AP: We Sent FOI Requests to 100 Countries, and All We Got Were These Lousy Denials….

The Mother of All FOI Audits is in, and the results are predictably grim. Seems wherever FOI laws are passed, age-old stonewalling tactics quickly set in and mire the process. A couple of nice nuggets from the complete story: The promise is magnificent: More than 5.3 billion people in more than 100 countries now have [...]

Add One More to the Osama FOI Derby…

Two updates on the Osama Bin Laden FOIA requests, courtesy of The Atlantic Wire, which is covering the heck out of the issue, by the way…NPR is filing…and here is the AP’s stance on why it filed. Good stuff here. cd Related articles The AP Lays Out Its Case For Revealing Osama Bin Laden Footage [...]

More on the Osama Bin Laden pics…

The AP has joined the fray: The US government may be forced to release photographs of Osama bin Laden‘s body after the Associated Press news agency lodged a request under the Freedom of Information Act asking to see them. The request, which was lodged on Monday, also asks for video taken by military personnel during the raid and [...]

AP: Colorado Government-Funded Cellphone Bill Hard to Figure…

A nice piece of FOI-driven work from the Associated Press, even if they couldn’t quite put a precise price tag on it… Colorado officials insist they’re combing through state spending to try to close an estimated half-billion dollar shortfall — but figuring out exactly how much Colorado pays for employees’ mobile devices is nearly impossible, [...]

AP Gets Walker E-Mails, Will Pay Legal Costs

Nice work, Christa! The office of Gov. Scott Walker has agreed to a settlement in a lawsuit brought by Isthmus newspaper and the Wisconsin Associated Press over access to emails sent to the governor in response to his “budget repair bill.” The settlement requires the governor to produce the emails and pay attorney fees for the plaintiffs’ [...]

Some good, some bad in AP Sunshine overview

The full story is here. More openness in government. Lawmakers across the country, including the Republicans who took control in many states this year, say they want it. But a survey of all 50 states by the Associated Press has found that efforts to boost openness often are being thwarted by old patterns of secrecy. [...]

Walker E-Mail Hearing

A soap opera within a soap opera in Wisconsin….just keeps getting better. This was a fabulous FOI request! About halfway through a three-hour hearing Tuesday afternoon on the lawsuitbrought by Isthmus and the Wisconsin Associated Press over emails received by the office of Gov. Scott Walker regarding his “budget repair bill,” Dane County Judge Patrick Fiedler made [...]

Isthmus, AP File FOI Lawsuit Against Walker

Isthmus newspaper and the Wisconsin Associated Press today filed a lawsuit against Gov. Scott Walker over his office’s failure to respond to open records requests regarding emails received by his office. “The governor said he had gotten more than 8,000 emails as of Feb. 17, with ‘the majority’ urging him to ‘stay firm’ on his [...]

FOI At Work: 8 Touches of a “Shrek” Glass Enough to Poison a Kid…

Image via Wikipedia The Associated Press with a nice use of FOI: Federal regulators leaned on McDonald’s to quickly recall 12 million “Shrek”-themed drinking glasses this spring because they concluded that a typical 6-year-old could be exposed to hazardous levels of the metal cadmium by touching one of the glasses just eight times in a [...]

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