"Dear Mr. Trimble," the recent correspondence, with Department of the Air force letterhead on top, begins.
"This letter is in response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated 27 February 2011," the letter continued, promisingly. "As of the date of this letter, without a waiver, the total estimated processing cost for your request as written is $87,432.00 for reproduction of releasable documents, as well as labor hours."
Hmm. This could be a hard one to slip through on expenses.
I submit the contents of this letter into the public domain to reveal the alleged costs of official transparency.
In the USA, the FOIA process allows any person to request official documents, which of course are first scrubbed for proprietary and classified information. There is a cost of providing such information to the public. In my case, that cost is apparently $87,432.00.
You may be wondering what on earth I asked for that costs so much. I can share this with you because my request is not related to any ongoing news investigation. I was simply curious after learning that final reports by the Fleet Viability Board are available if you submit a FOIA request, so I asked for all of them. I imagined that somewhere a clerk would pick up a stack of reports gathering dust on a shelf, walk over to a photocopy machine, press a button, and slide the result into an envelope.
I was not aware that there are 30 such reports, each containing about 800 pages! Although I'm sure most of these documents have already been requested by others through FOIA, each of those pages apparently still needs to be reviewed to avoid releasing classified or proprietary information.
I should also note that I would not actually be charged $87,432.00. As a member of the news media, I qualify for a discounted rate for receiving the same information, which amounts to $1,197.00 -- still a bit much for our expense budget!
I have duly clarified my original request. This time I'm asking for the executive summary and table of contents for two reports. I'll let let you know what happens.
"This letter is in response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated 27 February 2011," the letter continued, promisingly. "As of the date of this letter, without a waiver, the total estimated processing cost for your request as written is $87,432.00 for reproduction of releasable documents, as well as labor hours."
Hmm. This could be a hard one to slip through on expenses.
I submit the contents of this letter into the public domain to reveal the alleged costs of official transparency.
In the USA, the FOIA process allows any person to request official documents, which of course are first scrubbed for proprietary and classified information. There is a cost of providing such information to the public. In my case, that cost is apparently $87,432.00.
You may be wondering what on earth I asked for that costs so much. I can share this with you because my request is not related to any ongoing news investigation. I was simply curious after learning that final reports by the Fleet Viability Board are available if you submit a FOIA request, so I asked for all of them. I imagined that somewhere a clerk would pick up a stack of reports gathering dust on a shelf, walk over to a photocopy machine, press a button, and slide the result into an envelope.
I was not aware that there are 30 such reports, each containing about 800 pages! Although I'm sure most of these documents have already been requested by others through FOIA, each of those pages apparently still needs to be reviewed to avoid releasing classified or proprietary information.
I should also note that I would not actually be charged $87,432.00. As a member of the news media, I qualify for a discounted rate for receiving the same information, which amounts to $1,197.00 -- still a bit much for our expense budget!
I have duly clarified my original request. This time I'm asking for the executive summary and table of contents for two reports. I'll let let you know what happens.
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