FOIA lawsuit against the FBI over their failure to release documents pertaining to Occupy Wall Street.
Truthout filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) over the FBI's failure to release documents we have sought pertaining to Occupy Wall Street (OWS).
The complaint was filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia. In addition to Truthout, Washington, DC-based attorney Jeffrey Light is also named as a plaintiff.
The FBI has received numerous FOIA requests for Occupy Wall Street-related documents since the inception of the movement in September 2011. Thus far, it appears the bureau has only released about a dozen pages of documents, and those were sent to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California in response to the organization's own lawsuit against the FBI.
Those documents revealed that the FBI had been monitoring a Bay Area Occupy group and paid particularly close attention to protesters' plans to shut down West Coast ports in November and December 2011. The FBI refused to turn over other records to the ACLU on national security grounds.
Truthout's lawsuit stems from two FOIA requests we filed with the FBI on October 31, 2011, one by this reporter and another filed by Truthout associate editor Yana Kunichoff, during the height of nationwide OWS protests and what appeared to be a coordinated crackdown among federal and local officials and law enforcement on Occupy encampments in major cities.
Our requests sought a wide range of documents, including "emails, memos, audio/video, transcripts, reports, threat assessments" in which Occupy Wall Street was discussed by FBI agents and/or senior officials. Additionally, we asked for records regarding any correspondence the FBI might have had with local and state law enforcement officials.
In Truthout's case, the FBI, a DOJ component, responded to our FOIAs two weeks after it was filed by stating, remarkably, that it could not locate a single record on OWS.
However, as we reported last year, Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI's cybersecurity team in New York, received dozens of emails about Occupy Wall Street he was sent by a man who identified himself as a conservative computer security expert and gained access to the group's listserv. Loyd responded to at least one of the emails. Moreover, OWS documents Truthout obtained under a FOIA request from the Department of Homeland Security showed DHS shared information on OWS with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Truthout challenged the adequacy of the FBI's search for records. We appealed the bureau's "no records" response to this reporter's FOIA request to the DOJ's Office of Information Policy (OIP). However, our appeal was denied. OIP affirmed the integrity of the FBI's search, which resulted in the "no records" response.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12166-truthout-files-foia-lawsuit-against-department-of-justice-fbi-for-occupy-wall-street-documents