Background Referenced within the U.S. Department of Labor 2011 Chief FOIA Officer Report, located at: https://www.dol.gov/sol/foia/2011ChiefFOIAOfficerRpt.htm, there was a reference to a Internal FOIA Desk Reference Guide. Seemingly never published publicly before, I requested the record in November of 2016. In March of 2017 — I received the document, no available for download below. According to the document’s introduction: The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides that any person has a right, enforceable in court, to obtain access to federal agency records, except to the extent that records or portions of them are protected from public disclosure based upon one of nine exemptions.…
Author: John Greenewald
Background The Internal Revenue Service created a video parody of Donald Trump’s television show “The Apprentice” which was broadcast at a 2011 conference held by the IRS’s Small Business/Self-Employed Division (SB/SE). The video features a group of IRS employees impersonating contestants on the program and one impersonating Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump and contestants of the competition show. The video was obtained via a Freedom of Information Act Request by The Black Vault, and still outstanding on the FOIA request, are documents relating to the budget, drafts or the scripts, outtakes, etc. This page will be updated, as those documents come…
Background In June of 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) FOIA online submission tool went down. It created quite a few problems and frustrations for frequent requesters such as myself. So, I thought it would be interesting to see what they had internally regarding the incident. So after the site went back online, I filed a a request on July 1, 2014 for the following: “…all records pertaining to the temporary problem that brought down the CIA’s FOIA web site, including the ability to submit online FOIA requests, in June and July of 2014… {snip} which would include, but not be…
Background According to the report: On September 21, 2015, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Office of the Inspector General (OIG), discovered that [ REDACTED ] Office of the Chief Accountant (OCA), may have transmitted nonpublic information from his personal Gmail e-mail account to his official SEC work e-mail account. Specifically, during the course of investigative activities related to OIG Case #15-COM-0419-I, the OIG found [ REDACTED ] forwarded an internal SEC e-mail and attachment dated April 12, 2015, [ REDACTED ] It appeared [ REDACTED ] forwarded this e-mail from his personal Gmail address on April 12, 2015.…
Executive Summary Fifteen years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the terrorist threat remains in the United States and abroad, as evidenced by recent attacks in Paris, France; San Bernardino, California; Brussels, Belgium; Orlando, Florida; and Nice, France. The U.S.’s national security depends on the ability to share the right information with the right people at the right time. This requires sustained and responsible collaboration among federal, state, local, and tribal entities, as well as the private sector and international partners. In response to a request from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Homeland Security…