3 minute read
Spring awakening
The Foilies 2020
Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CAITLYN CRITES
BY THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
“T he Ringer,” the first track on Eminem’s 2018 album, Kamikaze, includes a line that piqued Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold’s curiosity: The rapper claimed the Secret Service visited him due to some controversial lyrics about Ivanka Trump. To find out if it was true, Leopold filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the federal law that allows anyone to demand access to government records.
After a year of delays, the Secret Service provided Leopold 40 pages about the interview with the real Slim Shady, including a note that he was “exhibiting inappropriate behavior.”
This wasn’t the first time government transparency has intersected with hip-hop. Type “Freedom of Information” into Genius.com (the site formerly known as Rap Genius) and you’ll turn up tracks by Sage Francis and Scroobius Pip using FOIA as lyrical inspiration. The hip-hop duo Emanon sampled Joanna Newsom for “Shine Your Light,” in which they declare that due to redactions of FOIA documents, we’re “never gonna see the true history of this nation.” Even George Clinton, whom many rappers cite as inspiration, chanted about “getting funky” with the freedom of information on the track “Maximumisness.”
There’s nothing quite like an envelope of freshly photocopied documents to make a journalist or opengovernment advocate break into song. But there’s also nothing that brings the melody to a record-scratching halt than the government withholding information without due cause.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international nonprofit based in San Francisco that fights to uphold civil liberties in the digital age – work that includes filing hundreds of public records requests each year with a variety of government agencies. In collaboration with the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, we also compile “The Foilies,” a list of anti-awards that name and shame government officials and corporations that stymie the public’s right to know.
Now in its sixth year, The Foilies are part of the annual Sunshine Week festivities, when news and advocacy organizations celebrate and bring attention to state and federal open-records laws that allow us to hold the powerful to account.
And the winners are ….
The Twitter-Assist Award: President Donald Trump
It’s not often that prying documents out of the CIA comes with a little bit of help from the commander in chief. But Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold (yeah, he turns up a lot in The Foilies) stumbled into just that kind of luck when Trump tweeted an acknowledgement that he had ended “massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.”
Leopold requested information on the payments from the CIA. Despite the president’s confirmation that these payments existed, the CIA still refused to confirm or
14 ORLANDO WEEKLY ● MARCH 18-24, 2020 ● orlandoweekly.com deny the records existed, a move known in the legal world as a “Glomar response.” Leopold went to court and a judge found that because Trump had acknowledged the payments publicly, the CIA had to stop playing secrecy games and hand over the documents.
In space, no one can hear you scream about thwarted public records requests, but down on Earth, you can take the government to court and make them listen.
That’s what Heath Haussamen, editor and publisher of NMPolitics.net, did after the New Mexico Spaceport Authority in 2017 refused to hand over basic public records related to the private companies that lease real estate at Spaceport America, the much-publicized commercial launchpad just outside Truth or Consequences, N.M.
With a New Mexico Attorney General’s Office opinion in hand that determined the Spaceport Authority had violated the state’s open records law, Haussamen filed a lawsuit. After following the wormhole of the justice system, Haussamen finally received the records in 2019, along with a $60,000 settlement for his trouble – but not before the New Mexico Legislature stepped in and passed a new law granting the Spaceport even more secrecy over its operations.
The Catalog Is out of the Bag Award: Special Services Group
In response to a California Public Records Act request
