FOIA on a Floppy

By Anupama Narayanswamy May 23 2007 8:46 p.m.

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 Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Interior stand out. Both the agencies sent us responses as PDF documents.

It appears as though they ran queries on their internal data system, printed out the results, scanned them as PDFs, copied them on a CD and snail-mailed them to us. Now, that's a lot of trouble for one FOIA request, in my opinion.

Thankfully, we received a fee waiver and did not have to pay for all the hours someone spent scanning.

In fact, the reply from FCC appears as though the correspondence logs were generated from an excel spreadsheet. As of now, I am asking them to just email the excel spreadsheets, at least for the future.

Share |

Search the Blog

Related Content

Real Time Ticker

Recent Posts

Reporting we're watching

Popular tags

2012 election Ad Ad Hoc AIG Arab Spring Barack Obama BP Campaign contributions Campaign Finance Center for Responsive Politics Citizens United consumer banking Contracting Correspondence Data Mine datamine Disclose act Distributed Research Dodd-Frank Earmarks FARA FEC Finance Data Catalog Financial Bailout Financial Reform FLIT FOIA follow the unlimited money Foreign lobbying Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker Fundraising Handy Tools health care Hoc Independent Expenditure Independent expenditures investment James Bopp Jr. Lobbying Logs_6553 Market Meltdown Media Medicare meeting logs Mitt Romney Newt Gingrich OGD Open Government Directive Party Time PMA Group Recovery Recovery.gov Rep. John Murtha Research revolving door Rick Perry Rick Santorum Ron Paul Sen. Christopher Dodd states of transparency stimulus Sunlight Live super committee super congress Super PAC Super PACs supercommittee Supercongress TARP Taxpayers for Common Sense