Tag: George Orwell

Punishing Citizens for FOIA Requests

The S.C. House has possibly outdone even itself with a bill that would punish citizens for making FOIA requests.

H.3191 is this beauty and it has already passed from the House to the Senate in its progress to becoming law.

Provisions in the law would allow public agencies to take legal action against citizens who make “overly broad” or “unduly burdensome” requests for public records.

Big Brother 30 Years Beyond 1984

George Orwell’s “Big Brother” is alive and well in the U.S. government 30 years beyond 1984, but I’m not sure even Orwell ever anticipated the level of the current actions.

Another attack, by “Big Brother”, on U.S. citizens’ right to privacy and guarantees of freedom from illegal search and seizure was reported by the “Guardian” and “Washington Times” newspapers recently regarding requests for cell phone records from Verizon.

Those revelations were bad enough, but we later learned, from “The Hill”, that senators knew about these vast phone sweeping operations by the National Security Agency, which have been going on since 2007.