From Huffington Post: The FBI is going long to keep its secret files on animal rights activists a secret: It is fighting public records requests about why it keeps denying public records requests.
It’s a deeply meta strategy that’s also like the set-up for an Abbott and Costello routine — but to Ryan Shapiro, the MIT doctoral candidate profiled in Mother Jones on Wednesday as “the punk rocker who can liberate your FBI file,” it’s nothing new.
For years, Shapiro and the agency have engaged in a tug-of-war over how many records the FBI will release to enable his academic research on the history of the animal rights movement. Since 2010, Shapiro has barraged the agency with records requests. He says he now has roughly 600 records requests open and is fighting for the release of 350,000 pages of files — which likely makes him the agency’s most prolific requester (or tormentor).
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