FCC Is Not Complying With Freedom of Information Act Requests, Alleges Lawsuit (arstechnica.com) 105
burtosis writes: The FCC is being sued for failure to turn over documents related to "correspondence, e-mails, telephone call logs, calendar entries, meeting agendas," between chairman Ajit or his staff and ISPs. Given the FCCs recent transparency issues, which appear to be directly ignoring the vast majority of feedback from Americans that are pro net neutrality, a nonprofit group called American Oversight is trying to force the real conversations the FCC is holding into public view. They are also asking for any communications with the media, Congress, and congressional staff. Two extensions for missed deadlines have been given, but the third extension was denied on July 24th. The FCC also ignored a FOiA request by Ars for the DDoS attack during the public comment period on net neutrality. With the current administration's attitude toward transparency and catering only to the largest corporate donors, will the American people have any meaningful influence in how the country is run anymore?
Re:Government in General (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution is simple: just don't record in meeting minutes or any fashion whatsoever the things you don't want the public to know about.
That seems like a strange "solution"
What you're saying is "the way to avoid committing a crime, is to commit a crime".
Re: (Score:2)
Yep... That's exactly what he said...
Well, what he said was to not keep RECORDS by not putting anything into writing where it is subject to FOIA laws. This is EXACTLY the reason that some think Hillary did this "Private E-mail server" mistake, it was an effort to keep E-mail conversations from being subject to FOIA requests (or that's how some see it). The problem for Hillary is that she kept all these old E-mails around instead of routinely trashing them (mistake 2), then she didn't just turn them all ov
Re:Government in General (Score:4, Insightful)
then [Hillary] didn't just turn them all over when they were requested
Except she did turn over everything relevant. Since there were intermingled emails, turning over everything was not necessary, no matter how it was painted or looked like. This doesn't mean her email use wasn't a huge error in judgement.
Like my company's default E-mail retention policy of 14 days. Crazy as it sounds, they do this for liability reasons (as well as limiting server space). Record retention policies are usually about limiting legal liability in the case of a lawsuit. "Oh, you want the E-mail from 30 days ago with that court order? Sorry, we only have 14 days worth due to our records retention policy..."
I'm not sure how that would fly should you actually go to court. You're required to keep certain types of documents for far longer than 14 days, whether they are in email or not.
Re: (Score:2)
then [Hillary] didn't just turn them all over when they were requested
Except she did turn over everything relevant. .
I'm going to stop you right there because the rest is pointless if you don't get this.
IF you receive a court order to turn over your E-mail, YOU don't get to pick and choose what is turned over. It ALL goes, regardless of if you think they are relevant or not. You and your lawyers do NOT get to sort them out and filter them in any way. She was legally required to turn over ALL the E-mails she had when the order was received, not a filtered subset. Had she destroyed them BEFORE she reasonably knew they w
Re: (Score:1)
IF you receive a court order to turn over your E-mail, YOU don't get to pick and choose what is turned over.
I've no idea what any court order said in the specific case you're talking about, but in general what you've said here is clearly bad advice. What you have to turn over on receiving a court order will depend on what the order says. It is incredibly unlikely to just say "your email", it might for example say "all emails in your possession", in which case your advice is probably reasonable (but seriously, refer to a lawyer not to some random idiot on Slashdot) or it might say "all emails relating to subject X
Re: (Score:1)
Except she did turn over everything relevant. .
I'm going to stop you right there because the rest is pointless if you don't get this.
IF you receive a court order to turn over your E-mail, YOU don't get to pick and choose what is turned over. It ALL goes, regardless of if you think they are relevant or not. You and your lawyers do NOT get to sort them out and filter them in any way. She was legally required to turn over ALL the E-mails she had when the order was received, not a filtered subset. Had she destroyed them BEFORE she reasonably knew they where under a court order, she'd be in the clear from the court order's perspective.
OK, the first part was that she deleted emails in 2014 after turning over related emails to the State dept, well before the first subpoena in Mar 2015. Which was specifically limited to items related to Libya [washingtonpost.com]:
Re: (Score:2)
The problem of course is that we're expected to take her/her people's word for it that she turned over everything relevant. Whereas if she did commit a crime, she'd have to be pretty stupid to then turn over the evidence when given the opportunity to censor it out. Unless the crime were so minor that the obstruction of justice penalties, weighted by the probability of getting caught, would be considerably more severe.
