"A new lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public," reports The Guardian.
"An MIT PhD student has filed a suit in Federal court alleging that
the use of a 21-year-old, IBM green screen controlled search software to
search the Department of Justice databases...constitutes a deliberate
failure to provide the data that should be being produced."
Ryan Shapiro's lawsuit alleges "failure by design," saying that the
Justice Department records are inadequately indexed -- and that they
fail to search the full text of their records when responding to
requests "When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI
effectively responds 'sorry, we tried' without making use of the much
more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors."
The FBI has a $425 million software system to handle FOIA requests,
but refuses to use it, saying that would be "needlessly
duplicative...and wasteful of Bureau resources."
No comments:
Post a Comment