Justice department 'uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests'

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Source: The Guardian

Justice department 'uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests'

• Lawsuit accuses DoJ of ‘failure by design’ through use of decades-old system
• DoJ refuses to use new $425m software on freedom of information requests

Sam Thielman in New York
Saturday 16 July 2016 13.00 BST

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.

Freedom of Information Act (Foia) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The Foia law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”.

Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage this month.

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/16/justice-department-freedom-of-information-computer-system