>You're required to keep certain types of documents for far longer than 14 days, wheth
Re: (Score:1)
The problem of course is that we're expected to take her/her people's word for it that she turned over everything relevant. Whereas if she did commit a crime, she'd have to be pretty stupid to then turn over the evidence when given the opportunity to censor it out.
Do you have any proof that any email of consequence from her was found on any other server? You do realize there's always 2 sources for emails when 1 is a "private" email server?
Re: (Score:2)
No, I have no proof - what sort of idiot would come forth with proof that they engaged in illegal activities with her? That would pretty much guarantee that no other politician would ever engage in such lucrative deals with them in the future.
I assume she engaged in illegal activities because she is a politician, and that seems to be the safe default assumption. Doubly so for those who become rich - you don't get rich on a Senator's salary, or even a President's. (How do you recognize an honest politician
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
> In general, you don't want the public to know what goes in to making the sausage because it's kind of disgusting.
I'm quite ok with how sausage is made. If you're disgusted by it, you might want to examine why.
Re: (Score:1)
Aren't you the ones who claimed that Trump would change all that ? That your beloved peodophile with the orange top would change everything, that he would make america great again ?
Where's the change ? Are you still going to find ways to blame the democrats again, despite a republican president, a republican senate and a republican house ?
Of course you will. You guys are simply just that pathetic.
Opacity: The American Tradition (Score:5, Insightful)
"With the current administration's attitude toward transparency and catering only to the largest corporate donors, will the American people have any meaningful influence in how the country is run anymore?"
Uh, current administration?
Can someone tell me when the last time any administration was completely transparent and somehow didn't cater to their largest corporate donors? For fucks sake, this has been going on so long it's now considered an American tradition. Not even you great grandfather remembers a time when this wasn't true.
The American People became irrelevant long ago.
Re: (Score:1)
This administraton _IS_ transparent.
We can see right through them.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
They are *not* transparent! Trump's dad was a real man and Trump will tweet you to death if you say otherwise!
His dad, maybe, but I heard Trump himself wasn't man enough to join the army. If you know what I mean.
Re:Opacity: The American Tradition (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
The FCC position has not changed during this administration - I don't see any reason to bring that up and I don't see any direct involvement from the administration in the FCC's handling of this. What attitude towards transparency are you referring to ? POTUS taxes ? Bogus collusion smears from anonymous sources by the CNN?
I am no fan of Trump but none of those arguments has anything to do with governmental transparency.
That is like saying Obama's administration was not transparent because he didn't show hi
Re: (Score:1)
Native English speakers don't refer to it as "the CNN".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess it depends on your political prospective.
I saw Bush as somewhat opaque, but not unpleasantly or unreasonably so. Clinton was documented as a liar and was very misleading and opaque when push came to shove politically. But Obama was the textbook definition of opaque for 8 full years.
I don't think Trump is opaque in the least, which is actually partly responsible for his PR problems. What you see is what you get with Trump, warts and all. He tweets out ill-advised stuff based on his feelings at
Re:Opacity: The American Tradition (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously? Some low level pawn takes some USDA information off line for a reason you don't like and you bludgeon Trump for being opaque?
Which FOIA requests are you concerned about? As I recall there are complaints that Obama's administration didn't cough up a bunch of stuff that didn't seem to be fostering transparency... Stuff about Benghazi was routinely slow rolled as was information about Clinton's involvement, ostensibly because the "public story" didn't match the "actual facts" and there was an el
Re: (Score:2)
if stringing together unrelated thoughts into a confusing mess is thinking for you, then yes, we get to see how Trump "thinks".
Re: (Score:2)
Yea, I don't think Trump's tweeting is a good idea either, but you have to admit that it's exactly the opposite of being opaque... It's sort of a blow by blow stream of how Trump thinks though things, unfiltered, unvarnished and unPC. I see them as more of a brainstorming session where Trump is spit balling his ideas to see how they sound... Decidedly NOT filtered or edited, transparent. He's not hiding anything, good or bad from his twitter followers.
