Welcome to all the visitors to this blog website coming via the links posted by Cryptome and Need To Know.
"The shadowy figures behind SPY.ORG.UK (of which we cannot speak, but who have haunted NTK since issue 1) have started a blog to gather and their track Freedom of Information requests, so you can have a nice RSS feed of wriggling civil servant replies. And, just to make life even more snugly private, you can anonymously provide your own requests, which they will forward as a sort of human anonymising proxy."
We would feel honoured if people chose to trust us to act as such a Trusted Third Party to act as a "human anonymising proxy" intermediary for Freedom of Information Act requests.
For the vast majority of people who make a Freedom of Information Act request, there should be no problems, and no need to get someone else to submit their request.
Howver, given the attitude of some public authorities, some of who are raising the dubious spectre of "mosaic attacks" through multiple FOIA requests, some people may wish to make suggestions via this blog.
If you are feeling paranoid, feel free to use anonymous remailers and/or our public PGP encryption keys for blog@spy.org.uk - more likely to be used by our Cryptome visitors than the NTK ones, we suspect.
We are hoping that by publishing the details of the FOIA requests which our limited resources allow us to make, sympathetic people "in the know" will guide our requests towards specific documents which they are aware of, hidden through the obscurity of the what passes for public sector document management and filing systems.
Bear in mind the large list of exemptions to the FOIA and the discussions about government resources versus the public's right to be informed.
1. If you want people to suggest FOI requests without sending you an email, perhaps you should put a specific form on the website and link to it from a prominent part of the first screen.
2. Given the use by christian terrorists of the animal rights terrorist tactics against the bbc (publishing personal addresses and telephone numbers of bbc staff, encouraging harassment and worse, using email mailing lists etc) it would be interesting to make an FOI request to find out what options the government considered for handling this sort of domestic tourism, what went into the very belated support for Huntington Life Sciences, what they considered before their latest proposals to help protect people, etc. I don't know enough to make a sharp enough request.
The Friends of the Earth website already has a fine FOIA Request Generator which people can use, so there is not much point in duplicating that.
http://community.foe.co.uk/tools/right_to_know/request_generator.html
N.B. Personal Data is covered by an exemption: Section 40: Personal Information
You can't even request your own Personal Data under the FOIA, you need to make a specific Data Protection Act subject data access request (41 days to reply, £10 fee etc.), although it is likely that the same team of people will often be handling both types of request.