Burningbird

Kevin Poulson of Wired has published an update on the Aaron Swartz document release.

Evidently the government found more documents and wanted time to review before releasing. The Judge said, “No way”, and that the government has to start releasing documents already reviewed, and provide a timetable when the rest will be released.

Poulson has stated when he starts to receive the documents, he’ll post them. I hope he does. Too many journalists have a habit of _not_ publishing documents they receive as part of a FOIA request or other action, preferring to dribble out the data in tiny bits to keep people coming back.

Ernie Lazar is a man who made a signification number of FOIA requests to the FBI over the years. According to the Medipedia entry on Ernie Lazar:

Ernest Lazar also Ernie Lazar (born 1945) is a “conspiracy buff”, researcher, and archivist of American nationalist and anti-communist organizations and individuals. Since 1980 he has flooded the FBI with thousands of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests obtaining over 600,000 pages of documents on over 2,000 individuals. In addition, he received information from the FBI on the identities of others who requested the same documents. Lazar once had a dispute with the FBI over a $4800 search fee request. The way he got around the fee was to claim he was a freelance journalist.

I’m not necessarily in agreement that it’s a good thing to flood agencies with FOIA requests, nor do I endorse any particular conspiracy theory, but there’s some very interesting documents in the collection.

You can explore the 1200 documents, and download whichever interests you, including large zip files of the entire document set, at the Internet Archives Ernie Lazar collection.

I appreciate Mr. Lazar making all of his FOIA documents freely and easily available to all.