FBI 'Freedom of Information Act' Site

The "Freedom of Information Act" site is an interesting example of how a piece of legislation, originally enacted to constrain the powers of the FBI and other government agencies, has been incorporated into the Bureau's online public relations presence. This process of incorporation is apparent in two main ways:  the site's selection and categorisation of FOIA documents to fit an FBI narrative of law enforcement and its implicit attempt to integrate the Act with the FBI ethos.

Structure

In terms of its structure, the FOIA site is a fairly straightforward archival site, incorporating a central archive of documents surrounded by a small amount of contextual information and links.  Its introduction describes changes in legislation which required the FBI, previously exempt from FOIA obligations, to undertake the "labor-intensive" task of responding to FOIA requests.  As an additional service, visitors are told, "we have selected several FBI cases which may be of interest to the public." 

The Electronic Reading Room is a virtual and partial version of the FOIA Reading Room in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington D.C. Electronic documents are subdivided into categories that include 'Espionage,' 'Famous Persons,' 'Gangster Era' and 'Violent Crime.' It is immediately apparent that these categories represent an attempt to structure the readers' engagement with the documents, albeit a fairly crude one.  One kind of category ('Famous Persons,' 'Gangster Era' ) relegates these documents to the status of curios, relics from an earlier period of American history. The other kind ( 'Violent Crime,' 'Espionage' ) characterises crime as an alien threat to the body politic in a way that recalls Potter: "The battles between sophisticated 'Government-Men' and psychopathic others became a familiar narrative for the increasingly complex encounters between state and citizen throughout the twentieth century." The Reading Room Index provides a listing of documents without the mediating categories. 

Various other features are worth mentioning: the Search function allows for location of documents by keyword or title; Major Information Systems provides a tantalising glimpse of the kinds of surveillance and data collection the FBI is currently authorised to conduct; you can check the grounds for exemption of information against the Explanation of Exemptions sheet.

The FOIA site is almost entirely enclosed; the only outside links it provides are to the Department of Justice website, for clarification of Freedom of Information Laws. However, when navigating to the DOJ site, one receives a warning: The FBI takes no responsibility for, and exercises no control over, the organizations, views, accuracy, copyright or trademark compliance or legality (!!) of the material contained on this server. This warning may or may not be a legal requirement. However, given that the link is to another official government website, we might instead see it as symbolic of the jealously guarded institutional autonomy of the FBI, and of Loch K. Johnson's assertion that "disaggregation has remained the hallmark of American intelligence, as units within the policy departments have resisted the move towards centrism as a threat to their own authority."

Purpose

Wright's 'institutional self-interest' can be clearly discerned as a motive behind the creation of this site. The impression we receive from the FBI's public display of these documents is of an institution going beyond its legal obligations to provide transparency as a public service. In doing so, the FBI gets to exert some degree of control over the way in which these documents are viewed.

 For instance, we can identify a clear split in the archival material between 'Hoover' and 'post-Hoover' periods. Many of the older files ( like those on Lucille Ball or Bertolt Brecht ) relate to surveillance of public figures suspected of being 'Communists' or 'subversives.' By contrast, most of the more recent ones relate to violent crime, organised gangs, and other more 'legitimate' threats to American society. In this way, the Hoover ethos of unregulated surveillance is implicitly contrasted with a more responsible approach in recent times. 

Finally, a pragmatic purpose for this site can be identified: it is intended to cut down the FBI workload of processing Freedom of Information requests. FOIA 'sightseers' who want to look at the FBI file on Al Capone or John Lennon can be redirected to this site, rather than requiring physical files to be sent to them. The introduction raises the possibility of an 'automated document delivery system' that would allow 'documents to be released in electronic format,' and it seems likely that this would eventually be incorporated into the existing FOIA site. What this would mean for the physical records is unclear. 

Usefulness

In his Lexicon of Critical Questions, Randy Bass provides interrogators of archival sites on the WWW with two important questions to pose: "How are primary historical and cultural texts rendered electronically?" and "In what ways does the electronic text transform the original primary text?" Applying these questions to the FOIA site, it becomes apparent that we are dealing with an unusual phenomenon: the censored text. 

The censorship is not concealed. The analyst uses a colored marker to delete any exempt material, writes in the margins the particular exemption cited, and has the work copy re-copied using a photocopier with a special filter. The portions that appeared in translucent color on the work copy are black on the release copy. Thus, in terms of Bass's first question, the electronic rendering of these texts is faithful; the photocopied documents are merely scanned and presented in Adobe Acrobat format. However, they have already been subjected to a process of concealment prior to their electronic rendering. They have also, in many cases, been condensed. Obviously, this means they must be treated warily by the historian. 

As to the second question, the electronic transformation of the text is minimal - the reader is confronted with a scanned document, usually of immense length. The size of these documents means that keyword searches with Acrobat take an extremely long time. One is left with the prospect of manually searching the document - a daunting task, but one that can yield fascinating information.  For instance, on page 120 of the Martin Luther King file, we find reference to "an illegal counterintelligence program directed to discredit and neutralise the civil rights leader." 

In summary, we find that, considered as an historical online archive, the FOIA site is a far from ideal source. The material is presented selectively, according to criteria we can assume are institutionally biased. We have no way of knowing whether the selection of documents is a representative one.  Most of the documents have been censored, and are thus incomplete. All this is in accordance with the FBI's uneasy relationship with the FOIA as identified by Charns and others. However, I would contend that the historian who takes its limitations into account can wring insights from this site, in spite of its structural 'intentions.' At the least, it provides an embodiment of the tension between two different conceptions of the archive that Featherstone discusses.

 

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