Now part of the public domain as unrestricted U.S. Maxwell's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Eyes Digital Archive makes available for the first time a collection of 51 FBI files on prominent African American authors and literary institutions, many of them unearthed through William J. Eyes reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. The official aim behind the Bureau's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Drawing on thousands of pages of recently released FBI files, William J. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. "For now, however, the protocol is to go back to the mainframe era - the days of Reagan.Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. In time, with more challenges to the FOIA protocol and better safeguards built into the FBI's current Sentinel software, the bureau "will better honor FOIA requests," Van Dyke predicted. "Many government agencies deal with software older than the interns servicing them," said Raymond Van Dyke, a technology attorney based in Washington, D.C. Department of Justice, which declined to comment for this story. "If we hope to know even some of what our government is truly up to, FOIA must not only be defended against the FBI and others who view transparency as a threat, but strengthened and dramatically expanded." In his latest lawsuit, filed July 4 in the same court, Shapiro requests that the FBI turn over the documents he says were withheld from him, waive the fees it tried to charge him, and cover his attorney fees and other litigation expenses.Īccess to information about the operations of government is essential to democracy, but FOIA is "broken," Shapiro said. The FBI, meanwhile, has argued that Shapiro's work constitutes a threat to national security. In January, a judge in the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in Shapiro's favor in a related case, finding that the FBI’s policy is “fundamentally at odds" with FOIA. "The FBI’s assertion is akin to suggesting that a search of a limited and arbitrarily produced card catalogue at a vast library is as likely to locate book pages containing a specified search term as a full text search of a database containing digitized versions of all the books in that library," Shapiro said. Because of the limitations of that technology, those searches frequently produce no results, he says.įurthermore, despite the existence of two much better search applications within ACS - along with newer search technologies implemented since then - the FBI "almost always refuses" to use those more modern systems on the grounds that they're no more likely to produce results, and that using them would be "unduly burdensome and seriously wasteful of FBI resources," Shapiro says. In particular, the FBI typically conducts FOIA searches in the "universal index" portion of its legacy Automated Case Support system, which was deployed in 1995. The FBI has established "countless means" of foiling FOIA requests, he alleges, including a process by which searches fail "by design." "Since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI has viewed efforts to force bureau compliance with FOIA as a security threat." "When it comes to FOIA, the FBI is simply not operating in good faith," Shapiro said via email.
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