Stanford Center for Internet and Society

According to National Journal's Technology Daily:

The House Oversight and Government Reform Information Policy Subcommittee on Tuesday approved legislation that aims to speed the government's response to Freedom of Information Act requests. CongressDaily reports that the legislation would uphold an existing requirement that government agencies respond to information requests within 20 days but would apply pressure to that deadline by imposing consequences on federal agencies for missing it. The bill also would mandate that agencies provide information requesters with a tracking number to follow the progress of their request either by phone or on the Internet. "Requesters are being forced to wait much longer than necessary for responses from agency FOIA offices," said bill co-sponsor and Missouri Democrat William Lacy Clay.

One of the big problems the journalist in Poulsen v. USCBP had was that the agency never gave him a tracking number and then claimed they lost his FOIA request. Hopefully this could solve that problem.

This morning I came across Stacy Cowley's article GPL 3: An Open Source Earthquake?. As a member of OGC Consortium, the group responsible for developing geospatial interoperability standards, I've suggested review of their standards' ownership, branding and licensing.

In April of 2006, Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen sued the United States Customs and Border Patrol under the Freedom of Information Act. Poulsen won the case, and yesterday the trial court granted Poulsen $66,000 in attorney's fees.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) includes a fee-shifting provision to incentivize private individuals to bring FOIA compliance actions. An award of fees is not automatic, rather, a FOIA plaintiff must have been successful in the action and must also be entitled to fees.

Following the favorable judgment obtained on September 26, 2006, we promptly stipulated for an extension of the fourteen day window with which to file our motion. The brief window is defined by N.D.C.A. local rules. We compiled all the records of our time and promptly contacted the Assistant US Attorney to negotiate a settlement in the hopes of avoiding further litigation. Unfortunately, these negotiations were largely unsuccessful, leaving us no alternative but to draft and file a motion.

We Filed our Motion for attorney's fees in the Poulsen FOIA case. FOIA includes a fee-shifting provision to encourage people to litigate to defend their rights-- when the government loses, it has to pay the other side's costs if they "substantially prevailed" and meet the test that they are entitled to fees. We're asking for ~$70,000 dollars to cover our litigation costs and attorneys fees and believe we should get all of it given the government's obdurate behavior in the case.