[yew]

The entire point of FOIA requests is to allow access to previously undisclosed documents that aren't legally considered secret.

The notably weird thing here is that they released a completely redacted document rather than just declining the request. Is there some minimum amount of text required to be considered a response?

Politics aside, this is certainly one of the strangest things I've seen in a while.

[axus]

There's some information here. There was a policy sent out for what information to keep from cell phones, to all US Attorneys and Assistant US Attorneys, and it's 15 pages long. It would have been nice if they'd included a date.

[yew]

Granted - even if it had been literally blank ;)

[totalforge]

It's not strange when you are familiar with the behavior of large bureaucracies. In doing this they are able to say they replied to the FOIA request, and satisfied the letter of that law. The request was for a document, and the document was provided.

There was sensitive information in the document that happened to be 100% of the contents, this was redacted. They now cannot be sued for not responding.

[shirkey]

"There was sensitive information in the document that happened to be 100% of the contents, this was redacted."

Is it a defensible position to assume that 100% of a document was excised as sensitive data? Since the subject of the memo itself is announced clearly, are we to believe that the presentation of the term "message" which almost certainly occurred one or more times in the body text was sensitive? What about harmless pronouns, conjunctions, articles, etc?

If a citizen were to reply to a government request of information from the government in the same manner, few would be surprised at legal consequences (penalties, incarceration) as a result. Actions such as this, in response to a legitimate request from the public allowed under law, can only serve the purpose of undermining confidence in the rule of law.

[defilade]

Just saying that a single example doesn't prove a pattern.

Yeah it's a little weird, but out of the context of other FOIA requests it doesn't make much of a point.

[dangrossman]

It's a pattern. This is the same kind of response the EFF got to its FOIA requests about NSLs (national security letters). They were sent back a pack of blank pages as all the text had been redacted. When the ACLU issued a request to the FBI on GPS tracking activity, they were sent back 111 blank pages.

[defilade]

You have three instances...that meets your hurdle for statistical significance?

[yew]

I should hope so! The government is rather more regular than a particularly noisy lab experiment.

Now, as to what it meets the hurdle for statistical significance for . . . well, I personally prefer to avoid conspiracy theories when possible. So I'll just be keeping an eye open for more information.

[yew]

It proves that they responded to this FOIA request by releasing a blank document. There are many different possible reasons why they released a blank document, but that's another question. (One which we can hopefully answer by examining the history of previous FOIA responses, but still another question.)

[specialist]

What level of proof do you require?

Out of curiosity, have you filed any FOIA requests?

[defilade]

For proof that there's a transparency problem, I'd want to look at hundreds of FOIA requests across 10-20 categories, content of news conferences and press conferences, level of press access to government officials, responsiveness to press inquiries, responsiveness to Congressional inquiries, and I could probably think of a few more things if I put more time into it. Then I'd want to compare that to data from previous administrations.