A “release to one, release to all” policy for FOIA will serve the public interest : Sunlight Foundation

"Today, the Sunlight Foundation commented on a 'release to one, release to all' policy for the Freedom of Information Act proposed by the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy promulgated in a Request for Comments, including an description of the 'release to all presumption' and a draft memorandum for federal agencies. Our comment, which will be available to the public at Regulations.gov, follows.

Dear Director Pustay,

We welcome the opportunity to comment upon the Department’s proposed 'release-to-one, release-to-all' policy for fulfilling requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. The Sunlight Foundation strongly supports the proposal overall, with some specific concerns regarding individual components in the draft regarding overly broad exemptions and exceptions.

As a decade-old nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to using journalism, advocacy and technology to improving the transparency and accountability of our politics and government, we see great potential for this approach to improve public knowledge of the operations of government, reduce the costs of administering one of the core sunshine laws of the nation, and reduce asynchronies in the disclosure of government data that are providing an unintended subsidy to industry.

As we have argued in the past, this policy represents a significant change in the nation’s information disclosure policies that would not only complement recent updates to how the federal government protects, structures and publishes public records but could, in the long run, increase public knowledge of what is being done in our name. Governments everywhere should use the demand signal of FOIA requests to prioritize proactive disclosures online.

Structuring and publishing the datasets that commercial interests repeatedly, frequently request should increase the capacity of FOIA officers to respond to more complex public interest requests. We hope that agency CIOs will work directly with the nation’s FOIA officers to apply Project Open Data’s resources to proactive disclosure of records online in machine-readable format.

Should the proactive disclosure of records as open government data be directly tied to the demand expressed by inbound FOIA requests in 2017, we expect to see significant improvements in government transparency and accountability to not only occur in the U.S. federal government but secondary effects in other states and countries that learn from our example."

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