Despite a pledge to open government, the Obama administration has endorsed a Bush-era decision to keep secret key details of an FBI computer database that allows agents and analysts to search a billion documents with a wealth of personal information about Americans and foreigners.<\/p>\n
President Obama\u2019s Justice Department quietly told a federal court in Washington last week that it would not second-guess the previous administration\u2019s decisions to withhold some information about the bureau\u2019s Investigative Data Warehouse.<\/p>\n
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, had sued under the Freedom of Information Act to get records showing how the FBI protects the privacy of Americans whose personal information winds up in the vast database.<\/p>\n
As a result, there is no public list of all the databases the FBI sucks into this computer warehouse, no information on how individuals can correct errors about them in this FBI database and no public access to assessments the bureau did of the warehouse\u2019s impact on Americans\u2019 privacy.<\/p>\n
On his first day in office, Obama reversed a policy on releasing government documents so there is a \u201cpresumption in favor of disclosure.\u201d Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. promptly beat Obama\u2019s deadline by two months for issuing new guidelines that urged release unless \u201cforeseeable harm\u201d would result.<\/p>\n
In contrast, the decision to endorse Bush\u2019s withholding of records about the FBI\u2019s data warehouse was filed in federal court last Monday with no other public word from the current administration.<\/p>\n
Michael J. Sniffen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite a pledge to open government, the Obama administration has endorsed a Bush-era decision to keep secret key details of an FBI computer database that allows agents and analysts to search a billion documents with a wealth of personal information about Americans and foreigners. President Obama\u2019s Justice Department quietly told a federal court in Washington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,1616],"tags":[49],"class_list":{"0":"post-5416","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-politics","7":"category-usa-news","8":"tag-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}