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FOIA Lawsuits Spike In 2014, With Reporters For NYT, Vice, Mother Jones Taking Legal Action

FOIA Lawsuits Spike In 2014
By 

HuffPost Media fellow

INDIAN HILLS, CO - JANUARY 10: At her home, Sarah Davidon looks through page after page of documents her father, Bill Davidon, collected from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act. It took years and many letters to acquire the documents. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, the anti-war activist group that burglarized the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971, broke four decades of silence and their identities were revealed in the book 'The Burglary', by journalist Betty Medzger. The ringleader of the burglary, Bill Davidon, lived in Colorado and died just this past fall. His daughter, Sarah Davidon, also lives in Colorado, and has boxes of documents and photographs that her father kept from the time before and after the burglary. (Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
INDIAN HILLS, CO - JANUARY 10: At her home, Sarah Davidon looks through page after page of documents her father, Bill Davidon, collected from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act. It took years and many letters to acquire the documents. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, the anti-war activist group that burglarized the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania on March 8, 1971, broke four decades of silence and their identities were revealed in the book 'The Burglary', by journalist Betty Medzger. The ringleader of the burglary, Bill Davidon, lived in Colorado and died just this past fall. His daughter, Sarah Davidon, also lives in Colorado, and has boxes of documents and photographs that her father kept from the time before and after the burglary. (Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

In 2014, 422 Freedom of Information Act lawsuits were filed against the federal government, more than any year "since at least 2001," the FOIA Project reported Monday.

Citing "new analysis of court records" compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the FOIA Project found that the number of suits jumped by 50 between 2013 and 2014; 35 more suits were filed this year than in 2005 (the next highest period since 2001).

Under FOIA, federal agencies are required to give any person access to records upon written request, unless the documents meet one of nine exemptions, ranging from national security concerns to invasion of privacy.

While a diverse group of people and organizations filed suits in 2014, according to the FOIA Project, a number of cases did indeed involve news outlets. The New York Times was the only "legacy" publication to file any suits against the federal government, and four of its five cases list Washington correspondent Charlie Savage as a co-plaintiff. Among individuals to launch legal action, Vice News' Jason Leopold filed eight suits in 2014; Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones who was detained in Iran, filed two.

MediaDC, the company that owns the Washington Examiner, and Propublica, an "independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest," also reportedly filed FOIA suits in 2014.

H/T Politico

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