Nothing but the Facts

• Author: David Burnham
• Position: Codirector, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and Associate Research and Professor
• Pages: 59-64

David Burnham - Codirector, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and Associate Research and Professor, Newhouse School of Public Communication, Syracuse University.

Page59

A good deal of the discussion at this important conference so far has concerned the impact and potential impact of the terrorism legislation approved by Congress in the wake of September 11, 2001. My role here is quite dififerent. It is to discuss, to the extent that we are allowed to see it, the concrete government information outlining the reality of how the federal agencies are dealing with the threat of terrorism in the United States.

I am able to outline this framework thanks to the power of the Freedom of Information Act. Here, in summary, is the background. More than a dozen years ago, Susan Long, a statistics professor at Syracuse University, and I carne up with the idea of establishing a nonprofit organization to provide the American people with comprehensive information about the federal government. The organization is called the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). With the support of a number of foundations, including The New York Times Company Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and the Knight Foundation, we started collecting highly detailed data from a wide range of federal agencies. Our information-gathering targets have included the Executive Office for United States Attorneys in the Department of Justice, the Office of Personnel Management, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and others.

With this information we are often able to sidestep the self-serving press releases, political speeches, congressional testimony, and special reports that come from the federal government. We can then examine what the government is actually doing: how they are enforcing the law, collecting taxes, deploying employees around the country, and spending federal dollars. Not what the officials in power say they are doing, but what is actually being done.

You name it, we've got it, the equivalent of millions and millions of pages of information. We have also posted this information on the web Page60 so that journalists, lawyers, public interest groups, legislators, law schools, and others can hold their government accountable.

For example, on the terrorism front, we recently posted a special report on our website about terrorism enforcement in the year following September 11, 2001.¹ What did the government actually do? Given the fear that gripped the nation and the government's law enforcement officers, the government's reaction was not surprising. However, even the most sophisticated observers were astonished by its magnitude. The enforcement data show a tenfold increase in the number of named "terrorists" indicted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the year after September 11. In the twelve months...