Sarah Abdurrahman
Sarah Abdurrahman is a producer for On the Media
Go FOIA Yourself!
Friday, March 02, 2012 - 01:22 PM
On this week’s show, we have a few stories exploring the subject of transparency. Inspired by the story of a woman who discovered the FBI had a 436-page report on her after sending in a bunch of personal FOIA requests, I decided to make the government get transparent with me as well.
We talk a great deal about FOIA—the Freedom of Information Act—on our program, but until this week, I had never considered doing a FOIA request on myself. In hindsight, it seems so obvious! It’s like sending out your DNA to learn about your genealogy—except instead of finding out your family origins, you get to learn what information the government is collecting about you. Sounds fun, right?
Fun, and surprisingly easy. To submit FOIA requests about yourself, all you have to do is write a letter to the specific agency whose files you want. You don’t even have to get it notarized, as long as you declare “under penalty of perjury” that you are who you say are. To create my letters, I used the website getmyfbifile.com, which allows you to input your information and select which agencies to generate letters for. If you aren’t comfortable putting in your personal information, you can also just print the letters with blank spaces for you to write in the details. And if you don’t want to do that, you can go to the different government agency websites and find detailed instructions on how to submit a FOIA request.
On the program this week, I explain to Bob why I think it is likely that the government has a file on me. You can listen to that segment here.
I printed out nearly a dozen letters, to local FBI offices, FBI headquarters, the CIA, Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security. Bob compared it to sending out cereal box labels for a toy. I'm pretty excited to find out what my mystery prize is.
It could take months before I get any responses to my letters, but we will keep you updated when I do. In the meantime, why don't you go FOIA yourself too? And let us know about it if you do!
And on the theme of transparency…here at OTM we are going to be more transparent with all of you by posting short videos of what goes on behind the scenes (behind the microphone?) at our show. To start it off, here I am talking to fellow producer Alex Goldman about my FOIAs:
More in:
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Conservative Bloggers Vindicated, Advice for Leakers, and More
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An 11-year-old and his 3D printer
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Who’s gonna pay for this stuff?
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A Source for Sources
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A New Incentive for Cord Cutters
-
A Journalistic Civil War Odyssey
- Department of Justice Warrant Names Journalist as a Possible Leak Co-Conspirator
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The Totally Legal Subpoena
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Angelina Jolie's Secret Test Results
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With IRS Scandal, Conservative Bloggers Feel Vindicated
Comments [6]
Normally I do not learn post on blogs, however I would like to say that this write-up very
pressured me to take a look at and do it! Your writing taste has been amazed me.
Thank you, quite great post.
Honestly, is it that hard to just apologize for not attributing something to it's creator, add the attribution, and move on? Especially when that's clearly what the Creative Commons license stipulates? I've read your responses and FurryGirl's, and your behavior is not at all what I would expect from an organization that I think of as "the good guys". I'd like to believe that my faith in your journalistic integrity has been well placed over the years, but this has shaken it. Apologizing and making right is an easy thing to do, and it's the right thing to do, and you're apparently not willing to do it, yet you are willing to take the time to edit viewer comments on your own site so they don't look as damning as they did originally. Talk about being seriously beyond the pale.
Living in a country in which it is taboo to have a simple discussion of an author's work is too scary to imagine. This post, and Furry Girl's reaction to it, is a great example of why copyright protection/Creative Commons exists - to provide us with a framework whereby public discourse can happen while simultaneously promoting authorship.
Cracking down on what is a very worthwhile message (we *should* take advantage of any means by which to access information the U.S. government keeps on us, per FG's original point) seems counterintuitive and, to me, just plain wrong. I'm sorry you guys at OTM have to deal with this.
Bernie -- please see our response to these accusations here:
http://www.onthemedia.org/response/
I'm disappointed that On The Media failed to attribute either the author or the name of the news blog it quoted in the FOIA story it broadcast. That blog is protected under a Creative Commons license. On The Media's failure to properly attribute that work under the terms of that license demonstrates a lack of journalistic integrity, if not outright theft.
Moreover, this seems rather hypocritical of On The Media, which frequently points out journalistic integrity failures of other news media outlets. Shame on you, On The Media.
-bernieS
The Columbia Journalism Review has a new FOIA column by Erin Siegal, a journalist who released a book of FOIA dpcuments from the State Dept. This week the column talked about how to sue for records/ FOIA in court pro se-- it's here:
"My Lawyer, Myself: Suing the government for access to info, pro se"
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/my_lawyer_myself.php?page=all
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