The other day a journalist asked me how to deal with the FBI when they constantly redact names and basic details of crimes that you could easily get from your local police. I’m not an expert on the FBI, but I can refer folks to people and resources that might help:

• The Reporters Committee guide to FOIA, has a great explanation of how to appeal denials and even sue, including sample appeal letters and litigation filings.
• The National Security Archive’s guide to using FOIA includes added tips.
• Department of Justice FOIA Guide is hefty but it goes into detail in the lingo and nuances of FOIA. Learn this and you’ll be able to converse better with the feds and not get bamboozled.
• If you have questions, talk to Lucy Dalglish at Reporters Committee, or Dan Metcalfe, who was a czar of privacy for the Department of Justice for decades and now promotes transparency at the Collaboration on Government Secrecy. He knows the Privacy Act stuff down and can probably help you.

This entry was posted by David Cuillier on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 9:04 pm and is filed under FOI strategies and tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.