"human anonymising proxy" for FOIA requests ?

| 3 Comments

Welcome to all the visitors to this blog website coming via the links posted by Cryptome and Need To Know.

"The shadowy figures behind SPY.ORG.UK (of which we cannot speak, but who have haunted NTK since issue 1) have started a blog to gather and their track Freedom of Information requests, so you can have a nice RSS feed of wriggling civil servant replies. And, just to make life even more snugly private, you can anonymously provide your own requests, which they will forward as a sort of human anonymising proxy."

We would feel honoured if people chose to trust us to act as such a Trusted Third Party to act as a "human anonymising proxy" intermediary for Freedom of Information Act requests.

For the vast majority of people who make a Freedom of Information Act request, there should be no problems, and no need to get someone else to submit their request.

Howver, given the attitude of some public authorities, some of who are raising the dubious spectre of "mosaic attacks" through multiple FOIA requests, some people may wish to make suggestions via this blog.

If you are feeling paranoid, feel free to use anonymous remailers and/or our public PGP encryption keys for blog@spy.org.uk - more likely to be used by our Cryptome visitors than the NTK ones, we suspect.

We are hoping that by publishing the details of the FOIA requests which our limited resources allow us to make, sympathetic people "in the know" will guide our requests towards specific documents which they are aware of, hidden through the obscurity of the what passes for public sector document management and filing systems.

Bear in mind the large list of exemptions to the FOIA and the discussions about government resources versus the public's right to be informed.

3 Comments

1. If you want people to suggest FOI requests without sending you an email, perhaps you should put a specific form on the website and link to it from a prominent part of the first screen.

2. Given the use by christian terrorists of the animal rights terrorist tactics against the bbc (publishing personal addresses and telephone numbers of bbc staff, encouraging harassment and worse, using email mailing lists etc) it would be interesting to make an FOI request to find out what options the government considered for handling this sort of domestic tourism, what went into the very belated support for Huntington Life Sciences, what they considered before their latest proposals to help protect people, etc. I don't know enough to make a sharp enough request.

The Friends of the Earth website already has a fine FOIA Request Generator which people can use, so there is not much point in duplicating that.

http://community.foe.co.uk/tools/right_to_know/request_generator.html

N.B. Personal Data is covered by an exemption: Section 40: Personal Information

You can't even request your own Personal Data under the FOIA, you need to make a specific Data Protection Act subject data access request (41 days to reply, £10 fee etc.), although it is likely that the same team of people will often be handling both types of request.

This is a superb post and may be one that is followed up to see what are the results

A comrade sent this link the other day and I will be desperately awaiting your next write-up. Carry on on the tremendous work.

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About this blog

This United Kingdom based blog has been spawned from Spy Blog, and is meant to provide a place to track our Freedom of Information Act 2000 requests to United Kingdom Government and other Public Authorities.

If you have suggestions for other FOIA requests,  bearing in mind the large list of exemptions, then email them to us, or use the comments facility on this blog, and we will see  what we can do, without you yourself having to come under the direct scrutiny of  "Sir Humphrey Appleby" or his minions.

Email Contact

Please feel free to email us your views about this website or news about the issues it tries to comment on:

email: blog @spy[dot]org[dot]uk

Here is our PGP public encryption key or download it via a PGP Keyserver.

WhatDoTheyKnow.com

WhatDoTheyKnow.com - FOIA request submission and publication website from MySociety.org

Campaign Buttons

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Campaign for the Freedom of Information

NO2ID - opposition to the Home Office's Compulsory Biometric ID Card
NO2ID - opposition to the Home Office's Compulsory Biometric ID Card and National Identity Register centralised database.

Watching Them, Watching Us, UK Public CCTV Surveillance Regulation Campaign
UK Public CCTV Surveillance Regulation Campaign

Peaceful resistance to the curtailment of our rights to Free Assembly and Free Speech in the SOCPA Designated Area around Parliament Square and beyond

Parliament Protest blog - resistance to the Designated Area restricting peaceful demonstrations or lobbying in the vicinity of Parliament.

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Amnesty International 's irrepressible.info campaign

Yes, Minister

Yes, Minister Series 1, Episode 1, "Open Government" First airtime BBC: 25 February 1980

"Bernard Woolley: "Well, yes, Sir...I mean, it [open government] is the Minister's policy after all."
Sir Arnold: "My dear boy, it is a contradiction in terms: you can be open or you can have government."

FOIA Links

Campaign for the Freedom of Information

Office of the Information Commissioner,
who is meant to regulate the Freedom of Information Act 2000 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Scottish Information Commissioner,
who similarly regulates the Freedom of Information Act (Scotland) 2002

Information Tribunal - deals with appeals against decisions by the Information Commissioners.

Freedom of Information pages - Department for Constitutional Affairs

Friends of the Earth FOIA Request Generator and links to contact details for Central Government Departments and their Publication Schemes

UK Government Information Asset Register - in theory, this should point you to the correct Government documents, but in practice...well see for yourself.

Access all Information is also logging some FOIA requests

foi.mysociety.org - prototype FOIA request submission, tracking and publication website

Blog Links

Spy Blog

UK Freedom of Information Act Blog - started by Steve Wood, now handed over to Katherine Gundersen

Your Right To Know - Heather Brooke

Informaticopia - Rod Ward

Open Secrets - a blog about freedom of information by BBC journalist Martin Rosenbaum

Panopticon blog - by Timothy Pitt-Payne and Anya Proops. Timothy Pitt-Payne is probably the leading legal expert on the UK's Freedom of Information Act law, often appearing on behlaf of the Information Commissioner's Office at the Information Tribunal.

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