MSNBC: Obama administration visitor disclosure policy exempts its first eight months
Bill Dedman, and investigative reporter at MSNBC.com, points out some limitations in the new policy announced by the White House today on providing open records:
...only visits after Sept. 15, 2009, will be revealed. The first wave of records is expected to be posted around Dec. 31.snip
...msnbc.com had sought records on all White House visitors. That request, for all visitors since Inauguration Day, still stands, and msnbc.com has filed an administrative appeal with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.
The new White House policy says it will consider requests for visitor ...
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Congressional-DoD correspondence visualization
Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? See for yourself.
Continue readingFOIA on a Floppy
Here's a picture of the most recent addition to the stack of FOIA clutter on my desk.
Luckily, Bill's computer still has a floppy drive so we could read the word document sent to us on a 3.5-inch diskette by the Department of Transportation. Responses to our FOIA request for congressional correspondence logs from Transportation have been trickling in slowly because each agency within the department has been replying separately.
The Department of Transportation is not the only government entity that's technologically challenged. The list is long. But the two responses we have received from the ...
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