[BetaMechazawa]

Too bad most of it has been censored. This means that even though the manual has been published a lot of it is useless.

I'm not that familiar with the US FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act). But why is so much of the document censored? Is the US government just allowed to censor whatever they please in documents they have to send due to FOIA requests? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?

[cnvogel]

Just glancing at the document, the censoring is marked "Ex.4" (exemption #4) in all places.

Exemption 4 is: "A trade secret or privileged or confidential commercial or financial information obtained from a person". [https://www.sec.gov/foia/nfoia.htm]

Add: Frankly, I directly jumped to the (redacted) PDF of the user-manual, without even bothering to read the article. But the article nicely explains this, too...

[bediger4000]

There's absolutely no way that everything they marked "FOIA Ex.4" is exempt under than that wording. If trade secret laws were that strict, then literally everything would be a trade secret. The "exemption 4" marking is a big middle finger to the MOIA requester. But it does raise the question of what's so important about Stingray and Kingfisher that everything about them has to be kept under wraps? We know in general what they do. We know that they have delicate screw threads. Unless there's some general and very obvious 4th Amendment abuse going on, I can't see why you'd keep it under wraps.

[ethbro]

Not necessarily.

Stingray is actually built by the Harris Corporation, so it seems entirely logical that a public corporation would consider the technical manner it's designed to glean intelligence from a standard cell phone a trade secret.

They are, after all, selling that very product to the US Government.

[a3n]

> why is so much of the document censored?

The direct reason is that the responding agency, the FCC, asked the manufacturer and an undisclosed government agency what should be censored.

[brixon]

The FCC did not write the document, so they are not the best ones to know what in the documents are trade secrets.

[hydrogen18]

The reason for the FOIA act is to allow government agencies to whitewash their secrecy. As long as they 'comply' with the FOIA act, they are doing everything they are legally required to do it.

"See we released the files!", as they hand you a book full of black pages.

[ethbro]

> As long as they 'comply' with the FOIA act, they are doing everything they are legally required to do it.

Given that this is the government, it seems like the FOIA censoring process is still highly manual.

Therefore, I believe there have been a large number of cases where important information was gleaned like this: - FOIA: "I would like all documents pertaining to wiretapping?" - Agency: "That is not a specific program, so here's a heavily redacted summary document." - FOIA: "I would like all documents pertaining to program BLUSTER, the name of which was not-redacted in the previous information you gave me." - Agency: "Here is heavily redacted but still more specific information on the program you requested."

My understanding is that there's somewhat of a gray area for requests that do not accurately enough specify the information desired. The agency in question can basically say "We don't understand what you're requesting, so there is no information."

Whereas if you more tightly specify your request and such a program does exist, they are legally required to give you something, even if it's an entirely blacked out page.

[abcabc321321123]

> My understanding is that there's somewhat of a gray area for requests that do not accurately enough specify the information desired. The agency in question can basically say "We don't understand what you're requesting, so there is no information."

This is essentially correct. Under 5 U.S.C § 552(a)(3)(a)(i), the request for records must reasonably describe such records. In addition, the 9th circuit has declared that "reasonable description relates not only to subject matter, but also relates to place of search..."

[hydrogen18]

Every document released under FOIA is hand reviewed, unless the document was publicly available anyways. For example, you can get a large number of "The Army's guide to X" and similar documents either from military's website.

In the case of government contractors, the appropriate government agency issues a letter to the contractor. The contractor has the chance to censor almost anything if they consider it a trade secret. There are other reasons for censoring, but the government themselves generally makes those decisions. Contractor's are completely OK with this because they get paid hourly to do the work.