The SEJ WatchDog Alert

The WatchDog Alert (formerly WatchDog TipSheet from 2008-2019) was a regular source of story ideas, articles, updates, events and other information with a focus on freedom-of-information issues of concern to environmental journalists in both the United States and Canada.

WatchDog was compiled, edited and written by Joseph A. Davis, who directs the WatchDog Project, an activity of SEJ's Freedom of Information Task Force that reports on secrecy trends and supports reporters' efforts to make better use of FOIA.

Topics on the Beat: 

Latest WatchDog Alert Items

February 9, 2011

  • House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on February 7, 2011, released some of the letters in an unsearchable 20 MB pdf file, which hardly made it easy to research the results. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has released a searchable version.

  • The House Oversight Committee Chair's method of investigating whether DHS was politically screening its responses to FOIA requests has at least one member of his committee worried about the privacy of the FOIA requesters due to Issa's demand for specifics of information.

  • The massive trove of diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks disclosed one of the Obama administration's darkest environmental secrets — that the U.S. held secret diplomatic talks on climate change during the run-up to the December 2009 Copenhagen meeting.

  • The environmental group Friends of the Earth got the information that an electric utility wants to use surplus weapons plutonium in a commercial power reactor through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Energy Department.

  • You can easily find the Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts of committees, federal agencies, and others on the Government & Social Media Wiki. As in the real world, however, the existence of these channels may not necessarily mean they carry any substantial information.

January 26, 2011

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