Obama Administration Unveils New Open Government Initiatives, Gets Sued for Denying Access to Visitor Logs
Last week each of the 20 federal cabinet departments rolled out new open government initiatives as the Obama White House continues to make transparency a priority.
The new programs run the gamut (read them all here), but one of the highlights is the release of data about releasing data.
The Justice Department will become the first federal agency to release its Annual FOIA Reports to the public. These reports include statistics on the overall number of FOIA requests, agency response times, how many requests are filled, and personnel costs to process FOIA requests. The White House says that eventually the other agencies will do the same, allowing “members of the public, including public interest organizations, scholars, and the media” to better track agencies’ open-government performance.
Despite this new push towards openness, many advocates continue to point out that the Obama administration has an “uneven record” so far on open government issues.
One such area that continues to be fought over is access to White House visitor logs.
The Bush White House had notoriously kept its visitor logs private, and the Obama White House was doing the same, until several lawsuits for the records put added pressure on the administration. In September, the Obama administration announced a new discretionary policy of voluntarily publishing the visitor logs on its website starting Dec. 31.
Despite that move, the conservative open government group Judicial Watch sued the U.S. Secret Service last week for access to still-unreleased visitor logs under FOIA. According to the group’s
press release, it made multiple unfulfilled FOIA requests and conducted failed negotiations with the Obama administration over visitor logs from Jan. 20 to Aug. 10, 2009.
“The courts have affirmed that these White House visitor records are subject to release under FOIA law. If the Obama administration is serious about transparency, they will agree to the release of these records under the Freedom of Information Act,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in the release.
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press notes that Judicial Watch’s case will likely hinge on whether the logs are considered “agency records” subject to FOIA. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, claims the records belong to the White House and are thus exempt. At least one federal judge, however, has rejected that argument.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on December 7. You can read the complaint here.
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Jacqueline Klosek, Senior Counsel in the Business Law Department of Goodwin Procter LLP, is a frequent author and commentator on data privacy and security. You can email her at jacquelineklosek@gmail.com -
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