Presidio of Monterey's questionable FOIA response

Presidio in May 2014 (Molnar)

The Presidio of Monterey continues to be cagey about an incident that caused the evacuation of the base back in mid-August.

After months of silence, The Herald was able to determine hundreds of students, faculty members and military personnel fled because officials believed an instructor intended to blow himself up.

This newspaper was only able to figure that out using a California Public Records Act request for all communication from law enforcement to dispatch at the Monterey County Emergency Communications center in Salinas. All the Army said was  that a  "real world incident" took place, a suspect was in custody and there was no danger to the public.

A Freedom of Information Act request for the Presidio, made at the same time as the state request, came back empty.

The Herald asked for: "All emails, reports and correspondence concerning the
Aug. 8, 2014, incident at the Presidio of Monterey that required an emergency
drill to be halted."

What we received was three press releases without an explanation of why nothing else was included. This would mean: 1) No one sent any emails, made any reports or sent any letters on a major military instillation, and home to the Defense Language Institute, about a basewide evacuation or 2) It ignored the law in its response.

FOIA law says government agencies must give "the reasons therefor" not granting a request. The Presidio's response just says "please find enclosed partial response." The fine print of the act is on the Department of Justice's website.

You can view the Presidio's response below:

Naval Postgraduate School's "ethical standards" in curriculum

After getting all the FOIAs from the Naval Postgraduate School (see Saturday's post) I decided to make a request for one that had already been made.

Someone had requested a response the school had made to the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman to review educational materials for "anti-Islamic content."

The response was fairly boring and it happened too long ago, so I decided against a story. Yet sticking with the purpose of this blog, I am sharing the response here.

The school basically listed a bunch of ways it searches and prevents this type of thing and, unless someone from the inside tells me differently, it looks like they are doing a pretty good job.

Tomorrow I will start getting into my municipal requests before swinging back around to local military stuff.

Read NPS' response below:



NPS FOIA follow -

FOIAing the FOIAs at Naval Postgraduate School

Today we will look at one of my favorite tricks to do when I'm new to a beat: Making a public records request for all the public records requests.

It might seem silly, but you learn some amazing stuff sometimes.

In this instance, I used the information to bolster my case for an article about a backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests at the Naval Postgraduate School.

I also later made a separate request for something I saw here and will post that Monday.

Below is my FOIA request for the FOIA requests and the Navy school. I should note the Presidio of Monterey denied a similar request for its requests a few months later.


NPS FOIAs -