[kictanet] FOIA- the most important law for openness and transparency in government.

[Alex Gakuru]

[Business Daily]
"Treasury opens lid on secrecy in military purchase
contracts"
Written by Steve Mbogo 
05-July-2007:
 
The Kenya military machine will undergo a radical
shake-up that will see the the veil of secrecy lifted
on its multi-million shilling procurement deals, that
have sometimes been labelled as classified.

Officials at the Treasury told the Business Daily that
discussions are going on with the military to work out
how the latter can increase its level of
accountability in its defence procurement to the
public. In the more strategic procurement that could
legitimately be classified as official secrets, the
Treasury seems to favour a plan where a Parliamentary
committee would have an oversight role without
compromising national security.

For many years the Kenya military, the Police and the
intelligence services have been bogged down by
single-sourced secret purchases that have often turned
into shaddy deals between politicians, high ranking
government officials and briefcase contractors....

...Mr Mwaimu Mati, the head of Mars Group Kenya, said
security related procurement should not be left to the
absolute discretion of the military or the Executive. 


“We have elected MPs who can be trusted with the
responsibility of scrutinizing security procurement
and budgets. This conforms to our Constitution which
requires that the security forces be subject to
civilian control,” said Mati.

It is unlikely that exposing procurement of security
items to public scrutiny will compromise national
security, in view of the massive information brought
to the public domain by the internet.

http://www.bdafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1794&Itemid=5813


---------
[WIRED]

Bittersweet Sunshine: Four Decades of FOIA Wins and
Losses

Ryan Singel, 04 July 2007

U.S. government documents used to be considered secret

unless individual agencies decided to release them.

But on July 4, 1966, that presumption was inverted
when the Freedom of Information Act was signed into
law, declaring that in a government of, by and for the
people, government records must be released to the
public upon request, unless those records meet a
handful of defined exemptions.

Over the last four decades, FOIA (pronounced "foy-ya")
has become one of the most important laws creating
openness and transparency in government. It's a key
tool for journalists and nonprofit groups
investigating the workings of the federal government.

It has been used to reveal the FBI's Vietnam-era
surveillance of American dissidents, CIA drug
experiments on American citizens, and government
inspectors turning a blind eye to the sale of
contaminated meat, among many other things.

But as a just-released report from the National
Security Archive showed, bureaucracies still resist
the law's openness imperative. They will ignore
requests, take decades to process them or redact
embarrassing information. A bill that would penalize
agencies for foot-dragging was set to be voted on
earlier this year by the full Senate, but was stalled
by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), who put a secret hold on
the bill. There will be no progress until he removes
the hold.

Despite these obstacles, persistent reporters and
public-interest organizations have been able to crack
the veil of secrecy that bureaucrats and politicians
use to hide their motivations and machinations.

In honor of the law's 41st birthday, Wired News
presents five of the best technology-focused FOIA wins
and five that are still outstanding.

Top Five Technology and Civil Liberties Sunshine
Requests

[1.] Carnivore Documents: In the 1990s, the FBI
developed software, dubbed Carnivore, that was 
installed at internet service providers[ISPs] to track
what targeted individuals did online. Though the FBI 
claimed Carnivore was not an untargeted dragnet, the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, pried
documents loose from the FBI showing the software was
capable of capturing all traffic across a server, and
that the software was not as accurate in practice as
the FBI claimed. Little is known about successors to
Carnivore, but ISPs have been configuring their
networks to make them surveillance-friendly.

[2.]Airline Data Dumps and No-Fly Lists: EPIC filed a
file cabinet full of sunshine requests to learn more
about terrorist watch lists and post-9/11 airline data
dumps to the government. Highlights included proof
that Northwest Airlines turned over data to the
government despite public statements to the contrary.
Also revealed  were no-fly-list mismatches, including
a long-running screwup that snagged one of the
nation's most high-profile nuns, who was only cleared
for flying after her boss called presidential adviser
Karl Rove.

[3.]Mercury Contamination in Fish: Successive sunshine
requests by environmental activists revealed that
certain fish, including popular canned albacore tuna,
contained higher levels of mercury than the government
had previously acknowledged. While canned tuna was
never put on the list of fish that pregnant women
should avoid, the data has proved important in an
ongoing debate about the risks of eating seafood.  

[4.] Domestic Military Spy Databases: The American
Civil Liberties Union successfully uncovered a
Department of Defense database, dubbed Talon, that was
supposed to include reports on terrorist threats to
military bases in the United States. Instead, the
secret database soon became filled with reports on
legitimate antiwar protesters whose activities were
protected under the First Amendment. The program was
shuttered following the ensuing publicity, but the
full extent of the spying is unknown since the
Pentagon deleted many of the records before an audit
was complete.

[5.] Encryption Wars: Though it may seem like ancient
history to some, civil liberties groups spent much of
the 1990s fighting the government over encryption,
which had previously been used almost exclusively by
secret government agencies and the military. The
government claimed that any public use of encryption,
including such now-commonplace standards used to
secure online purchases and banking, needed to have a
backdoor for law enforcement. FOIA requests revealed
that the government knew its proposals were flawed. It
also showed the government intended to use
requirements that 
digital telephone switches must be wiretap-friendly as
a way to force encryption products to have backdoors.
The government eventually lost "the war," and
encryption now helps lock down internet e-mail, online
purchases and commercial DVDs, though few use
encrypted e-mail.

Five Unanswered Technology and Civil Liberties FOIA
Requests

[1.]  Warrantless Wiretapping Documents: A wide array
of media and activist groups are attempting to get
information on the government's warrant-free spying on
Americans' phone and e-mail communications. So far,
none have succeeded, though a Senate committee has
just 
subpoenaed the Bush administration for some of the
sought-after 
documents.

[2.] Automated Targeting System: For years, the
Department of Homeland Security has been assigning
threat levels to individual foreigners and citizens
alike as they enter and leave the country. However,
little is known about the algorithms or data used. So
far, Homeland Security has failed to release documents
in response to open-government requests.

[3.] Total Information Awareness Program: Nearly four
years ago, Wired News filed a request for documents
about the testing and privacy protections of a program
intended to sift through a massive database of
Americans' private lives in order to find terrorists. 
Instead of filling the request, Darpa, the Pentagon's
advanced research arm, looked into this reporter's
prior stories and questioned his motives.

[4.] Patriot Act Abuse Documents and Telecom
Contracts: 
In March, an internal Justice Department report found
the FBI had massively misused a key Patriot Act power
that allows investigators to get financial and
communication records on anyone relevant to an
investigation without getting a judge's approval. The
FBI also inked secret contracts with three large
telecommunications companies to speed up the process.
A judge recently ruled that the agency will begin
releasing 2,500 pages a month starting July 5 to the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[5.] FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse: Post-9/11,
the FBI created a massive search engine that indexes a
bunch of different bureau databases, including
investigative files and phone records obtained through
the above Patriot Act abuse. 

Little is known of the technology, which a
representative compared to Google's, or the scope of
the databases searched. Wired News and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation have each filed sunshine requests.


http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/07/sunshinelawat40

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