FOIA request still pending after 24 years

By Martha Mendoza
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Twenty-four years after a young and optimistic journalist-in-the-making typed up a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, Seth Rosenfeld — now an award-winning muckraker with a few gray hairs — is still waiting for the records.

"I'm very disappointed that the Justice Department and the FBI have failed to comply with the law, with court orders and with their own legal agreement to release these public records," Rosenfeld says.

An investigative and legal affairs reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Rosenfeld holds the dubious record of "longest pending FOIA request," according to the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research center on declassified documents.

When he made his request, Rosenfeld was researching Cold War FBI activities at the University of California. Well, actually, he's still researching them.

To date, his saga has included three lawsuits and orders to release the records from five federal judges. It has cost the FBI more than $1 million and prompted the release of more than 200,000 pages of documents — though more records still are being held.

Despite a settlement agreement signed by the FBI in 1996 to release the requested material, the agency has acknowledged that it has yet to turn over an estimated 17,000 pages.

In 2002, Rosenfeld used the documents to write an award-winning package of stories describing how the FBI campaigned in the 1950s and '60s to curb the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley and plotted to oust UC President Clark Kerr.

He said he intends to keep waiting for the rest of the records.