How Bad Faith Publishers Are Weaponizing FOIA ⇥ cjr.org

Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll, reporting for ProPublica in 2024:

An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by [Colin] Aamot, [Mike] Howell and [Roman] Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Miranda Green, reporting for Columbia Journalism Review this week:

Founded in 2019, Metric has been criticized for jury tampering and tied to pay-for-play political schemes and fake newspapers that land in mailboxes ahead of key elections. Recently, it has focused on obtaining troves of public records. In the past year, an investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found Metric filed more than nine thousand Freedom of Information Act requests across all fifty states.

[…]

Brian Timpone, one of the founders of Metric Media, disputed Tow’s FOIA count, saying, “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” He did not respond to a list of detailed questions. Metric’s other founders, Dan Proft and Bradley Cameron, did not respond to requests for comment.

I recognize that, as a resident of a country outside the United States — in fact, a resident of one that is struggling with its own sunshine law problems — my commentary here is of little weight. I am, in principle, not opposed to a voluminous set of requests, and especially not when they are for things that should be public already.

However, while the Heritage Foundation portrays its efforts as “oversight”, the sheer number of requests made by these groups creates logjams for everyone thereby preventing oversight. Oftentimes, they are merely requesting a huge aimless dump of communications to sift through. For example, the most recent log (PDF) from the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is mostly comprised of requests from Aamot and Howell for emails and text messages.

Some people believe adding a fee to each request — perhaps only for commercial requests. But it is generally not free to file these kinds of requests in Canada, and we also have a massive backlog. Another option is proactive disclosure of high-ranking officials’ communications and calendar entries, but I imagine that will cause all sorts of tangential problems even with liberal use of redactions. Perhaps there are technological improvements that could allow for more automated discovery, but a real person would still need to verify the work and screen for exclusions. There is no way out of this without a significant increase in funding and staffing, especially not when it is easier than ever to flood agencies with automated requests that, regardless of their intentions, must be processed like any other.