openpolitics.com

A Wizard at Prying Government Secrets From the Government

The Freedom of Information Act was enacted in the 1960s to help citizens gather information on their government. In practice, it can seem as if Kafka and Orwell sat down together to plot a nightmare of bureaucratic complication.

“It’s impossibly slow, and it seems on many levels arbitrary what exactly they’re classifying,” Mr. Goldman said.

.. The office of the secretary of defense, a man who runs a department with an annual budget of more than $500 billion, was reported, in 2013, not to be accepting FOIA requests because its fax machine was broken. The C.I.A.’s FOIA website has been down for some time, Mr. Leopold said, and there seem to be few signs it will be fixed. And there is one small Treasury Department office, he said, that has no working email, fax number or address, and that does not answer the phone.