Bureaucracy's Great Paper Chase

Freedom has become license under the Information Act

The hottest growth industry in Washington these days is generated by the Freedom of Information Act. It soaks up millions of dollars, employs hundreds of civil servants, and is driving many of them to utter distraction. The law has brought out of "secret" drawers many illuminating facts about the Government and its manipulations, but it has also in vited misuse, abuse, overuse and a lot of silliness in the name of the public's right to know.

The 30-ft. stack of documents released last week by the FBI on the Kennedy assassination is dramatic testimony to the effort needed to comply with requests under the act. Some 280 FBI agents were called in from the field this summer for "Operation Onslaught," as the project was called. In addition, 379 people are employed full time at FBI headquarters researching 16,000 similar appeals a year. Estimated cost to this one Government agency in 1977: $9 million.

At the CIA, 65 staffers work full time on Freedom of Information cases, at a cost of $2 million a year. In 1976 the Defense Department had 90 employees and $4.7 million tied up fielding more than 40,000 applications.

Though a version of the law has been on the books for eleven years, Watergate and revelations of FBI and CIA misconduct led to a radical change in its use. Over Gerald Ford's veto. Congress in 1974 amended the law, which now sets deadlines for responding, bans excessive copying fees for documents, and provides that winners of Freedom of Information court cases should have their legal fees paid for by the Government. Attorney General Griffin Bell applied another spur to information seekers last May, when he warned all Government agencies that his department would not defend them in court fights to preserve secrecy unless disclosure was "demonstrably harmful, even if the documents technically fall within the exemptions in the act."

With that, almost all information requests--worthy or witless--gained equal weight. An oddball claiming to be followed by Martians demanded and received the record of his "correspondence" with the FBI on the subject. Commercial firms can--and do--try to use Government files as a marketing aid. Example: one company attempted unsuccessfully to get the names and addresses of all people who had bought tax stamps for home wine making. The FTC, the Food and Drug Administration and the Defense Department are constantly turning back efforts by firms to acquire trade secrets of competitors. Says Barbara Keehn, the FTC Freedom of Information chief: "It's a form of industrial espionage, except that they do it under the law. We get very few requests from journalists and consumer groups. That's too bad, because that's who the law was written for."

The commercial prying has led to the phenomenon of the "reverse case." Aggrieved parties sue to prevent release of information--including product specifications, drug formulas, production costs and minority-hiring records--that they supplied to get Government contracts or licenses. There are now 79 such cases being considered in federal courts.

People also interrogate the bureaucracy to determine what the Government has found out about them. After the exposure of FBI and CIA "dirty tricks," thousands approached the agencies for information. Celebrities such as Jane Fonda, John Kenneth Galbraith and Eldridge Cleaver took advantage of the act, giving it wide publicity.

Nonetheless, the Freedom of Information Act has achieved worthwhile results. The CIA, for example, was forced to reveal its top-secret MK-Ultra program of drug experimentation on humans. Ralph Nader used the act to pry out documents for his successful campaign against carcinogenic Red Dye No. 2. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have pressed with some success to get the investigative records of the SEC concerning almost 400 U.S. firms that have paid bribes at home or abroad. The very existence of the law causes bureaucrats to hesitate before launching actions they would not want to explain in public. But as the number of paper chasers grows in Washington, it is increasingly clear that some changes are needed in the act, otherwise the Government may drown in its own regurgitated material.

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