Re: (Score:2)
Now, I suppose if you think there was some kind of improper relationship with the Russians during the campaign he's trying to hide
Yes obviously there was.
Citation please? (Hint: It may be obvious to you, but it's not based on any factual evidence.) There's been a whole lot of bloviating over the prospect, but no real evidence that anything improper happened between the Russians and Trump or his people. People goina believe what people want to believe I guess.
Re:Opacity: The American Tradition (Score:5, Informative)
Not even close to true. See how many times Judicial Watch [judicialwatch.org] and Legal Insurrection [legalinsurrection.com] have filed lawsuits for information that's supposed to be public record. There is still standing lawsuits in the courts as holdovers from the Obama administration, and several cases where people in the previous administration have directly refused to turn over information that's public record despite court orders. If you think that the current administration is bad, then the previous one would be right around the blackest of nights, on the darkest of nights in terms of transparency. The Obama administration was very good at showmanship of trying to peddle transparency but that was it.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo and ended up being worse for civil liberties than Bush. He promised transparency, but his legacy is the war on whistleblowers [salon.com] and an expansion of the powers needed to prosecute that war that now belongs to future presidents. [twitter.com]
Re: (Score:2)
You are comparing 8 months to 8 years. Can you even give a meaningful comparison with such a disparity of time frames? Especially when speaking of a something that inherently moves as slow as government?
I'm not a big fan of our current POTUS but perhaps, just maybe, we could give him some time to clear out the old Obama holdovers and see how their replacements act before calling him worse than Clinton, Obama, AND Bush?
How long should we wait before judgement? I don't know, two years perhaps, let him go t
Re: (Score:2)
Please cite some actual evidence, not just regurgitating your left wing propaganda. Saying you are transparent (like Obama did) is not the same as being transparent. The Obama administration was the least transparent presidency in modern times, cutting out reporters regularly, using white house staff to photograph and film instead of reporters so they could control and "produce" events to their liking, stonewalling FOIs (there are still dozens pending from the Obama administration days) lying to judges so
Re: (Score:2)
https://newrepublic.com/articl... [newrepublic.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, that article has zero evidence of any Trump wrongdoing. He was a real estate developer. Organized crime sometimes used real estate investment to launder their money. That is the only factual evidence contained in that article, everything else is innuendo.
Re: (Score:2)
When... (Score:1)
have they ever?
Re:When... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ajit Pai... (Score:2)
He has a lot to lose if it were to be made completely public.
they really have FCCd themselves (Score:2)
who in their right mind does not do a post mortem or at least send a email (OOB) when their infrastructure is suffering from what you might call a DDOS
under american law would they have to turn over records to prove they didnt send anything ?
John
Be careful what you wish for (Score:2)
Among that supposed smoking-gun treasure trove of information you want, you might find things that you didn't want to know about.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about him but you will be pissed when Comcast or time warner charge $10 a month extra so you can stream from fox. Don't think that will happen? Both own the "fake" news and not fox so they can make a Devine stream that forces you to pay and since theirs travels on their network it is free.
If you want results.... (Score:1)
Did we have any with the previous administration.. (Score:3)
You seem to think this is a new phenomena but the American people DID NOT have meaningful influence with the previous administration or the one before that or the one before that, and so on...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, the current administration is the most transparent in decades. The last administration was the least transparent based on actual facts and historical evidence (as opposed to liberal propaganda). Furthermore, the current ADMINISTRATION is populist in most of it's positions, as opposed to the Republican party in general who is much more pro business as you indicated.
What "vast majority"? (Score:2)
Citation needed. Badly...
Jail time for contempt of court (Score:2)
Do what happens to anyone else when they disobey a court order. Send in the US Marshalls (FOI go through federal court I believe) and arrest everyone there and throw them in jail for a week for contempt of court. Then haul them before the judge and let them explain how they are going to meet the FOI and give them a week to do it. If they don't do it or make good faith progress, throw them back in jail and lose the key. Also revoke any position they hold for failure to discharge their office. That may h
Re: (Score:2)
mod parent up
Re: (Score:2)
There's more to the story than the parent suggests.
The US Marshals ultimately get their marching orders from the DOJ, which in turn works for the President.
Ultimately, the only way charges can be brought is if the President decides to enforce the law, which isn't mandatory in practice. (Congress has yet to impeach a President for not enforcing a law -- and there is a long history of Presidents ignoring laws).
