The SEC-ret of their success?

Last summer, we happened to be looking for some agency success stories about FOIA request backlog reduction, and we thought we’d found one at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Monday Links: Disclosing federal contracts, strengthening FOIA, Chicago a model of transparency?

Quick hits related to transparency:

• Washington Technology reports that the General Services Administration is starting to discuss ways to ease transparency around federal contracts.  Foreseeing a day that federal contracts would be made available to the public, GSA is looking to make the process of segmenting public and confidential portions of the contracts in an efficient standard manner to ensure fairness and efficiency, Alice Lipowicz reports.

• Veteran FOIA blogger and attorney Scott Hodes rounds up several practical ideas for strengthening the federal FOIA.
• The City of Chicago now posts online the logs of FOIA requests so anyone can view what information has been requested from city offices and who made the request, although Chicago Sun-Times City Hall beat reporter Fran Spielman sounds distrustful of the mayor’s intent behind the “information dump.”