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FBI launches eFOIA System for faster FOIA requests

by dan-silver on 11/30/15, 10:33 PM with 27 comments

• by hodwik on 12/2/15, 4:35 AM

  Glad for the FBI. Getting something like this in place is a massive undertaking.

  These organizations are all clamoring to get this sort of thing in place, it's a serious game changer, but it's frankly hard as hell.

  I hear a lot of people suggesting these guys are dragging their feet on FOIA requests because they don't want to release their documents. So wrong. Anyone who has worked with large government or private sector document management knows the problems here.

  No one (except really young organizations) has the centralized infrastructure in place to make this easy. They're looking at huge amounts of legacy systems, decades worth of warehouses filled with paper records, millions of new e-mails created daily. None of these systems are effectively integrated.

  The company I work for has one of only a handful of FOIA systems being shopped to the government right now, and after seeing the hurdles going on here I can tell you first hand that these backlogs aren't because people are dragging their feet. We've been doing ECM stuff for 30 years now, and whenever we come into an organization like this it takes us ages just to help them sort out how to connect this stuff together.

  But it's totally worth it. Every organization so far that has managed the move to an electronic FOIA system, despite the slight uptick in requests, has taken a huge bite out of their FOIA backlog just because electronic centralized systems make the FOIA response process so much easier.

  Again, congrats to the guys over there. I'm sure this was incredibly hard to put in place.

• by tristanj on 12/2/15, 4:53 AM

  They're trying to spin this as a "good" thing but I believe the reason they're doing this is more selfish: they're trying to stop people from making multiple, slightly different FOIA requests on the same topic and getting back different censored results. On one request, some parts might be censored, but on another that part may be uncensored. By making multiple requests you can open more and more windows on the actual document.

  Here is a 2013 article on someone cleverly abusing this tactic [1]. With the new system in place they'll be able to spot and prevent these tactics more easily.

  [1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/foia-ryan-shapiro-fb...

• by danso on 12/2/15, 3:25 AM

  The FBI is surprisingly responsive and "human" for FBI file (e.g. dead people records) requests, at least for the non-controversial ones. For example, MuckRock sent a records request for "Leslie Nielson" with no proof of death and yet the FBI (as far as I can see in the message chain) didn't give them a hard time about it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...

  I recently sent in a request for Paul Newman and got nothing back (which was both very disappointing and surprising, given Nixon's well-known hatred of Newman, and Newman being an all-around big name and businessman)...the only hold up was that they required a snail mail address to send things to. I thought they had dropped my request but realized they had sent the "no records found" letter to my mailbox well before the required deadline.

• by morisy on 12/2/15, 2:11 AM

  You can also just email FOIA requests to foiparequest@ic.fbi.gov

  Emailing also doesn't require uploading a scan of your driver's license or limit you to one request a day, which the new system does.

• by trollian on 12/2/15, 3:10 AM

  "eFOIA is currently closed. Typically, eFOIA operates Sunday through Saturday, 8am to 10pm Eastern time.

  Please try again within those hours."

  sigh

• by awqrre on 12/2/15, 1:49 AM

  "If you are requesting information on a deceased individual, you will need to upload proof of death unless the deceased individual is more than 100 years old."

  The FBI doesn't know who is dead?

• by barney54 on 12/2/15, 12:46 AM

  Only now in 2015 the FBI fullfills FOIA requests electronically? That is incredible backward. I thought the Department of Interior was bad because they couldn't do global email searches on even global searches within a specific Bureau, but Interior is light years ahead of the FBI.

• by lsh on 12/2/15, 9:00 AM

  I don't see the FOIA Machine mentioned anywhere: https://www.foiamachine.org/

  Kickstarted and now doing amazing things.

• by mystique on 12/2/15, 5:08 AM

  How is this different than http://www.foiaxpress.com/ ?