Since taxpayers foot the bill for government operations, most people think taxpayers ought to know what government is doing. A key element of government transparency is freedom of information. Napoleon Byars, assistant professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, recently discussed the federal Freedom of Information Act with the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society. He also discussed the topic with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Freedom of information — why is this so important?
Byars: Well, it’s a tool whereby citizens can learn about more of what their government is doing in terms of collection of records on individuals, government programs, in terms of expenditures of tax monies. It’s a way of us knowing and keeping an idea of what’s going on with our government. That’s why it’s important.
Kokai: Speaking of freedom of information, I should clarify that there is actually an act, the Freedom of Information Act. How does that work?
Byars: It was passed in 1966 during the Johnson Administration, primarily to give the public access to government records and information, and what an individual has to do to find out something that they want to know from the government. [If] they’re having difficulties getting that information, they can file the Freedom of Information Act request. And at the point that you identify exactly what it is you want to get at, what truth are you trying to show sunshine on, a government agency has 20 days from the time you file that request to respond — 20 business days. At the end of those 20 days, if it’s denied, that same agency, government agency — for instance the IRS — has another 20 business days to decide whether they’re going to grant your appeal. And beyond that, if you’re not satisfied, you can take it to federal court, and many citizens have been successful in doing that.
Kokai: You also mention that people who are going through this process ought to expect delays, and … they will need a lot of time if they’re ever going to get something that the government really doesn’t want to give away right away.
Byars: Yes. I mean, each government agency is like a relative; they have a personality, and some agencies are more open than others. So, you can go anywhere from 20 days — which is the legal amount, or 40 if you put in the appeal — to some agencies still at the 2,763-day response period. So it can get pretty extended when there’s a tussle with the agency. But for the most part, 88 percent of the requests — Freedom of Information Act requests — are granted.
Kokai: You also mentioned a figure that was quite interesting in the presentation about just who is filing the requests. A lot of people might expect that it’s the media. You mentioned the media really is a distant third.
Byars: Yeah. The media comes up “show” on this one. The winner is individuals — 20 million requests, over 20 million, filed in 2008. Almost 50 percent of those are by individual citizens, for instance, and then the next largest percentage – about 27 — [is] business. And then the media comes in at about 23 [percent]. There are a lot of things that are surprising. For instance, the Energy Department. You don’t know, unless you did a Freedom of Information Act request, that between 1990 and 1995, the Department of Energy spent $97 million on legal fees fighting U.S. citizens suing the government for exposure to the nuclear material — $97 million. Now, that came out just in the legal process, you know — not in giving money to citizens — that’s just legal fees. That’s something you don’t know unless you just ask. Now, we don’t have figures for those past five years, because no one has requested that.
Kokai: Perhaps the most interesting piece of your presentation is just what happens in our society when no one is keeping a close watch on government. You gave several examples of things that can happen when people aren’t asking questions and aren’t paying attention. What are some of those?
Byars: Well, the current one is the TARP Program — $750 billion of taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street. TARP One, TARP Two now; we’ve kind of got this into a first half of the game and second half of the game. … We don’t know where that money is going. I mean, we don’t know which banks got it, we don’t know if they’re lending with that money, we don’t know if there’s any oversight. And the only way we’re going to get at that information, one day, is through an FOI request, because government has obviously not come forward to say that. We’ve been given a lot of promises, particularly from the Obama administration, about transparency, but we don’t have that information yet. Let’s talk about the Federal Reserve bank. It’s given $2 trillion to these same characters — $2 trillion. I mean, we’ve gone from ‘B’ to ‘T’ — the larger discussion should be the ‘T.’ I think that’s the way it goes in the alphabet and in the dollar figures. But no one knows, and the money is gone. And yet, the Federal Reserve Board … said it will do whatever possible to keep these institutions afloat. We need to have some transparency. But the Federal Reserve is one of those organizations that stands outside the Freedom of Information Act’s purview.
Kokai: [I] didn’t mention this at the top of the interview, but you were actually on the other side of this issue in your role working in the Air Force. What tips can you offer to people about dealing with the public information requests, from the vantage point of someone who has seen them — thousands of them — flowing through?
Byars: Well, the one thing you want to do — one of the exotic accounts that I had as an Air Force officer was the UFO account, when I was a young officer in the Pentagon, so we got a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests surrounding that topic, and it usually had to do with classified weapon systems and not actual UFOs. But one thing I advise the public to do is, first, do your research. A lot of organizations have the information you’re trying to seek, and you can get that information from think tanks, much like the John Locke Foundation, who have done papers and policy papers, and they have that database here. The other process to do is, in addition to doing your research, you want to define that; you want to define it down to a digestible capsule. For instance, you don’t want to know Department of Energy records from all of 1980. You want two weeks in 1980 that are specific to your experience with the government. The other thing you want to do is, you want to have a contact, a name to tag this with. And then once you do the contact, set up an administrative schedule — when you mailed it out, every contact you have with the government in terms of that request, you want to log that in so that you’re table is kept respectful — and if you have to go through the legal redress, you have that information for you. So those are some of the things you want to do.
Kokai: Some are going to say, “Wow, this is complicated. [It] sounds tough. Why would I ever want to do this?” Why should people want to do this?
Byars: Well, because we the people have the right to know what our government is doing. And it’s not that we’re anti-government, it’s just that we voluntarily give taxes to the government, we have voluntarily as a people given power to the government, and it’s only natural for us to know what’s happened to that and how it’s been executed. I think that’s the role of being a citizen. And for journalists, it’s the role of getting at the truth, and for think tank organizations, it’s the role of advancing where we are in terms of knowledge. So it’s not only a good idea, it may be our salvation.