Basically, out of 103,000 FoIA requests last year, DHS delayed about 500 more than the customary 3 days, because Janet Napolitano's staff wanted to find out more about the people making those requests.
The scandal is really about the policy put in place by the Obama administration.
From the article you cited:
"Career employees were ordered to provide Secretary Janet Napolitano's political staff with information about the people who asked for records — such as where they lived, whether they were private citizens or reporters — and about the organizations where they worked.
If a member of Congress sought such documents, employees were told to specify Democrat or Republican."
That's a dangerous politicization of DHS and the FOIA process and certainly goes against the spirit of "transparency" the Obama administration was voted in on.
Ok, sure, it's against the spirit of transparency but I'd be willing to bet that in 90% of the cases that got sent upstairs, it actually was quite transparent scandal-fishing. Still, agree on the principle, you're right there.
But as for policy put in place by a given administration.. citation? Are you alleging with a straight face that the Bush administration wasn't doing this? Remember that whole "Department of Justice actually frickin prosecuting people on poltiical grounds" thing?
Umm... isn't the a large part of FOIA to enable scandal fishing? Scandals wouldn't need to be fished if DHS did their job and brought them to the public's attention.
From the article: "But in July 2009, Homeland Security introduced a directive requiring a wide range of information to be vetted by political appointees for "awareness purposes," no matter who requested it."
So yes - the Obama administration "PUT IN PLACE" this policy. It's not a long article. Read it.
The article said this was done by Janet Napolitano's staff. Napolitano is the former Democratic governor of Arizona who was put in place by Obama, so I think it's fair to criticize him here.
Bush did have issues with FOIA, though, but they were quite different from investigating the politics of people making requests. Specifically, under Bush, agencies were supposed to deny as many requests as possible. I don't believe Bush ever had the DHS looking into who was requesting what (at least, not that we know of). After all, the DHS had no permanent leadership until Obama appointed Napolitano.
Yeah, plus with DHS we have a bureaucracy that deals in skirting the line with people's rights by its very nature, and for kicks it's a hastily assembled bureaucracy of bureacracies. If we figure double for each of those factors, that's 4x.
oh ffs, take your scary boogy man bullshit elsewhere. Unless of course you'd like to cite some proof of this army of scary "terrorists" (stupid word btw) that is so large they have time to probe every possible vulnerability. And while you're looking that up, please bring with you research on why they haven't managed to do anything with the countless holes we have everywhere [1].
[1] One glaring example is the ocean ports. Did you know something like 1 out of every 100 containers is actually checked? I believe that was at the request of Walmart, among others. They must be working with the "terrorists"!!!
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iz_vYVn2EG...
Basically, out of 103,000 FoIA requests last year, DHS delayed about 500 more than the customary 3 days, because Janet Napolitano's staff wanted to find out more about the people making those requests.