President Obama’s “most transparent administration ever” is being accused of “failure by design” in the DoJ\u2019s protocols for responding to public requests.<\/strong> The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format,” but as The Guardian reports,<\/a> a new lawsuit alleges DoJ intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system <\/strong>when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.<\/p>\n In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner \u201cfundamentally at odds with the statute\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia\u2019s passage this mont<\/strong>h.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Foia requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year<\/strong>. The FBI\u2019s chief technology officer during the second George W Bush administration, Jack Israel, said he was unimpressed with the system in a Q&A cited in Shapiro\u2019s complaint with the now-defunct site FierceGovernmentIT.<\/p>\n Not only is the interface archaic, but the way that you search data, the way you input data, all of those are archaic, wrote Shapiro in his complaint.<\/strong> Indeed, in 2012 a DoJ commission headed by Webster himself investigating the 2009 Fort Hood shooting called ACS \u201cthe FBI\u2019s most outdated system\u201d,<\/strong> noting that \u201c[i]t is being phased out in favor of an impressive Web-based successor, Sentinel\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n More recently, the FBI\u2019s own investigation into the September 11 attacks found that \u201c[o]n September 11, 2001, the Bureau\u2019s information technology was inadequate to support its counterterrorism mission<\/strong>\u201d, noting further that \u201c[t]he FBI\u2019s legacy investigative information system, the Automated Case Support (ACS), was not very effective in identifying information or supporting investigations\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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