>> this is c-span3 with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week, every weekend, 48 hours of people and events telling the american story, on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs at our websites. and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. >> going on now on c-span2, a day-long discussion on the influence of islam in the middle east and north africa. political party officials from mo rack co, egypt, libya and other countries are talking about what it's like in their countries and the political change they see coming. president obama signs the jobs act this afternoon, it eases regulations on small businesses raising capital. whether on line or through initial public offerings, c-span will have live coverage at 2:10 eastern. today marks the second anniversary of the worst mining accident in 40 years. 29 workers died in the upper big branch mine in west virginia, a house committee recently held a

hearing on mine safety and lessons learned. we'll have that hearing at 2:20 eastern. at 5:15 eastern, a look at president obama's 2013 budget request, for the defense department. defense secretary leon panetta is joined by joint chiefs of staff chairman dempsey in explaining the spending plan to the house budget committee. you can see the hearing on c-span3. this weekend marks the anniversary of the bloodiest battle to be fought in the civil war. up to that point the battle of shiloh with almost 24,000 casualties and we'll tour the baltimore field with the chief park ranger stacy allen saturday at 6:00 p.m. eastern. and sunday night at 7:00, the angel of the battlefield and founder of the red cross, clara barton operated the missing soldiers office 18 washington, d.c. boarding house until 1868. join us as we rediscover the third floor office as it's prepared for renovations. this weekend, on american

history tv on c-span3. >> a louse committee gives the federal government a c-minus grade for ability to track information about freedom of information act or foia requests. the report came out as american university law school held an event on transparency and openness in government. in this hour-long session, susan long of syracuse university who has had a long career working on freedom of information act issues. >> good morning everyone. happy sunshine week to you all. we've seen the sun trying to poke out behind the clouds here at the washington college of law and the campus of american university. i'm dan metcalfe of the

collaboration on government secrecy or cgs for short. i'm pleased to be able to welcome both our auditorium audience and our viewers remotely, both on the washington college of law web cast, and i understand c-span will be broadcasting this as well. this is freedom of information day. and i believe everyone here on site and many folks in our viewing audience know that that's the day of the year that we celebrate openness in government, transparency, sunshine, call it what you will. and that date is chosen and has been traditionally used because it's the birthday of james madison, who is regarded as the founding father of freedom of information. this is the fifth freedom of information day program that we've had here at the law school. and it's the 18th one that the

collaboration on government secrecy has been able to hold in the last year and a half. i'm pleased to say that pardon me, in the last 4 1/2 years, very pleased to say that we're continuing to hold these programs with great regularity. again, this is the 18th and for those of you more mathematically inclined that means that since our second program in january of 2008, we have now held 17 or exactly three per month. which is a record of which we're quite proud. we also celebrate international right to know day in september. our audience here knows what freedom of information day is but worldwide the international right to know community knows that that is on september 28. and we'll be having our sixth annual international right to know day celebration this coming september 28th. so, that's something to look forward to. but today we continue our

tradition here at the washington college of law of not only holding a day-long program and celebrating james madison's birthday in particular, sunshine week in general, but we also have the tradition of presenting the robert vaughn foa legend award. this is one that we've now presented, this is the fifth time and we're very pleased that we have an honoree who came in from out of town as a matter of fact, to receive the award. she's the first lady to receive that award of the five of the -- of the four others who received it thus far in the last four years. and we're very pleased also that we have last year's award recipient, allen morrison, an associate dean at gw law school, to make the presentation. we do things sort of academy

awards style f. you win best actor one year you have to present best actress the next year and the like. i'm pleased that professor morse son has agreed to continue that tradition. professor morrison, i'll introduce you first. everyone should know that you are the founding director together with ralph nader of the public citizen litigation group which i think is fair to say has been over the years, over the decades, the leading openness in government litigation group in the land. and then you retired in 2004 where you went to then teach at a number of law schools, stanford, nyu, harvard, georgetown, tulane, in china, and even here at the washington college of law. professor morrison has argued 20 cases before the supreme court including some particularly significant ones.

