NASA FOIA 21-HQ-F-00500

a right to know what their government is up to and why.
COngress recognized that there should be exceptions to immediate public disclosure. Over the
past few months, the news media has reported on some of the current efforts to delay release of
information that, for example, could harm national security or law enforcement interests.
COng ress, however, intended to put the burden on the government to prove that documents
should not be released for public inspection - the presumption of FOrA is open government.
Unfortunately, the government's view of its obligations to the public under FOIA has never been
in sync with Congress's original intent.
Take for example the FOIA bureaucracy, Not only does each federal department have a FOIA
office; typically each agency within a Department will have a FOIA office. Each Department will
have its own set of regulations applying the FOIA. The Defense Department regulations, for
example, number over 50 pages; each page contains two columns of rules in small print.
Somewhere in every department's set of regulations will be the "helpful" advice that your FOIA
request will be processed more quickly if it is directed to the appropriate subagency, For the
DoD that will not only include its own subagencies, but also the Departments of the Army, Air
Force, etc and each of those Departments' respective subagencies and regulatory tomes, Even
assuming that an agency name explains its function, the constancy of government reorganization
makes even this first step inordinately difficult In CFi's case the Headquarters, U,S. Army
Support Detachment, Oakdale, PA facility is now called the Charles E. Kelly Support FacUity. In
1965, oakdale was under the jurisdiction of a Fort Custer in Michigan, it now reports to Fort Dix
in New Jersey,
To make this maze more user non-friendly, there Is typIcally an address hidden within the
regulations where the public can write in the event that there "is uncertainty" about what
subagency might have the record being sought. CFi wrote to one·of the 000 offices for the
"uncertain", which responded that it did not have the documents CFi requested because DoD's
FOIA program was "decentralized" - in other words the burden is on the public to figure out the
agency paper trail. Fortunately, because of CFis research, FOIA requests were also made to DoD
agencies on various rungs of the bureaucratic ladder.
If you can get beyond the "who's on first" phase of the FOIA, you get to move to the "name that
document phase", The Army, for example, told CFi that we had not described what we wanted
with suffICient specificity to enable it to even conduct a FOlA search. Its regulation on specificity
advises the public to provide "descriptive information" that "Is event related and includes the
circumstances that resulted in the record being created or the date and circumstances
surrounding the event the record covers," Apparently, for the Army, CFi's data establishing, Inter
alia, the participation of the Anny, and military personnel from the U.s. Army Support
Detachment in Oakdale, pennsylvania In a publicly acknowleclged investigation of an unknown
object reported at 4:45 pm and referred to the military shortly thereafter by the Pennsylvania
State Police on December 9, 1965 didn't give the Army a due about where to start looking.
A variation on the same theme was NASA's \\no records" response to CFi's first request letter.
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