What did you request? Was it successful?
What did you request? Was it successful?
Marfa Lights wrote:
What did you request? Was it successful?
I've made many FOIA requests when I lobbied Congress. Lots of records on waste disposal, air pollution, political donations. Because I worked in this realm, denials were rare. Don't be bullied by those who try to deny access to records that are in the public domain.
Start here:
http://www.rcfp.org/federal-open-government-guide/federal-freedom-information-act/how-foia-worksYes. I successfully did one to get a copy of my long dead great grandfather's nationalization records. I do not understand why the records hadn't been transferred to the National Archives.
No, I have never made a FOIA request.
Yes. A number of years ago, after reading Day of Deceit by Stinnett about the "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor, I wanted to verify if the McCollum memo* was genuine. I filed a FOIA request with the national archives. I got a very non-committal response. The weird thing is it was from the FBI, which seems to me a case of notifying me Big Brother Is Watching You. Participating in such a routine and clearly non-criminal matter may explain why 9/11/2001 happened, since it was obvious the designated hijackers were suspects long before that date; the FBI needed something more trivial to do.
Yes. My company was looking to buy and rehabilitate multifamily residential properties that had been built under a particular government program. For reasons not worth going into here, owners typically look to sell these properties 15 years from the date of original occupancy. I did an FOIA request to the state housing finance agency to get a list of all of the relevant properties in the state along with the year that they were placed in service so that we could make offers on properties as they were about to hit 15 years. They provided the list within a few days.