Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas
My prior employer filed a FOIA (Freedom of information Act) request for her (Secretary Hillary Rodham Clintons) records and they (the State Department) came back with a response saying There are no responsive records to this request which is impossible.
And this isnt just her this is common. People who tend to run these agencies tend to think they are above these types of disclosures or theyre afraid of the political consequences Daniel Schuman Policy Director for the online email & cellphone cyber-
security group Demand Progress tells Texas Insiders Jim Cardle.
What we never suspected was that some (administration officials) would go entirely off government email entirely and create these types of home-brewed servers that violate the spirit of FOIA and that are an effort it seems to avoid accountability.
When asked about the difficulties a totally separate home-brewed system like Clintons would present Schuman said:
Well it makes it impossible. The FOIA Officers inside an agency wont have access to this information. Nor do they have control over this information. So theyre entirely reliant on the person who is running it to be responsive and to provide the information in response to the FOIA Request. That is simply a system that does not work right. In fact President Obama has come out and said the folks (in his Administration) are not supposed to use these types of home-brewed systems that you are supposed to use the government operations.
One thing that the Secretary had said was that they were having problems with the State Departments email systems so they did this as a matter of convenience. But if you run an agency and you find out that the government email system doesnt work well then maybe you should fix the email system at the agency instead of trying to cut yourself out of it from everyone else. That doesnt make a whole lot of sense.
This is one of the things that we had heard about. We were looking for officials that were using inappropriate aliases said Schuman.
One of the things weve seen is that (government agency) administrators will get additional email addresses while theyre inside the agency so while you might have an email for Hillary.Clinton@state.gov they will actually have other emails like JohnSmith@... and you would never think that this is the person (being FOIAd).
The ultimate accountability for trying to be secret is something that the American people and the citizens of each state need to decide for themselves. And we need to demand better of our public officials that they need to operate in the open to the maximum extent possible and this is a violation of that principle Schuman noted.You cant open up your newspaper or read anything on-line these days without seeing at least one or two articles that have only been possible as the result of a Freedom of information Act Request or FOIA as its called said Schuman Policy Director for the
online email & cellphone cyber-security group Demand Progress.
Government officials do know whats going on but they say that they dont. When a Freedom of information Act Request is filed were able to get the emails & other information to show how the decisions have been made who was responsible for them and the processes that took place.... and this happens all the time.
Freedom of information is the lynch-pin of the publics right to know especially for the things that they dont want to tell us about or want us to know.
Senator Cornyn from Texas as well as Senators Charles Grassley from Iowa & Patrick Leahy from Vermont have been working on a transformative bill thats poised to pass the Senate with FOIA being 50 years old this year. This bill addresses the problems that weve seen with FOIAs implementation over time and that will address bureaucrats and others efforts to dial back FOIAs efforts toward being more closed said Schuman.
Senator Cornyn has been leading the fight along with Senators Grassley & Leahy to address the problems that weve seen crop up over the past 10 or 15 years to make sure that this is a process that works in the internet age and something that works for everyone in the future Schuman said.
Visit Schumans DemandProgress.org site for more information about the current F.B.I. vs. Apple cell phone case as well as efforts to protect your online email & cellphone privacy.
