foolsguinea | (no subject)

So, the Justice Department has proposed new rules governing Freedom of Information Act requests for documents. Right now, you can get three responses to your FOIA request: "Sorry, that doesn't exist;" "Yes, it exists, and here are your documents," and "we can neither confirm nor deny that these records exist." Now, that third one is called a Glomar response. It allows the records-holder some leeway in cases where answering straight would jeopardize national security, or if it exposes an ongoing criminal investigation or private data of some sort. Reasonable enough. The issue is that they wanted to do away with this Glomar response, and substitute outright lying for their non-answer.

The proposed rule change would have allowed a records-keeper to give a "no records" response when it would have given a Glomar response before. Now, I want to put this aside, as Justice has decided to reconsider the rule change. What I want to discuss is why they had the power to even propose this, and whether that's appropriate.

http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1221413.html
http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=49272&oref=todaysnews

OK, they backed off, but good grief, Holder!