we are interested in suggestions on it. the more exciting news is we have received funding to expand it to the administrative level. that is a huge area. we will try it from two directions. one is an upload facility which is on beta form on the web site now so you can upload your requests or commentary about it. secondly, we have the funding to develop all of the computer infrastructure and in the funding to go after one agency and all of their database foia tracking and how they handle each case and put that up on the web. we can look at analysis that way. >> we are wondering which agency was that? you said one agency?

>> yes. >> which agency is that? >> immigration and customs enforcement. >> you made a lot of people in the audience less nervous. just for that clarification. >> however, we see the need to do that everywhere. we see no reason. indeed, if you have good examples of agencies that are making this kind of class of records available, agency a, i think, you know, we should celebrate that. agency b you know, they are not. how come? we are going to reach out now that we have this upload facility and asking government to provide their own commentary. the whole record is public. that's my vision. thank you very much.

[ applause ] >> we will take some questions from the audience. i'm going to exercise my prerogative as the moderator to start off and folks can come to the mics at the sides of the aisle. you mentioned congress and i think you mentioned it with respect to your concern that congress would ever strengthen the sanctions of the foia. going back the four decades, congress has paid attention to the foia in a cycle. '64 and then '86 amendments and '96 amendments. 2007 amendments.

now congress has finally broken that cycle with 2009. this may take as a leading question putting it in lawyerly terms. has congress paid sufficient attention to the foia over the years or are you optimistic that perhaps out of the ten-year cycle, the congress will look at the foia and amend it more regularly? are you optimistic about that? >> i'm agnostic. i don't think one should count on it. i would welcome it. i have seen many, many of the amendments, which were good intentioned, agencies have been able to frustrate. so, in fact, all the tracking and so many days and all of the very liaison you can go to. if you are an agency -- that

doesn't mean they don't supply anything, but there are things they don't want to supply. it doesn't make a bit of difference. all that's happened is government agencies used to be honest with you. they said no and they told you why. that doesn't happen anymore. there are all of -- it is very much and i know this is really a strong statement, but in my earlier stages of my know, the justice department hired me to do studies on white collar crime and tracking white collar crime. it has always been an interest of mine. in many requests, what we have is it has been so corrupted that we now have organized illegal operations within agencies that they are just really hard to

tell the difference between some organized white collar crime organizations and what is going on in some agencies with foia. guess who their top gun is? the doj attorneys that are defending all of that. i'm not real optimistic. in fact, there were sanctions, as you recall, in the law and my husband and i were the second, i believe, the second ever to get those sanctions invoked. the first step of it where the court found the circumstances surrounding theg raised issues. it went to the civil service. we got the finding and that was the end of it. i'm agnostic. it would be wonderful. >> if you are agnostic, you may

pray for congress to pay more attention, would you not? >> you know, they can do a lot of damage, can't they? >> on that note, there is a gentleman on this side with a question. he has raised his hand. he is standing at the mic. >> i'm paul. in what format this database you are building of judicial administrati administrative. are they pdf files? >> you cannot insist on certain things. we make pdfs out of them. we make them searchable. we load them to cloud. we are trying to make it as widely public. working on indexing of it. i want to add more statistics to it once we get a longer list.

there is a lot of work behind the scenes that is required as you all know if you look at what you get in pacer. you can't just find out what easily here are all of the suits from the fbi. they are entered in different ways. we need to come up with ways of doing this that is the smallest margin as possible. we are updating daily. right now, in terms of docume s documents, we will make pdfs out of them. >>fantastic. >> encourage anyone. >> question on this side of the room here. >> i'm wondering if you could talk more about the sanctions that you might like to see enforced. if think would be targets. individual foia officers or

agencies themselves or whether or not the courts will be too reluctant to enforce them or keep the agencies from constantly moving the ball and making those sanctions really stick. >> what i talked about was a vision of what we all could do, the public, if we set our minds to it that doesn't require a change in the law and doesn't require the courts. after 40 years, i guess i don't want to bank that is going to be a solution. what is it that we can do and remain optimistic that these laws are really important? we don't want it to be a dead letter. we talked to so many people that are frustrated by the process. they just give up. what can you do to build something? i really believe transparency.