and he was a well deserved recipient of this award last year. i'm sorry to say that professor vaughn himself is unable to be with us this morning. but professor morrison will present the award to professor long. well, that sounds right. we're at an academic institution, we have law professors here, veries in lar i suppose, a small community, then professor long will be giving you the benefit of her long, long years of wisdom in this area that's for sure. so, without anything further, we try to stick to tight time limits as best we can. let me pass you over to professor allen morrison. >> thank you and welcome. i did not teach at all of those

law schools in that short period of time between 2004. i'm fast but not that fast. since we're celebrating foia day today i made a resolution i'd have to file at least one foia request to make at perfect day. unfortunately i have a client i need have him sign some papers before i can file the request so it will be deemed to be timed today although it won't be filed today. deemed is my favorite word i tell the students, it's a meeting of let's pretend as in it didn't really happen but we'll pretend that it did happen so when you see deemed in all of these opinions you know it's really not true but they are pretending it is for other reasons. there's an old saying, that i'm from the internal revenue service and i'm here to help you. well, today we're going to turn that around a little bit. saying today is i'm sue long and i'm here to help the irs. and the department of justice

and the fbi and the dea, and just about everybody else in the government. she's really here to help them. they haven't quite figured that out yet that she's really there to help them but we all know that she is. of course she's really there to help the american people understand what their government is all about which is after all the purpose of the foia or at least that's what everybody has said it was. when most people think of foia they think of it in terms of exciting revelations, scandals, abuses, abu ghraib, fraud, waste and abuse. those are important because scandals and misuse of the government are always important to the american people. but they occupy a very small portion of what foia is all about and why we have open government. and they don't focus on why

ordinary citizens should be concerned about what their government is doing and not doing on a regular basis. that's where sue long and her late husband phil and her current side kick who is unable to be here today, david burnham working with track are doing for the american people. they truly appreciate the value of data. small bits of really important information. but they also realize this data is meaningless unless it can be accumulated and put together in some sensible fashion. they understood far before me and almost everybody else how important the computer was going to be in figuring out what the government is doing. and how important electronic records were in being able to take the information that was there, run it through a computer and come up with new ways of

looking at information which nobody understood had any significance at all for the public before. so they understood the importance of computers and electronic data and the importance of combining the two of them together. and to produce information that was interesting and important because it told us things about our government we could never figure out in the absence of that kind of combination. of course it was available because those were not really secrets that were being hidden. there was just information that was in an inconvenient form and was useless unless somebody like sue long could figure out a way to put it together. that's what she and her colleagues have done. but of course before there was all of this data collection, there were the manuals which she got out of the irs.

and these are really important because although they didn't have the word law written on them, they were all about the law and what the government thought the law was and what the government thought the law was not. there was every reason these should be released because that's what we're supposed to know about our government, what the law is. there was of course no basis to withhold them and she prebailed in getting these manuals released. the one thing you have to say about irs manuals they are not very sexy. can you imagine being the public relations person who has to draft the press release, irs enforcement manual released today coupled by yawns. those of us who know how important those manuals are recognize the great service that sue did not only with regard to the manuals that she got released, but the precedent she set and what it told everybody

else about having to disclose what the government is really doing and thinking about the obligations under the law. there is one other point i want to make and that is, if you pardon the double entendre. that sue is really a long distance runner. you have to be willing to stay in the fight for a very long time. my calculation is it is almost 40 years you have been doing this. i know because that is how long i was doing it too at public citizen. there is no way that you can continue this kind of work unless you are prepared to look at it in the long run. it may not seem like it's 26 years in all these cases, but sometimes it feels as though it is running 26 years, if not 26 miles. surely, some of the lawyers in some of the cases with you, felt it was going on forever as we

passed on to lawyer after lawyer to keep up the battle. if you weren't willing to go the long distance, you know the bureaucracy will wear you down and not get what you want. so sue long, better than anybody else, understands the importance of being a long-distance runner. for that reason and all of the other reasons that i have given and others have given, i am honored to present this award to you today, sue. congratulations. it says in recognition of the remarkable career as a successful requester of government information and creator of litigation of four decades of the freedom of litigation act, foia award to susan b. long. [ applause ]

