Ready, aim, FOIA
Keeping up with the digital revolution
Freedom of Information Center The Freedom of Information Center has donned electronic flak jackets and entered the digital revolution. After responding to questions about accessing government secrets for almost 40 years, the center is now firing back answers to a bundle of queries its founders never could have imagined.
Some examples: Which states have the best open records laws for access to electronic information? Answer: One of the best is North Carolina with passage of recent amendments. Is Federal government e-mail considered a public document? Answer: Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on whether the information is covered by one of the nine exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act. How much can a state charge for copies of an electronic database? Can a state charge for redacting electronic information? Answer: Depends on the state. In Kansas in 1995, the State Court of Appeals ruled that the Department of Revenue could force newspapers to pay, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of dollars for access to the state driver's license database. But the same year, Kentucky's state attorney general said that a $240 fee to redact juvenile delinquents' names from a database was unallowable.
As anyone can see, some information about electronic access particularly on the state level is as difficult to find as data on a fragmented hard drive.
But some other answers about electronic access are getting easier to find, particularly with the passage this fall of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments law. Those amendments ease getting electronic information from the federal government. Throughout these shifts, the role of the FOI Center, located at the Missouri School of Journalism, remains the same: It is a research and reference library focusing on controls placed by government and society on the free flow of information. The center's staff surveys articles from almost 150 publications and journals to add to its files collection.
Those files now contain more than 1 million articles and documents on the controls of information. That is why the center regularly gets requests from such news organizations as the Kansas City Star, the Arizona Republic, and the Associated Press. The center receives about 3,000 requests annually from students, attorneys, business people and journalists.
Some of the most recent additions to our collection add to the understanding of how government controls electronic access. They include BNA's Electronic Information Policy & Law Report, which surveys court and government developments on electronic information. The center also subscribes to "Government Technology," a publication geared toward government managers who set up information systems. The FOI Center has put its own digital footprint on the Internet with its Web site at: http://www.missouri.edu/~foiwww. The site has the text of federal and some state public information laws, as well as links to a variety of sources about access to information.
Got a question about what information you can get from the government? Call the FOI Center at (573) 882-4856 or, send e-mail to jourke@muccmail.missouri.edu