that is the magic word. we have seen it in other areas. look at the money trail. it is possible money trail. social media these days really opens up the possibility of communication. and connecting people that don't know -- you know, they're isolated out in america some place. they can go -- they can find out -- they can find out who's active. what's going on and suddenly have a connection there. they can upload their story. they can tell it. doesn't require anybody's permission to do that. and i really think that, you know, there are lots of foia officers. this is a movement towards professionalism there. i have known a lot of really good ones, you know, both head of the agency, and, you know, working in the ranks, you know, fielding and they're honest to

me. they say this is -- i don't even get to look at the document. you know? chief counsel's office tells me what to write. there's not a -- and they're very upset about that. but you know, they have to work within the confines. but the head of the foia office if that head of the office wants to do it, real huge professional cost to do it. i'm not going to sign off on the letter and persist and ask questions, because not all -- a lot of requests are really pretty routine. you know, so the volume of, you know, so you can sort of attack them as how do we handle the routine matter. then there are a smaller number that are really sort of the inner secrets from a policy perspective. it's possible, i have seen it done. i have also seen foia officers that lost their job in the -- their life is made so miserable that they take early retirement

or they're shovelled off to another position. what's the countermand? it was how severe the penalty within the irs and it was very clear that the dividing line between low serious/high serious was did the public find out about it? okay. i mean, that's realistic because -- so the counter, you get in trouble when you release something and your boss is unhappy with the press. okay. there's no countermand here. it's really secret. it's very, very rare that that, you know, gets any traction and anybody knows about it. unless it's just really high profile issue. people are effective with the media. it's so exceptional. why don't we make this a more general threat and then foia

officer that wants to obey can say, well, do you want to see that on "the new york times" tomorrow morning, right? it might change the balance. did i -- >> so given that, sue, everything that you have just said and given your experience, do you come down in favor or against sanctions against individual foia officers as opposed to sanctions of the more institutional nature? >> well, i personally think that you do need to hold people accountable. i certainly wouldn't hold necessarily the people that are low level, but the foia officer who is signing that letter, because it comes out in the foia's officer name, you should hold that person responsible. but you see, my way of holding them responsible is public

exposure that will give them more leverage, should they want. because i hear the story, you know? so they can say, you know, they can say well, do you want it known, you know, that you are doing x, y, z. how do i justify this? they will have as a result more leverage. >> that goes back to your earlier point that just as sunlight is the best disinfectant, this may be the best of deterrents? >> right. more information out there systematic. so you know what's going on. because i think foia requesters would be more effective if they really solve a whole terrain. they can see what had happened. it could be more effective in their own. there would be some best practices that they could be see. they could have a sense about what is possible and what is correct. >> best practices foia requesters? >> how does agency respond, how

do we as a requester get the information, right? >> yes. >> yeah. >> and so you know what to expect and, you know, that being forewarned is very helpful. >> gentleman on this audience looks semi-forewarned at least. >> jim snyder. my question has to do with conflict of interest guidance for foia officers. there's lots of discussions about how to get foia officers to comply with the law, but it's not generally thought that they may have blatant conflicts of interest in actually serving their role. many officers don't just do foia. they're lawyers for an agency and they have many other roles. for example, i have been researching a particular agency and the foia officer also does all the vetting for the federal advisory committee. this agency it happens to be i'm interested in investigating how that agency does the vetting office. there's no public disclosure

that the person i'm asking is actually -- i'm actually checking on the foia officer as it turns out. i didn't know that early on, and they don't disclose it. well, this is not an isolated phenomenal, a lot have these blatant conflicts of interest. should they disclose they're actually the -- not only the vehicle for fulfilling it, they are the person who is the subject of the foia request? should this be disclosed and we have so many other conflict of interest guidelines that we try to have check an balances, is this an acceptable way to conduct foia in the federal government? >> to have conflict of interest guidance -- >> a conflict of interest. instead of having a separate neutral, you go to the say sap

meeting, they present themselves concerned about truth and then you find out they have a dog in the fight and it's not being disclosed. we would not accept that in a legislator or a judge and i don't think it should be permissible to begin with. >> i haven't considered that, but i'm for openness. the mechanism of, you know, it certainly would be very useful to know that. and have a mechanism for doing that. but i haven't really thought in depth about that. >> i can tell you from my own experience that there ought to be a mechanism in all instances, of all agencies, whereby someone has an individual personal interest in the matter should not be handling that matter and should, feor example, i can

recall having to recuse myself in foia matters. that should be the norm. >> they should just disclose. >> i would say if a foia officer has an individual personal interest in any aspect of the handling of that foia request or any other matter in the agency, that person should step aside and allow someone else who has no such interest handle it. >> but how are you going to do that for requests as to how the foia office operates which is what i'm advocating here. >> if the request is for records, then it should be processed. i can tell you one instance that the justice department where because the request had to do with the activity of the foia office, which is what repositing, that wassed adjudicd in a separate way.

>> you have more sort of structure in the department of justice. but lots of agencies, a small agency and the practicality of it. you disable everybody that touches foia, well, who's left? >> well, there's a legal principle that applies there and it comes up what ena group of federal judges sue for a salary increase and the principle is if everyone is recused, then nobody is. >> so many lovely rules and practice. you don't see much of. we shouldn't think of the practicality of it, but certainly sunshine seems reasonable. >> one other thought. the sarbanes-oxley has a law where the ceo of a company and the chief financial officer has to sign off on the financial statements and they are personally liable. >> yep. >> why not when it comes to foia where you have an agency official who has a self-interest because you're investigating agency c