Ryan Shapiro, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD candidate, is the most prolific Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requester for information from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) according to the US Justice Department. For a time during 2011, Shapiro was filing two FOIA requests daily. That should come as no surprise because Shapiro’s PhD work centers on how the FBI monitors and investigates activists. More specifically, Shapiro is researching how the FBI came to see animal rights activists as the “number one domestic terrorism threat” (.pdf; 8.2MB) in the US.
Will Potter writing for Mother Jones reports that the government has filed a lawsuit in the US District Court, Washington, DC, to prevent the release of some 350,000 pages of information Shapiro is seeking. “Invoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro’s multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a ‘mosaic’ of information whose release could ‘significantly and irreparably damage national security’ and would have ‘significant deleterious effects’ on the bureau’s ‘ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism,” writes Potter.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and the National Security Archive have all filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Shapiro. “Under the FBI’s theory, the greater the public demand for documents, the greater need for secrecy and delay,” Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Potter.
Shapiro’s methodology for greasing the slow-turning wheels of government responses to FOIA requests is to accompany each request with privacy waivers from any potential subjects of the document request whenever possible. Suddenly, the FBI was providing hundreds of pages of documents on individuals of which it had previously denied the existence in responses to earlier requests that were not accompanied by privacy waivers.
Shapiro sued the FBI in 2012 after it stopped responding to his FOIA requests. FOIA rules require any government agency to indicate whether or not it will comply with a given FOIA request within 20 days. The agency doesn’t have to produce the requested information within 20 days — only whether or not it will comply with the request. The FBI has insisted it needs seven years to determine its compliance position with regard to Shapiro’s FOIA requests. Additionally, the FBI argues that can’t discuss the matter in open court — pleading damage to national security interests — and has filed a “secret declaration outlining its case” with the court. “This is an especially circular and Kafkaesque line of argument,” Shapiro tells Potter. “The FBI considers it a national security threat to make public its reasoning for considering it a national security threat to use federal law to request information about the FBI’s deeply problematic understanding of national security threats.”