Would you pay $1.4 million to find out how the Drug Enforcement Administration took down a Mexican drug lord? That's essentially the question the DEA recently posed to someone in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.A man named John Dyer filed a FOIA request to the agency last May, asking for documents pertaining to the DEA's role in the location and capture of infamous Mexican drug cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who was arrested last February. Dyer requested that any fees for finding and replicating the documents be waived, a common request that is often accepted if the person filing is a journalist who will use the documents to inform the public on the government's activities.
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Nine months later, the DEA issued a response: the fees would not be waived, and given there was a thick stack of files on Guzman (13,051 case files, to be exact) the total cost would be an estimated $1,461,712—$28 an hour for clerks to do the work and 10 cents per page for reproductions to be made.
It's not clear if Dyer is a journalist or not (I've confirmed he is not the John Dyerwho contributes to VICE News), but he has had the fee waiver granted in previous FOIA requests and appears to be gathering information about the US government's activities in Mexico.MuckRock, the online FOIA-filing service that Dyer used, has received some high estimates before, but this is the highest it's ever received, according to co-founder Michael Morisy (full disclosure: Motherboard and MuckRock are partners on the Drone Census)."To be fair, it was a tremendous amount of material, but I think so much of this kind of comes back to the fact that government agencies seem to purposely have opaque systems so that they can fight off requests like this," Morisy told me.
He also noted that much of the government's records systems still rely on hard-copy paper documents, snail mail, and fax machines, making the process even more tedious and time-consuming. Morisy said Dyer can file an appeal or try to make a more specific request to cut down the number of files."I've never seen this. It's a little weird that it took them nine months to come up with that estimate. I don't know if that's an inefficiency of the FOIA office or just their own files are such a mess that it takes them nine months to figure out how much they know about somebody," Morisy said. "Either way, it's not a particularly reassuring conclusion."
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He also noted that much of the government's records systems still rely on hard-copy paper documents, snail mail, and fax machines, making the process even more tedious and time-consuming. Morisy said Dyer can file an appeal or try to make a more specific request to cut down the number of files."I've never seen this. It's a little weird that it took them nine months to come up with that estimate. I don't know if that's an inefficiency of the FOIA office or just their own files are such a mess that it takes them nine months to figure out how much they know about somebody," Morisy said. "Either way, it's not a particularly reassuring conclusion."