LAPD lies about attack on reporters
Dear Friend of Press Freedom,
It’s the 143rd day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 62nd day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. After more than two months in detention, press freedom groups are again demanding Guevara’s immediate release. Read on for more, and click here to subscribe to our other newsletters.
LAPD lies about attack on reporters
Last Friday, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department wantonly violated a court order by assaulting, detaining, and jailing journalists covering a protest.
Then, the LAPD falsely told California station KABC-TV that two people were detained at the protest for “pretending to be media.” The two were, in fact, journalists, but you wouldn’t know it from KABC-TV’s report, which uncritically parroted the LAPD’s claims.
Journalists must be skeptical of LAPD statements about its treatment of the press. The department knows that it violates the First Amendment and California law to detain or interfere with journalists covering protests, but it does it anyway. It won’t stop until the press reports accurately on all of the LAPD’s abuses, and the public makes clear that it won’t stand for them.
Israel kills journalists in Gaza to silence reporting
Two weeks ago, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on the Israeli Defense Forces’ threats to Anas al-Sharif, meant to scare him into ceasing reporting. He didn’t, and now he’s dead.
Al-Sharif was one of four Al Jazeera staff correspondents and two freelancers killed by the IDF in an Aug. 10 targeted strike. The others were Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammad al-Khaldi.
“Israel is killing journalists for exposing its atrocities in Gaza,” said Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) director of advocacy Seth Stern. “We can’t let our leaders get away with mere performative condemnations while the money and weapons Israel uses to exterminate journalists and other civilians keep flowing.”
Two years since ‘a massive failure’ of the justice system in Kansas
This week marked two years since the shocking police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of Record co-owner Joan Meyer, who passed away the day after the raid.
FPF spoke to investigative journalist Jessica McMaster, whose award-winning coverage of the raid for KSHB-TV in Kansas City, Missouri, had us glued to her social media feed for weeks.
“This was a massive failure by several people within the justice system,” McMaster said, speaking about the raid. “I think it’s hard for a lot of us to grasp that so many people, in positions of power, failed in such spectacular fashion to do their jobs.”
How a climate change researcher makes FOIA work
Rachel Santarsiero, director of the Climate Change Transparency Project at the National Security Archive, knows how to use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover information the government would rather keep secret. This week, FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper spoke to Santarsiero, who shared her expert FOIA tips.
“The key with any agency is sending targeted requests asking for specific types of documents, a date range, and the office or official who would’ve been responsible for the records,” Santarsiero explained.
Santarsiero also recommends that requesters build relationships with FOIA officers, always appeal denials, and check federal website reading rooms and other publicly available source materials. “You’ll be surprised what you can find hiding in plain sight,” she said.
Read the whole interview here.
What we’re reading
Eyewitness to Gaza’s death traps: Whistleblower Anthony Aguilar in conversation with Defending Rights & Dissent (Defending Rights & Dissent). With journalists being killed or shut out in Gaza, whistleblowers are even more important. Watch Anthony Aguilar’s firsthand account of blowing the whistle on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Trump administration outlines plan to throw out an agency’s FOIA requests en masse (404Media). This is “an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly?” FPF’s Harper said.
Appeals court upholds block on Indiana’s 25-foot police buffer law, citing vagueness (Indiana Capital Chronicle). Hopefully, Tennessee’s and Louisiana’s “buffer” laws will be next, and other states will think twice before passing these unconstitutional laws.
Sorry, scanner listeners: BPD is encrypting its transmissions starting this weekend (Boston.com). Just like in New York City, encrypting police radio transmissions and adding a delay makes it harder for journalists to report and the public to stay informed.