That sets up the administrations current annoyance:
* President Trump knows he has the authority to f
Re: (Score:2)
The reason Nixon was forced out in the end was that there as actually a criminal act (the Watergate break-in). So far there is zero evidence of criminal activity (meeting with someone, anyone, who says they have evidence that your political rival is engaged in criminal activity is not only perfectly legal, it is also your civic duty).
I might think the Russian investigation was legitimate if there were evidence that someone:
1. Actually hacked the election, which did not happen.
2. Actually had evidence of
Re: (Score:2)
Nixon's crime was "Obstruction of Justice" by firing everybody involved until he got to somebody who would halt the investigation.
There was zero evidence that he was involved with Watergate, or that it was done on his orders. Conjecture sure; but no hard proof. (Unless you count the missing minutes in his tapes as "proof" - no court would).
If there actually was proof that Nixon was directly involved in watergate, he would have been screwed to the wall faster than you can say "wha?".
I don't think that trump
Re: (Score:2)
The Obama FBI and Comey started investigating Russian Trump ties/collusion/influence whatever you want to call it back before (or right after) the election. That is easily 8 months plus. (That is how Susan Rice was able to unmask people and then leak it to damage the Trump administration.) They didn't find any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Muller has access to all of those records and works plus his own team looking for several additional months.
This is exactly opposite to how criminal investigations
Re: (Score:2)
Look: I've not really said anything in this thread defending (or promoting) anything the Democrats have done. To me, it's a turd from a different animal. Different, but it's still a turd.
I've watched the (global) political shitshow long enough to know that however much I like (or dislike) any given administration, in the end not much really happens because the Federal government was designed to be a roadblock — specifically to avoid waves of major changes with each new election (as is found in other n
Re: (Score:2)
No argument from me that the Trump administration is not filled with career politicians. This added to the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of Obama holdovers trying to sabotage the administration (a la 121 leaks in the first 120 days) and numerous PR blunders by the administration has definitely been detrimental to the Trump administration, but you can't argue that the media is extremely hostile to Trump as well (CNN had something like 89% negative coverage of Trump since the inauguration).
Re: (Score:2)
The media is, on the whole, hostile to every president. It comes with the job; competing interests and no way to actually meet them all.
You think Obama didn't have news media hating on him? It was about the equivalent time in his presidency that "Obamacare" was coined, he passed a massive (and controversial) bailout bill, and bumper stickers with him photoshopped as "the joker", and "why so socialist" was everywhere — to say nothing of the birther crowds, and newspapers & talk radio saying he'd re
Re: (Score:2)
Is that why Chris Mathews had a thrill run up his leg during the Obama inauguration? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Obama had the friendliest media coverage in the last 30 plus years. George W. Bush was treated so unfairly by the establishment media that it literally launched Fox news as one of the largest cable news outlets because people (especially conservatives) were so sick of the rampant left wing bias. By any meaningful statistic George W Bush and Trump have both been treated horribly by the pre
Re: (Score:2)
Do what happens to anyone else when they disobey a court order. Send in the US Marshals (FOI go through federal court I believe) and arrest everyone there and throw them in jail for a week for contempt of court.
Since the days of George Washington, there's been a longstanding tradition of Presidents ignoring laws they don't like. The fact of the matter is the executive branch executes the laws. The President is the one who holds the reigns of the DOJ, which governs the US Marshals and FBI(among other things, of course).
If the executive wants to quash transparency and refuse FOIA requests, it can tell the DOJ to ignore enforcement, regardless of what the law says. The courts can't force the US marshals to do anythin
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the president is immune to contempt of court, but not the FCC.
The FCC is not part of the executive branch:
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute (47 U.S.C. 151 and 47 U.S.C. 154) to regulate interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. It reports directly to congress.
So no, it is not on Trump that the FCC is violating legal FOI requests and is in contempt of court. And it's members are not
Re: (Score:2)
I must not have been clear: The FCC is not part of the executive; not question there.
My point is that the President can direct the DOJ to ignore the FCC violating FOI requests.
I'm not saying he has but that he can.
Re: (Score:2)
Fair enough, though as you point out, he has not.