Monday, April 1, 2024

'Almost Orwellian': Feds Black Out Nearly All Emails About Trucker Surveillance Proposal

 A Department of Transportation component slammed the brakes following semi-furious opposition to its proposal for "On demand" law enforcement surveillance of commercial vehicles a year and a half ago.

What can the public learn from the nearly 500 pages? Almost nothing.

FMCSA blanked out all but 30 pages under the FOIA exemption for "Deliberative process privilege," a redaction notation that appears more than 500 times in the production to the Bader Family Foundation, more than 30 of those paired with the notation "Attorney-client privileged."

"Truck drivers are already operating under an almost Orwellian degree of government monitoring and scrutiny,"and the proposal is vague on what data the devices would transmit, senior attorney Rob Johnson wrote in a November 2022 blog post.

IJ quoted a New York Times essay months before the ANPRM that called long-haul truckers "Some of the most closely monitored workers in the world" and the Canadian COVID-19 vaccine mandates for cross-border hauls "The straw that broke the camel's back," erupting in trucker protests in February 2022.

Despite the requirement that agencies issue determinations in response to FOIA requests within 20 working days, FMCSA told Bader it would take "Up to 5 months" but had given "No documents and no further response" by seven months, prompting the lawsuit, he wrote.

Most of the 461 blanks in the FOIA production are from drafts of the "Final Public Comment Analysis Summary Report" and "Final Excerpt-by-Issue Report of Substantive Comments," both dated Jan. 13, 2023, about two months after public comments were due.

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/almost-orwellian-feds-black-out-nearly-all-emails-about-trucker

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