Blasting Facts Free

In October 1973, when Ralph Nader wanted to learn more about Internal Revenue Service investigations of "ideological, militant, subversive and radical organizations," his Tax Reform Research Group cited the Freedom of Information Act and asked to see 41 confidential IRS documents. Not a chance, said the revenue service. Nader's group responded with a suit, and the IRS reluctantly agreed to open its books. Last week Nader revealed that the service's intelligence gathering had been prompted by the Nixon White House. The 99 organizations investigated between 1969 and 1973 included

Americans for Democratic Action, the John Birch Society, the Urban League, the Congress for Racial Equality and the National Council of Churches.

Back in 1969, Realtor Philip Long and his wife Susan also invoked the Freedom of Information Act to get IRS reports and manuals for their fight against a claimed tax debt of $38,144. Three years later, a federal judge ruled for the Longs. Two weeks ago, chastened by its initial loss, the Government agreed to a new Long request and turned over statistical summaries of the 2 million audits made each year since 1954. While dredging through their latest haul, the Longs will be seeking to find whether established agency procedures and practice discriminate against small taxpayers.

To judge from these examples, the

Freedom of Information Act is alive, well and helping information seekers to blast facts out of the Washington bureaucracy just as it was supposed to. Though information seekers have begun to crack the stone wall of official secrecy, they have still been meeting adamantine resistance. Many Government bureaucracies have continued to use all available weapons, tactics, loopholes and weaknesses in the law to maintain their sheltered ways.

Two weeks ago the University of Florida law school's Center for Government Responsibility reported to Congress that, despite Executive objections, the law could and should be amended to assure greater access. That critical conclusion found detailed support in an examination of the act in the current Columbia Law Review. Without needed amendments, said Author Gregory Waples, "the statute cannot attain the lofty ideals that mesmerized its drafters."

Those ideals, stated in the 1966 law, were simply that every federal agency must make "records promptly available to any person." Apart from exceptions so numerous and broad, complained Yale Law Professor Thomas Emerson, that they took away "most of what was previously granted."

The exception for law-enforcement investigatory records, for example, was recently cited to protect Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case. Attorney General William Saxbe reversed an earlier decision to disclose and decided instead that FBI techniques and informers would be compromised, even though the case is a quarter-century old. Angered, Smith College Historian Allen Weinstein will now press his claim in court under the act's provision for judicial review. He may not have much luck. Judges have upheld similar bureaucratic refusals when a Congressman sought reports on the My Lai massacre investigation and a Warren Commission critic asked to see tests of the "single bullet" that killed John Kennedy and wounded John Connally.

The other big exception has been that Golden Oldie, national security. When Hawaii Representative Patsy Mink and 32 other members of Congress asked the Atomic Energy Commission for information about the dangers of a nuclear blast planned for Amchitka Island, they were turned down on national security grounds; the Supreme Court refused to require that a judge inspect the documents to doublecheck the bureaucrats' claim. Recently, Historian Bertram Wolfe and other scholars also failed to win access to Army documents on the allied roundup of anti-Communist Soviet citizens in the West who were handed back to the Russians after the end of World War II.

New Changes. The effectiveness of the act has been further undercut by bureaucratic abuse. Because the law allowed agencies to charge for the duplication of requested files, applicants have had to pay from 50 a page up to what seems like an intentionally prohibitive $1 a page. One group seeking documents for a study of the Department of Agriculture was told that the charge would be $89,000. Delay has been another familiar tactic. Some agencies have been taking more than two months for an initial response and twice as long before ruling on an administrative appeal.

Eight weeks ago, in an effort to remedy some of the defects, Congress passed a number of changes in the act. They require a reply to any request within ten working days and limit duplicating charges to actual costs. The new provisions also call for in camera review by judges of national security claims and restrict investigatory-agency exceptions to ongoing techniques and cases only. Finally, to make going to court easier, one new requirement stipulates that if the information seeker wins, the agency will have to pay his attorney's fee. "Such changes," said the Columbia Law Review's Waples, promise to "remedy the most serious problems."

But President Ford opposed the new time limits and the investigatory and national security alterations. So he vetoed the entire package and urged "a more " flexible and realistic set of ground rules" than the amendments called for.

Last week Congress overrode the veto, a move that promises some drastic changes in the use of the act. Thus far, corporations have made three tunes as many inquiries under the law as scholars, journalists and public-interest law firms combined. Businesses have been understandably eager to lay hands on information given to the Government by competitors, to keep watch on regulatory-agency actions and even to get sales leads. Now with access eased, other diggers may, in Waples' words, move more actively to "unlock the 'quality' knowledge of common public interest."

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