It’s Sunshine Week, which highlights the importance of government transparency. While there are a lot of important steps our government could take to be more transparent (and an urgent need for Congress to take the matter seriously), we at Defending Rights & Dissent know first hand the importance of using the Freedom of Information Act to uncover surveillance. 

In fact, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we used the still pretty new FOIA law to uncover that the FBI had compiled a 132,000 page file on our founder and organization, the fruits of unconstitutional surveillance.

But our organization, our board members, and our staff are still at it, using FOIA to ferret out the truth about government surveillance. For example

• Our board member Patrick Eddington recently made headlines when he uncovered via FOIA a 2019 audit of FBI investigations involving “sensitive investigative matters,” such as political organizations, religious organizations, candidates for office, or the news media. These are the very types of investigations that touch on core First Amendment activities that have the greatest potential for a chilling effect on democracy. The audit found the FBI broke their own rules 747 times.
• Policy Director Chip Gibbons spent nearly half a decade fighting to liberate FBI surveillance files about Palestinian solidarity activists. What Chip uncovered led to  an exposé he penned for The Intercept showing how the FBI opened  multiple counter terrorism investigations that use intrusive techniques that found no lawbreaking, but did conclude its subjects were engaged in political activism.
• Our FOIA requests for historical files about Spanish Civil War Veteran Delmer Berg and former civil rights attorney George Crockett led to in-depth pieces about government surveillance in Jacobin magazine.
• We hosted FOIA researcher Aaron Leonard, as well as Fred Hampton attorneys Flint Taylor and Jeffrey Haas, to discuss their new findings about the FBI’s role in the assassination of Fred Hampton. And we hosted peace and environmental activists sharing how they have used FOIA to advance their advocacy: FOIA for Activists 101 with Jane Kleeb (Bold Nebraska) Drew Hendricks (OlmPMR) and Shawn Musgrave (MuckRock) 

One of the biggest things we are discovering is just how many unreleased FBI files there are. Whether its surveillance of suspected Communists from the McCarthy era, anti-Vietnam War groups, Arab civil society groups in the 1990s, or anti-globalization protesters, a single, narrowly crafted FOIA request can turn up tens or even hundreds of thousands of potentially responsive documents. Given the FOIA backlog, slow processing times (a maximum of 500 pages/ month), –and the FBI’s notorious obstructionism–processing these files could go on for years. And that’s if the FBI is being cooperative! That’s why we are working with historians, journalists, and other FOIA researchers to educate Congress and push for a mass declassification and release of historically significant FBI files.

If you would like to help with this effort, please donate. 

Happy Sunshine week!