>> tell me where i'm supposed to stand. >> folks, while these formal photographs are being taken, we have another very particular tradition here at the washington college of law. for our broadcast viewers, you may not realize there is a leading case going back to 1972 called vaughn v. rosen that established the legal mechanism of which freedom of information cases are litigated. named after that case like for example a miranda warning was named after that case agencies now file what are known as vaughn declarations as a means for foia litigation cases to be adjudicated. we have a vaughn declaration in that spirit to read with respect to professor long. it begins, wherea susan b. long began working with the freedom of information act more than 40

years ago, when she was one of the first persons to realize the act's potential for shedding light on federal government operations. whereas, together with her husband philip long she used with uncommon success in its early decades, as an agents of change at the internal revenue service. whereas, she promoted government openness, also as a remarkably successful foia lit i ganlt leading to the creation of such lit i gags precedence as long versus irs, in which the government received only its second foia denial. after the vaughn v rosen case itself, by the way. whereas, more than 20 years ago she founded the transactional records clearing house known as track w david bernham, which has through both foia requests and litigation made comprehensively available to the public detailed information on federal enforcement staffing and spending. this is the last.

whereas, in so doing, she has uniquely influenced the development of the foia during its formative years and beyond. therefore, susan b. long is singularly deserving of this recognition as recipient of the 2012 robert vaughn foia legend award. there is one more thing. as befits the type of legal document that the government has to file in court in freedom of information act cases, the final sentence reads as follows. it is hereby declared under penalty of perjuriry in accordance with 1746 that the foregoing is true and correct. i give you professor long. [ applause ] >> thank you, dan and thank you, alan, for all those kind words.

you know, when dan called me to let me know that we were all going to award me this very significant honor and it had the word legend in it, i immediately thought, that means i'm really old to be a legend. at least i'm still a living legend and not a dead legend. sometimes if you live long enough, you, too, could become a legend. it started when i was a student at the university of washington. i thought about, what should i say that might be interesting? i'm a statistician. i knew you did not want to hear about databases and statistics and all of the wonders of that although i get very excited about that. maybe i should think back about, you know, what was it like back in 1970 when first started the

foia activity and think about what's changed. i really hadn't done that. you know, you don't really think back that long. you are too busy in the present. so i want to sort of contrast and tell you stories and contrast that and then hopefully close with my vision of the future. so, i need to paint this picture of 1970. i am a student at the university of washington. my husband to be phil long is a small family business. and he gets audited by the internal revenue service. an ordinary event happens to many millions of people over the years. and, you know, he feels like and takes the law very seriously. he felt that he had paid his

taxes and he was an honorable man. the irs wasn't really very nice to him. they did some unbelievable things. including threatening him with a jeopardy assessment. we didn't know what a jeopardy assessment was. at that point in time, i looked it up and found it was a procedure, thankfully somewhat changed to have more due process where anyone from the irs can come without saying you owe a dime and seize all of your assets forever and there was no court review. period. that is how things were set up. it was pretty astonishing and scary. as you can imagine, you suddenly had the thirst for knowledge. you know, what are you going to do? and we really -- you know, this is 1970. we really didn't know about the

freedom of information act at that point in time. it was in the media a lot when it passed because the news media was a really big force then. and so we kind of, you know, read some stuff and it kind of stuck in our brain. and thank goodness for carnegie libraries and our traditional public libraries and librarians. we found a good librarian and we asked. we pulled out the freedom of information act and read it and we thought, wonderful. we wanted to know the instructions to staff were, because what happened seemed -- we just couldn't believe it. was this sort of normal or was this some rogue agent or something like that? and, you know, freedom of information act said all staff and it must be made public. period. simple. and i'm a statistician. i wanted to see information about how they were working.

what happens if you went down path a, what were the odds, if you went down path b. to make a long story short, you know, we asked for this information originally because we thought it would help us. right? but the pace of events moves slowly, although looking back, it was rapid in comparison to events today. but they didn't progress along. so we didn't get the information in time really to help us. we decided, you know, this is wrong and the law says this. you know, the government should comply. and so we decided we would persist. you know, we went through the formal procedure of making requests and got turned down. it was a big surprise. you know, the law said you are supposed to appeal it. so we appealed it. and we got turned down. another big surprise. so the law said that the remedy was you could take them to court.

