The Freedom of Information Act process serves multiple purposes. At one level, it's an administrative routine, where citizens make uncomplicated requests for routine and uncontroversial documents, and where governments can ease the burden on everyone by proactively publishing items which are subject to such routine request.

The other half of FOIA is its contentious side, where an individual or an organization asks for something that the agency is reluctant or unwilling to release. In some cases, initial requests are met with stonewalling, requests for absurd fees or stony silence; subsequent appeals are slow or head to the courts for a decision. When organizations, especially media organizations, get turned down, the process often becomes the story.

Not every FOIA request is fulfilled in a timely way. And sometimes when the truth comes out, it's embarrassing or worse for the organization that finds itself under extra scrutiny - in part for whatever actions come to light and in part for the questions about transparency and secrecy that accompany it.

Reuters, Wikileaks

Wikileaks is a website based in Iceland or perhaps Sweden that anonymously publishes leaks of sensitive docments. Founded in December 2006, it has made its mark on the news gathering world by maintaining anonymity and by publishing documents from sources that the mainstream media does not touch because of copyright, libel, slander, and data protection laws. The organization has found itself under fire from governments all over the world which are seeking to shut it down, prompting media like the New York Times to defend it and invoke the Pentagon Papers case in 1971.

Two employees of Reuters were killed in a U.S. helicopter air strike in eastern Baghdad on July 12, 2007, prompting Reuters to request a copy of the video from the event that Reuters editors had seen in an off-the-record briefing on July 25, 2007. Reuters did not get a prompt or timely reply to its FOIA request, and pursued access through official channels.

Wikileaks spent about $50,000 to bring the story to light, taking an encrypted copy of the video sourced from anonymous sources and decrypting it with the help of an army of computing resources sourced from Twitter. An anonymous senior US military official has confirmed the video is authentic, while at the same time the military is continuing to deny the FOIA request on the grounds that it cannot locate the video in question.

The footage is graphic and disturbing. Because Wikileaks released it, they had the opportunity to produce the annotated edition which puts their case forward clearly that the aggression against the Reuters journalists was unjustifed and the subsequent actions seen on the tape were brutal and barbaric. Had CENTCOM released the video directly to Reuters, the narrative would have been very different, and not given an opportunity for Wikileaks to be the hero.

CENTCOM has released some supporting information via FOIA via their FOIA reading room. They have lost control of the story, the story that they tried to carefully play to Reuters, to an organization which does not respect their authority.

Dearborn autopsy released, but late

Muslim Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah died in an Oct. 28, 2009 shootout with federal agents in Dearborn. In initial press reports sourced from official sources, the incident was described as he "shot a police dog before he was fatally shot by authorities, the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit said in a statement." (Wall Street Journal).

News organizations looking further at the incident, including the Michigan Messenger and the Detroit newspapers, asked for a copy of the autopsy reports. The Dearborn Police department was slow to release this information, citing the routine denial of information requests for information associated with an ongoing investigation. The autopsy was finally released in February, prompting an immediate call for an investigation by the Congress and the Department of Justice.

On April 7, the Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) released graphic photos of the crime scene, which further call into question the initial official accounts of the event.

The FBI and the Dearborn Police have lost control of the story, the story that they tried to carefully play to the media, to an advocacy group which can use both the event and the subsequent lack of evident transparency in handling information about the event to focus attention on their perspective on treatment of Islamic groups.

Edward Vielmetti writes the FOIA Friday column for AnnArbor.com .