Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

EFF shines sunlight on docs it has “pried” from the feds

Over the years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has amassed a large cache …

It's Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan celebration of (and request for) government transparency. Most of transparency concerns aren't technical in nature—open meetings and open records law are two of the biggies—but the Electronic Frontier Foundation's contribution to Sunshine Week looks to be a boon to tech journalists and advocacy groups.

The EFF has put its entire archive of government documents online. These have been "pried loose from secretive government agencies" through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits over the years, but EFF has scanned and indexed all of them, then created a custom search engine to make browsing or digging much easier.

While the documents have been used by EFF's own attorneys already, the new central repository makes it much easier for third parties to see the same material without having to file another FOIA request of their own. For instance, if you're interested in seeing all documents related to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the search engine makes that simple. In seconds, you can be viewing exciting documents like the Tentative Agenda for ACTA meeting in Tokyo (which is unbelievably vague; "Lunch," "Continue Negotiation," "Coffee Break," and "Conclude Discussion" basically sums it up). The EFF's documents include material on National Security Letters (NSLs), the government's Automated Targeting System (ATS), and various telecom lobbying records.

"Until recently, documents obtained under FOIA often gathered dust in filing cabinets," said David Sobel, EFF Senior Counsel and director of the organization's FOIA Litigation for Accountable Government (FLAG) Project. "We believe that government information should be widely available and easy to research, and our new search engine makes that a reality."

Courtesy McClatchy-Tribune Direct

The document cache is a nice place to start, though a central FOIA database that combined scanned documents from many such organizations would probably be more useful. The project is more than just a way to publish material that would otherwise sit in a room at EFF headquarters; it's also a way to crowdsource the information-gathering process a bit. FOIA responses can return thousands of pages of documents, and while EFF's own lawyers can't simply let anonymous Internet readers do all the work, they're happy to have the help. EFF asks that anyone who digs up an interesting tidbit in the documents pass it along for further analysis.

The project is a reminder that transparency isn't just good practice; in many cases, it's also good for the bottom line. A graphic produced by McClatchy-Tribune Direct for use during Sunshine Week shows that exposing corruption can help the government save money. In 1989, federal whistleblowers brought both increased transparency and $15 million in recovered cash to the government. In 2007, the government recovered more than $2 billion in taxpayer money thanks to whistleblowers.

Sunshine Week also promotes a host of other transparency strategies, including a new website and a project that hopes to make even the text of Congressional bills more transparent. "In February 2009, Congress passed the largest piece of spending legislation in history and no one read the bill," says The site's mission, as you can guess from its name, is to push for enough time between a bill's final text and its final vote to enable legislators to actually examine the completed text in full. The recent stimulus package in question only had 13 hours from final text to vote.

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