Time: Mon Oct 28 22:31:57 1996
To: oneazman@juno.com (Alfred R Martin)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: FOIA update 
Cc: 
Bcc: 

At 08:24 PM 10/28/96 PST, you wrote:
>Prying secrets from federal bureaucrats has depended for 30 years on a
>law written in the age of carbon paper.  This fall, the bureaucrats were
>given a nudge toward the electornic age.
>
>CONgress had decided to bring the Freedom of Information Act up-to-date. 
>The new act prods federal agencies to share their data electronically
>when that's what the requester wants.  Why could this be important? 
>Consider some requests in which agencies provided the requested
>information on lists of paper --yards and yards of paper.
>
>Now the bill would compel agencies, which receive about 600,000 FOIA
>requests a year, to release information in the format requested, whether
>it be on computer diskettes, CD-ROM, or through the Internet.  The bill
>would also tackle "the mother of all complaints" against the FOIA, the
>often ludicrous amount of time it takes for a response.  FOIA requests
>answered by the FBI in 1995 had been pending an average of 923 days. 
>However, some say the bill is not necessarily revolutionary; it just
>gives the signal to government agencies that they need to shape up.


The court of original jurisdiction
to compel production of documents
requested under the FOIA is the
District Court of the United States,
not the United States District Court.
For authority on the difference,
see Balzac v. Porto Rico, S.Ct. (1921).
      

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