US wants stronger FOI Act for bloggers

Posted by Martin Stabe on 19 March 2007 at 13:40
Tags: Freedom of Information

While the British Government is planning to make changes to the UK Freedom of Information Act’s fees regimes that would eviscerate the law’s utility for journalists, the US Congress is working on a bill that would strengthen its American equivalent — particularly for independent journalists and bloggers.

The British government is planning to impose a fees regime that takes no account of the public interest in any given FOI request, is cracking down on those pesky “serial requesters” — many of whom as journalists — that make extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act.

American FOI policy, by contrast, actively encourages journalists’ requests on the grounds that they are likely to seek disclosures that are in the public interest. “Members of the news media” have access to a preferential fees regime — and have the option to request a complete waiver of fees for requests made in the public interest.

In recent years, however, this approach has irked freelances and bloggers who have had difficulty accessing the privileded status of a journalistic FOI requestor. But now the US House of Representagievs has passed a bill would stengthen the US FOI Act in several ways, including a provision that would bar agencies from rejecting bloggers’ request for the fee waiver on the grounds that they have no affiliation with a mainstream news outlet.

The bill, known as the Freedom of Information Amendments of 2007, will now be considered by the Senate, where former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry has already pledged his support.

That’s quite a contrast to the British legislation with a similar name. The Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill 2007 is a backbencher’s attempt to reduce the effectiveness of the UK FOIA by exempting Parliament from its provisions altogether.

Update 20/3: BBC FOI specialist Martin Rosenbaum has more on this over at Open Secrets. He points out that under the proposed changes in the UK, individual bloggers would actually have more access to FOI than institutionally-accredited journalists.

182 responses to the Freedom of Information consultation

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2007 at 20:46
Tags: BBC, Crown Copyright, Ethics, Freedom of Information, Guardian, Investigations, Journalism, Mashups, NUJ, foi, foia

The Government has received 182 responses to its consultation on the Freedom of Information Act fees regime.

We know about five of these so far. One submission is Press Gazette’s petition, signed by more than 1,250 journalists who oppose the Government’s plans. Another is the Guardian’s strongly-worded defence of journalists’ use of FOI. The BBC has also made its opposition plain.

FOI campaigner Heather Brooke’s submission is posted on her blog. It’s a forcefully-worded piece which is notable for introducing two very practical arguments to a debate that is usually dominated by abstract polemics about the public’s “right to know”.

First, Brooke assaults the Government’s frequent claim that Freedom of Information Act introduces a net cost to the public purse and the economy as a whole. Instead, she makes a strong case that FOI — combined with a more liberal system for the re-use of public-sector information — would boost the economy by fostering a stronger private-sector information industry like the one in the United States. More transparency would also save the Treasury money in the long run by making public record-keeping more efficient and exposing waste.

Second, and perhaps more interesting to readers here, she argues that a strong Freedom of Information regime would improve British journalism overall, by encouraging “responsible, informative journalism, leading to an informed and civically engaged electorate”.

First, Freedom of Information means more accurate, factually-based reporting, including analytical computer-assisted investigative journalism:

The polemical style of much British journalism is due in large part to the difficulty obtaining official information. It is noteworthy that the UK lacks any organisation devoted to computer-assisted reporting – a type of investigative journalism that is well developed in the US and Scandinavia where freedom of information laws are much stronger and well-developed. I have worked with several organisations to try and build up this type of analytical journalism in the UK but the difficulties are enormous. …

Regular readers will know that I completely agree with her about this.

Brooke also makes the interesting argument that greater access to legitimate sources of information would reduce the need for journalists to resort to dubious or illegal methods for obtaining data:

If the government wants to encourage legitimate reporting techniques then it needs to provide an efficient and timely mechanism to make this type of reporting cost effective. This mechanism should be the Freedom of Information Act. In the US, the federal FOIA combined with strong state FOI and public records laws means there is no demand for an information black market. Having worked as a journalist in the US for eight years, I never once came across a reporter who had used a private detective to gather information. There was simply no need. All the information needed was available in the public domain.

By contrast in the UK, trying to access information legitimately couldn’t be more time-consuming and difficult. Obstacles are constantly put in one’s way and everything the government does encourages the creation of an information black market economy. Now we are going to jail reporters who access information illegitimately, but a more effective solution to this problem would be to create incentives to use legitimate information gathering tools. The main way of doing this would be to make the FOIA more effective.

The NUJ made similar noises about encouraging investigative journalism through Freedom of Information in a Parliamentary committee on media regulation this week. Its own 10-page response to the consultation has also been submitted.

I look forward to seeing the other 178 submissions. I hope I don’t need to file a request …

Networked journalism: distributed FoI requests

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 November 2006 at 13:02
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism, Networked Journalism

The Guardian’s “Bad Science” columnist, Ben Goldacre, is attempting a small experiment in distributed investigative journalism. Having had a Freedom of Information Act to Durham County Council rebuffed on cost grounds, he is calling on his readers to obtain the data piecemeal through lots of smaller, individual requests.