freedom.press/issues/lapd-lies…
Trump Administration Outlines Plan to Throw Out an Agency's FOIA Requests En Masse
The Department of Energy (DOE) said in a public notice scheduled to be published Thursday that it will throw out all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to the agency before October 1, 2024 unless the requester proactively emails the agency to tell it they are still interested in the documents they requested. This will result in the improper closure of likely thousands of FOIA requests if not more; government transparency experts told 404 Media that the move is “insane,” “ludicrous,” a “Pandora’s Box,” and “an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible.”The DOE notice says “requesters who submitted a FOIA request to DOE HQ at any time prior to October 1, 2024 (FY25), that is still open and is not under active litigation with DOE (or another Federal agency) shall email StillInterestedFOIA@hq.doe.gov to continue processing of the FOIA request […] If DOE HQ does not receive a response from requesters within the 30-day time-period with a DOE control number, no further action will be taken on the open FOIA request(s), and the file may be administratively closed.” A note at the top of the notice says it is scheduled to be formally published in the Federal Register on Thursday.
The agency will send out what are known as “still interested” letters, which federal agencies have used over the years to see if a requester wants to withdraw their request after a certain period of inactivity. These types of letters are controversial and perhaps not legal, and previous administrations have said that they should be used rarely and that requests should only be closed after an agency made multiple attempts to contact a requester over multiple methods of communication. What the DOE is doing now is sending these letters to submitters of all requests prior to October 1, 2024, which is not really that long ago; it also said it will close the requests of people who do not respond in a specific way to a specific email address.
FOIA requests—especially complicated ones—can often take months or years to process. I have outstanding FOIA requests with numerous federal agencies that I filed years ago, and am still interested in getting back, and I have gotten useful documents from federal agencies after years of waiting. The notion that large numbers of people who filed FOIA requests as recently as September 2024, which is less than a year ago, are suddenly uninterested in getting the documents they requested is absurd and should be seen as an attack on public transparency, experts told 404 Media. The DOE’s own reports show that it often does not respond to FOIA requests within a year, and, of course, a backlog exists in part because agencies are not terribly responsive to FOIA.
“If a requester proactively reaches out and says I am withdrawing my request, then no problem, they don’t have to process it,” Adam Marshall, senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. “The agency can’t say we’ve decided we’ve gotten a lot of requests and we don’t want to do them so we’re throwing them out.”
“I was pretty shocked when I saw this to be honest,” Marshall added. “I’ve never seen anything like this in 10 years of doing FOIA work, and it’s egregious for a few reasons. I don’t think agencies have the authority to close a FOIA request if they don’t get a response to a ‘still interested’ letter. The statute doesn’t provide for that authority, and the amount of time the agency is giving people to respond—30 days—it sounds like a long time but if you happen to miss that email or aren’t digging through your backlogs, it’s not a lot of time. The notion that FOIA requesters should keep an eye out in the Federal Register for this kind of notice is ludicrous.”
The DOE notice essentially claims that the agency believes it gets too many FOIA requests and doesn’t feel like answering them. “DOE’s incoming FOIA requests have more than tripled in the past four years, with over 4,000 requests received in FY24, and an expected 5,000 or more requests in FY25. DOE has limited resources to process the burgeoning number of FOIA requests,” the notice says. “Therefore, DOE is undertaking this endeavor as an attempt to free up government resources to better serve the American people and focus its efforts on more efficiently connecting the citizenry with the work of its government.”
Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation told me in an email that she also has not seen any sort of precedent for this and that “it is an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly, and it should be challenged in court. (On that note, I am filing a FOIA request about this proposal.)”
“The use of still interested letters isn't explicitly allowed in the FOIA statute at all, and, as far as I know, there is absolutely zero case law that would support the department sending a mass ‘still interested’ letter via the federal register,” she added. “That they are also sending emails is not a saving grace; these types of letters are supposed to be used sparingly—not as a flagrant attempt to reduce their backlog by any means necessary. I also worry it will open a Pandora's Box—if other agencies see this, some are sure to follow.”
Marshall said that FOIA response times have been getting worse for years across multiple administrations (which has also been my experience). The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have cut a large number of jobs in many agencies across the government, which may have further degraded response times. But until this, there hadn’t been major proactive attempts taken by the self-defined “most transparent administration in history” to destroy FOIA.
“This is of a different nature than what we have seen so far, this affirmative, large-scale effort to purport to cancel a large number of pending FOIA requests,” Marshall said.
reshared this