50,000 FOIA Requests You’ll Never Be Able to Make From the FBI

The indefatigable folks at
MuckRock, a site dedicated to making freedom of information
requests, has some bad news: A huge number of documents were
permanently destroyed by flooding of the FBI building in
Washington, DC last year.

“Last week, the FBI got back with their initial response, and
it’s disturbing, to say the least,” explains MuckRock, which

published their findings on Monday:

There’s over five hundred pages, each listing fifty plus
damaged/destroyed documents. And again, this is
the initial response.

At MuckRock, we believe that digitization is an important
component of promoting transparency, both in ensuring dissemination
of information, and guaranteeing the long term survival of
documents. Incidents like this – and the staggering loss to both
history and accountability they incur – are regrettable examples of
why. 

There were so many documents, it took almost
an entire year to put the request together.

This flood took place last April. It’s not the first time water
damage has ruined FBI documents. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York,
the FBI experienced what Salon described as a
“huge and still unquantifiable loss of records” that “between 8,000
and 9,000 cardboard boxes, each capable of storing hundreds of
documents from investigations and cases spanning at least two
decades” were lost. 

You can
click here for the 500ish page list, but it’s not exactly
light reading.