It’s a nice idea, especially since the government plans to make it easier to reject journalists’ FoI requests on cost grounds.

There’s just one small problem: The Government anticipated this tactic when preparing the legislation. Section (12)(4)(b) of the Freedom of Information Act allows public bodies to treat multiple requests that are made “by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign” as though they were a single request. I fear, therefore, that the avalanche of requests the column is likely to generate will be rejected in much the same way as Goldacre’s original request.
Let’s hope nobody at Durham County Council read Goldacre’s column before the requests start pouring in!

The case also nicely illustrates the danger of the government’s proposals to change the FOI fees regime. If the government has its way, the power to aggregate requests in this way would be extended to multiple requests o on multiple topics made by people from the same organisation, making it much easier to reject requests on cost grounds.
The same exemption that I suspect will scupper Goldacre’s plan could in future be used to prevent all the reporters at the Northern Echo from using the FOIA to ask questions of Durham Council more than once or twice a quarter.

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Google Video in copyright suit

Posted by Martin Stabe on 9 November 2006 at 18:41
Tags: Google, YouTube, copyright, video

Google Video is being sued over copyright infringement

Google did not identify the claimant or eleborate on the suit, which was revealed in documents filed by Google today with the SEC.

The suit may be a sign of things to come when Google completes its takeover of YouTube, the AP’s story suggests.

CNET recently published a nice summary of the numerous copyright lawsuits that Google is involved in. The New York Times recently wrote about the extensive legal team fighting these battles.

Update: Google is also lobbying against proposed changes in Australian copyright law, which could open the door for claimants to sue the search engine for indexing and caching web pages.

@Society of Editors: The public’s right to know

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 16:49
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism, Society of Editors

The panel, chaired by Fiona Armstrong of ITV Border, is Alistair Bonnington, a lawyer for BBC Scotland; the Scottish Information Commissioner Kevin Dunion; Sir Christopher Meyer of the Press Complaints Commission; and Caroline Kean, a partner at media law firm Wiggin.

Lord Falconer, who was originally scheduled to appear on this panel and who has proposed some restrictions on Freedom of Information, might have been irked by what Dunion, the Scottish information commissioner, had to say.

It is a myth, Dunnion said, that the costs of FOI implementation are out of proportion.

It is also a fallacy, he said, that journalists are not expected to make heavy use of the Act. He notes that in the United States, journalists are priveleged in making FOI requests because their fees are waived on the grounds that their requests will be published in the public interest.

Around 10 per cent of requests under the UK Act are from journalists; in Scotland nearly 50 per cent of requests to some public bodies (including the police services) in Scotland appear to come from journalists. In Ireland the media share is being reduced as the public at large is becoming more accustomed to making requests, he said.

A third myth, he said, was that journalists are making frivilous requests. “That was a hand in the sweetie jar phase in the early days of the act”, he says. His impression now is that it is being used very well. The Evening Times did serious research into crime statistics in Glasgow, for example.

Sir Christopher Meyer agrees, saying that he can understand why Lord Falconer did not turn up. The Government, he said is talking the talk, but failing to walk the walk on Freedom of Information. It is far too early, the PCC chairman says, to talk about changing the FOI Act.

(As expected, he also announced interest in regulating newspapers’ online multimedia content.)

An MP blogs about Freedom of Information changes

Posted by Martin Stabe on 4 November 2006 at 17:10
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

Labour MP Tom Watson has posted on his blog about the government’s proposed changes to the Freedom of Information Act fee regime. Unfortunately, Watson seems to have swallowed the government’s line highlighting the number of silly requests it has received for things like “the total amount spent on Ferrero Rocher chocolates in UK embassies”.
But Watson seems to be missing the point. This is a very important debate, not about the odd silly request about chocolates, but about a proposal that could significantly limit legitimate, public-interest FOI requests.

Many journalists who use the FOI Act in a serious way fear that these proposals could make it very difficult for them to use the act effectively to hold government to account.

The plan to allow public bodies to “aggregate” multiple unrelated requests from multiple individuals could mean reporters in big news organisations like the BBC — or local papers that generally only ask questions of a handful of local public bodies — would be limited to a single question per month or forced into silly games like filing requests in their friends’ names.

The government is framing this debate as being about the cost of FOIA implementation, but that also seems somewhat dubious.
As Steve Wood of the UK FOIA Blog has pointed out, the government’s £35m annual cost estimate is actually far lower than the £125m it said it expected to spend when the current fee regulations were drafted in 1999.

