In this case, they sent a "press statement" response instead of a "FOIA response". The FOIA response would have been just the "there are no written records" part plus the boilerplate.
They realized that this is a press story about to blow up, and that if they don't make a statement the press will just write "USSTRATCOM TWEET RAISES HACKING FEARS. WERE WE ONE KEYSTROKE AWAY FROM GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?" with a "We contacted USSTRATCOM but did not receive a response [in the 3 minutes between asking and posting]" so they made a statement.
The entire point of FOIA requests is to allow access to previously undisclosed documents that aren't legally considered secret.
The notably weird thing here is that they released a completely redacted document rather than just declining the request. Is there some minimum amount of text required to be considered a response?
Politics aside, this is certainly one of the strangest things I've seen in a while.
It proves that they responded to this FOIA request by releasing a blank document. There are many different possible reasons why they released a blank document, but that's another question. (One which we can hopefully answer by examining the history of previous FOIA responses, but still another question.)
I suppose releasing something that is completely redacted isn't the same as releasing nothing. That's the only scenario I can think of that doesn't make this look like self-sabotage. Makes you question the usefulness of FOIA requests.
The letter at the beginning strongly implies they did and this was just the last record responsive to the request.
> they couldn't have released it earlier
That is not at all clear. FOIA applies even to classified documents, to the extent that they contain responsive information not subject to classification (and which don't meet any of the other remaining FOIA exceptions). The standard appears to be "reasonable segregable material". Many classified documents (including this one) contain portions that are not classified.
Large chunks of this document are paragraphs marked as unclassified, including much of the material pertinent to the FOIA request, so it is unclear to me why they would not have released the unclassified portions previously. (Unless they did, and this is a second release that includes more due to having been declassified.)
> A FOIA office simply looks for any excuse they can use to deny a request if they want to deny it. The reason doesn't need to make sense or be their true reason.
That's exactly what I was hinting at here. The agency has no interest in the public finding out how much of that feedback was bullshit.
> In my experience it's likely that no technical people were consulted on it.
From the sounds of it, they did at some point consult someone technical and tried to parse their answer as part of their justification for not executing the FOIA request. The fact that they knew it would take a script to extract the data as opposed to just dropping it into a search tool suggests as much anyhow. Though more likely it would just be a couple `sed` commands, a perl/ Python script, or a few command line tools.
It's not strange when you are familiar with the behavior of large bureaucracies. In doing this they are able to say they replied to the FOIA request, and satisfied the letter of that law. The request was for a document, and the document was provided.
There was sensitive information in the document that happened to be 100% of the contents, this was redacted. They now cannot be sued for not responding.
I wouldnt be surprised if it were true. If it is, it's probably intentional. Primitive technology gives them plausible rejection of broad FOIA requests of exactly the kind requested.
> But, I don't see any reason to give any benefit of the doubt to people submitting FOIA requests on vaccine microchips, or chemtrails, or conspiratorial nonsense like that.
Gov officials don't have to give the the benefit of the doubt. But gov officials do have to respond in a timely and accurate manner to the requests. In this case, that probable means running the equivalent of a ctrl+F over various explicitly enumerated databases for "vaccine microchips" or "chemtrails" and replying "sorry, zero results".
Yes, because filing a FOIA request on a holiday weekend and getting a response is required before merely asking officials for more details about their decision.
This is so freaking strange, but I can see how it happened and it doesn't surprise me at all. Thankfully it's been resolved, as another poster pointed out (https://www.supportdavidcarpenter.org).
It's not uncommon for a FOIA to be extra scrutinized if it's sent by a lawyer. Meaning the request will be brought up in a meeting with higher ups when it normally wouldn't be. It's basically an implicit threat to sue. My guess is the administration freaked out at the implicit threat, saw something that looked fishy at-face, and made a decision too early thinking the whole thing would have cost quite a lot of money.
They realized that this is a press story about to blow up, and that if they don't make a statement the press will just write "USSTRATCOM TWEET RAISES HACKING FEARS. WERE WE ONE KEYSTROKE AWAY FROM GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?" with a "We contacted USSTRATCOM but did not receive a response [in the 3 minutes between asking and posting]" so they made a statement.
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