S O U N D   O F F

Regarding the Obama administration recommendation that feds should maybe "lie" about existence of information when FOIA'd, is nothing new. We deal with lying government employees daily; which makes life for honest government employees a living hell!

But, making this long kept secret public could be a good thing. Why? To curb the litigious, FOIA'ing appetites of Eco-criminal groups.

Eco-criminals use FOIA as a way to keep some government employees from doing the job they were hired to do.
Example: Using FOIA, Eco-criminals keep BLM agents strapped to a desk, encumbering them from doing their "outside on the land" job.

Then, using Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) they *sue the BLM agents for "not being outside on the land" -doing range management; according to Eco-criminal gospel; which generally has nothing to do with science.

One can hope that since Eco-criminals now know they're not going to get one darn thing out of FOIA'ing, they'll stop impeding BLM agent work.

This makes me wonder why they’re not screaming the loudest against this proposed measure. Could it be they've been in on - the secret?

*sue - Circuitously, Eco-criminals get federal funding to sue; then collect more federal money for their attorney's billable hours (that run at about $650 per hour); then collect "settlement" money - again from federal.

Volunteer Editor Roni Bell Sylvester