So the government appears to have been happy to pay up to £125m per year on FOI in 1999, but is suddenly concerned about an actual cost of £35m? And if cost is the real issue, why has it adopted a proposal that would apparently save a mere £900,000?
Fourteen senior journalists from the Sunday Telegraph wrote to Lord Falconer last week outlining these and other concerns about the proposal. Others — like the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum, the Guardian’s Rob Evans and David Leigh, and freelance Heather Brooke — have disputed various assumptions and conclusions made by the report into FOI costs produced for the government by Frontier Economics.

Meanwhile, in a Kafkaesque twist, the Department for Constitutional Affairs has denied an FOI request — submitted by Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information — for some of the data underlying the Frontier Economics report.
More than 100 MPs signed an early day motion encouraging the government not to introduce up-front fees for FOI requests, a plan that ultimately wasn’t included in the government proposals. Hopefully more MPs will start asking questions just as probing as the bloggers, campaigners and journalists.

FoI footnotes

Posted by Martin Stabe on 23 October 2006 at 17:22
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

The BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum has some sage advice for journalists: Always read the footnotes in government reports.

In particular, Rosenbaum refers to the footnotes in the report commissioned by the government from Frontier Economics to assess the impact of various proposed changes to the Freedom of Information Act’s fees regime (PDF).

Based on calculations contained in this report, the Government is justifying its proposal to change the FoI fees regime on cost grounds. Journalists and activists, however, have argued that the main effect — and some suspect the purpose — of any change in fees policy would be to eviscerate the open government legislation, particularly as a useful tool for journalists.

Buried deep in the footnotes, though, Rosenbaum has spotted some strange cost assumptions “which seem to be entirely arbitrary and have important consequences for their calculations” — like pricing ministerial and private office time at £300 per hour and arbitrarily doubling the cost assessed for internal discussion.

Update: Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, has an opinion piece in the Telegraph today about the proposed changes.

Journalists concerns over FOI proposals

Posted by Martin Stabe on 17 October 2006 at 18:28
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

This afternoon, I spoke with Martin Rosenbaum, the head of the BBC’s Freedom of Information unit. I asked him how he thought the Government’s proposed changes to the FoI fees regime would affect the BBC’s journalism.

One of the strange ways that blogging has transformed the journalist-source relationship is that sometimes sources report interviews before the journalists file their stories.
Rosenbaum’s reply is now up on his blog, Open Secrets — and it’s not good news. If the Government proposals come into effect, he writes, it “would dramatically curtail the use of FOI by the BBC”.

No wonder the Society of Editors is planning to lobby against the proposed changes next week.

Another blogging journalist concerned about the proposals is FoI campaigner Heather Brooke. She notes that the report (PDF) by Frontier Economics, the company commissioned by the Department for Constitutional Affars to study the costs of FoI implementation, “is more an indictment of the inefficiencies that have grown up in the culture of secrecy rather than a criticism of openness”.

Steve Wood of the UK FOIA Blog notes that the brief Frontier Economics were given by the DCA was very narrow. The company was asked only to consider the impact of four options, all of which would have made submitting FoI requests more expensive.

“[T]he DCA approach has been very much ‘find us some evidence to support what we want to do’ rather than indepedently research then suggest the options based on the evidence”, he writes before asking a few questions.

Call for blogger support of FoI motion

Posted by Martin Stabe on 12 October 2006 at 16:24
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

Steve Wood, who runs the excellent UK Freedom of Information Act Blog, is trying to organise support for the cross-party Early Day Motion against the Government plans to introduce fees for FoI requests.

Wood is encouraging bloggers to use MySociety’s tool WriteToThem.com to encourage their MPs to support EDM 2699.

A similar motion in 2004, Wood notes, appeared to have an important role in beating back the even harsher fees regime proposed in 2004.

(via Martin Rosenbaum’s Open Secrets)

MySociety to build Freedom of Information archive

Posted by Martin Stabe on 28 September 2006 at 16:01
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism

MySociety, the group of pubic-interest web developers behind such acclaimed projects as TheyWorkForYou.com, intend to build a Freedom of Information Archive, “a searchable, readable, googlable user-created archive of FOI requests and their responses.”

When it launches next year, this resource will be invaluable for journalists.

The FOIA Archive was proposed by journalist and FOI campaigner Heather Brooke, who writes on her blog, Your Right to Know, that one of the inspirations for it was the National Security Archive, a non-profit organisation based in Washington which is consistently one of the heaviest users of the US Freedom of Information Act.

While this initiative seems absolutly in the spirit of open government, it is not inconceivable that government departments might attempt to obstruct the archiving of their responses to FOI requests by citing Crown Copyright. Hopefully they will recognise this as the legitimate news-dissemination excercise that it is, even if it isn’t being run by a traditional news organisation.

One of the suggestions that was considered but rejected in MySociety’s call for proposals that led up to today’s announcement — perhaps to the relief of regional newspaper editors — was WriteToYourNewspaper.