Why Tony Blair thinks he was an idiot posted:

"You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it."
- These are the words Tony Blair addresses to himself in his memoirs while reflecting on his government's introduction of the Freedom of Information Act.

Global Investigative Journalism Network posted:

The FBI files offer peeks into the lives of disparate characters ranging from Albert Einstein to Malcolm X to Zsa Zsa Gabor.

"Anytime someone dies, you can request their FBI files, so as long as people keep dying, there’s always going to be a lot of material," says Brown.

bedpan posted:

shocked at the turnaround time on the FOIA request with the FBI

commie kong posted:

How a flawed freedom-of-information regime keeps Australians in the dark posted:

• FOI refusals are at their highest level since records began in 2010-11, spiking recently due to the secrecy of the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility (Naif), the agency that gave conditional approval to lend Adani $1bn in taxpayers’ money. Naif rejected 99.4% of the FOI requests it received.
  
• More than 2,000 FOI requests have taken three months longer than the statutory time frame to finalise, rendering the documents all but irrelevant by the time they are released, if they are released at all.
  
• FOI teams have shrunk in at least 20 government departments or agencies. Meanwhile, the federal government is increasingly refusing to process FOI requests because they are too onerous. The government’s use of “practical refusal” grounds to block FOI requests has skyrocketed to record highs, increasing by 163% last financial year alone.
  
• The regulator, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, has been chronically understaffed, despite an expanding remit and a 72% increase in the number of complaints received about FOI. The OAIC was gutted under the Abbott government, leaving it with two-thirds of the 100 staff minimum needed to do its job.
  
• Academics, authors and not-for-profits are being denied the most benign of documents. Journalist and author William Summers has been battling to obtain a copy of Parliament House lunch menus for two months without success because the Department of Parliamentary Services is not beholden to FOI laws. Lockout campaigner and academic Tony Brown was wrongly blocked from receiving a hotelier’s submission to a recent inquiry into Newcastle’s lockout laws because the NSW Department of Industry indicated it had promised the publican it would remain secret, in a submission seen by Guardian Australia.