As Congress considers big changes to the Freedom of Information Act, a court’s decision on Monday underscores how some of the best ways to fix the ailing transparency statute are really small—like adding a comma. Last fall in Naji Hamdan v. U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit read the lack of a comma in FOIA’s law enforcement exemption to limit public access to investigatory techniques and procedures. EFF thought that decision was wrong, both because it misread FOIA’s text and legislative history and because it emphasized technical form over the statute’s goal of ensuring robust access to government records. We filed a brief asking the court to reconsider its decision, but the court denied the effort in a summary opinion on Monday. For Mr. Hamdan, the denial means that an American citizen may never learn the extent to which law enforcement and national security agencies knew about or were otherwise…
↧