well, at that point in time, this is before the 1974 amendments. there is no award of attorney's fees. there is no possibility of that. you know, us taking the irs to court is kind of a scary prospect, right? neither of us -- i'm really poor. my husband was even less conversant in how you would even approach that kind of thing. we talked. we knocked on doors. we didn't have any connections anywhere. you know, if you are persistent and you knock on doors and call enough people and ask questions, and the uniform response was from every single tax attorney and cpa is, no, you don't want to do this. this is totally stupid and foolish. first of all, you won't be successful. you know, big irs. us, little. secondly, you will make the irs

mad. and let me tell you, they can be really nasty for the rest of your life and you don't want to do that. so, we thought about it and we said, you know, but it is just not right. so we went to washington. never having been to washington before, we just couldn't believe this could possibly be the way. congress or somebody. so we went knocking on doors not knowing anybody. but we are very persistent. that is one thing we are, very persistent. through that, we got a referral to bernard finstewald, who had been involved in the committee side staffer in getting the freedom of information passed and was then in private practice as an attorney. we called him up, and he was good enough to see us. we went to his office and laid it out.

he said this is normal. what you have to do is call the government's bluff. the way you do this is you file suit in court, and then they know you are serious. and they will turnover the records to you. here's a copy of a complaint. you just have to change the words around a bit and file it and you are in business. and we decided, okay, we can do that. so we filed first a suit against the internal revenue manual, which we had nosed around and found that was, according to the manual itself, the single official compilation of agencies' policies and procedures all marked official use only. you know, 32 feet of shelf space that irs contended they don't have instructions to staff that affects a member of the public. and we went after some basic statistics because we found

that, believe it or not, at that point in time, it was classified information to know how many audits, high income versus low income, how many audits of big businesses versus little businesses, how many audits in washington state versus d.c. and versus new york, versus kansas. roadmap to tax evasion. that cannot be released. so we filed suit. guess what? the government didn't fold. suddenly we had a lawsuit on our hands. it ended up that because in fact the irs wasn't terribly cooperative after court orders, it ended with a series of 12 lawsuits. along the way, the 1974 amendments came in to get attorney's fees. we got a very young fresh out of

law school teen still going strong to take an appeal. we thought -- on one of them, we thought the court will listen a bit more to somebody on appeal if it shows they are an attorney and got them to take it on for us pro bono. then they said, they didn't have a lot of work. they said, we could do some other things. so, you know, led to 12 lawsuits. okay. what was different about lawsuits back then? i thought about that. a couple of things occurred to me that are really, really striking that occur before, and it's no longer true. number one was you got discovery in litigation in court. now, you may not appreciate what

that means, but it's a world of difference, because right now, government comes in, you know, they sign some generalized statement nicely written by i assume government attorneys to clinch the case. doesn't say much. signed by somebody who usually doesn't have any personal knowledge of whether this is true or not, and it is taken as gospel unless it was bad faith. and that's a really, really hard bar to get across. back then, that wasn't the case. and you got to see an actual judge. amazing. you had an argument in front of a judge. here's me, you know? the thing we did is we asked for -- we wanted to depose some people. we had a set of questions we wanted to give and have them answer. i remember judge beats. we were very lucky we got that judge. very, very good judge. and of course, you know, i'm

appearing, you know, pro se, doesn't know what they're doing. the judge wasn't likely to allow me to, in fact, you know, interrogate big government officials. waste of time and everything like that. he was turning me down. we didn't have an attorney. we talked to people, and i remember the parting words from one very good attorney as i was headed out the door. he says, the worst thing happened to you, you get turned down. what you have to do is say i want to make an offer of proof. he didn't explain what that meant. when i was turned down, i knew, okay, this is what i had to say. so i said, i want to make an offer of proof, not having the slightest idea what that actually meant and hoping it didn't mean i had to do it right then until i could find out what it meant. okay. i remember the judge's head came up. he looked at me. i could see suddenly i was being