The members of this military unit could use some perspective. Nuclear history researcher Chuck Hansen was the bane of the Department of Energy for many years, and he managed to get quite a bit of historical information out thanks to DOE’s compliance with FOIA, as well as a good bit of generous cooperation. His collection is still available as a CD.

Apparently DOE’s FOIA office even had a special category for Mr. Hansen’s numerous requests – but they never stonewalled the way I see various agencies doing these days, nor did they ever claim that he ‘broke’ the FOIA process.

According to Whatever, if you make enough requests to someone else, said someone else is permitted to consider you obsessed and not deal with you.

Yet you never see him describe antidirt in the same way despite being far less cordial and much more harassing. Hm.

I’ve worked as a DoD FOIA processor, and I’ve handled a few of Turse’s cases, so I think I have some unique insight into this.

Pro-DoD – There are lots of great guys in DoD FOIA – people who care about the work, recognize its significance, and get the job done. I have nothing but respect for Jim Hogan. I have known countless individuals where the only thing stopping FOIA requests is limits on manpower and resources – you can’t requisition additional hours in the day to get everything done.

Anti-DoD – DoD is enormous. For FOIA purposes, that means it’s decentralized. As such, you get a wide variety in the quality of people doing FOIA, but, once you find the right people, you know it’s being handled by people who understand the documents, culture, etc. When the FOIA guy knows the subject matter expert personally, and sees him on a daily basis, there’s a good chance the FOIA guy will get what he needs to do his job (if there’s an uncooperative subject matter expert, there’s not much the FOIA guy can do).
That all wouldn’t be a problem, except that FOIA is resourced at the local level. And, as you can imagine, most military brass doesn’t have FOIA as a priority: it doesn’t kill sumbitches; it doesn’t keep sumbitches from killing our sumbitches; and it provides yet another avenue for anti-military assholes to harass our boys. Now, those are all good priorities for military leadership – you want brass that cares about protecting our boys, winning our wars. But it means FOIA gets neglected. Often, FOIA becomes yet another collateral duty for the secretary/coffee boy/office bitch, often times explicitly defined as 10% of their duties – so about 45 minutes a day, and rarely the aspect of job performance that gets any attention on their performance review. And that’s before we even touch on offices getting necessary supplies – there were times when we had to wait an entire month for printer toner to be in the budget. To summarize: FOIA is often underfunded and undermanned (training is a joke), and there are a few too many FOIA guys who just don’t care.
And avoiding the requester like that is simply inexcusable (assuming we’re getting the full story, which is a reasonable assumption).

Pro-Turse – Nick’s a good guy, and does important work. A lot of what he looks into needs to be looked into. And, at the end of the day, he’s a guy doing his job, just like everyone else.

Anti-Turse – And here’s where you expect me to rip into him. I’ll admit, his requests are no fun – they tend to be broad, sensitive, and he’s almost always asking for much more than he really wants. But, in my experience, he’s been eminently reasonable when contacted to clarify or narrow the scope. But then we get to the general problem of requester negotiation.
An ideal sort of negotiation:

Q: I want the moon.
A: That’s effectively impossible. It would require a century of dedicated engineers to determine if there’s even a feasible approach, and trillions of dollars and decades of research developing and testing prototypes before we can even attempt such a mission.
Q: How about some moon rocks?
A: That’s an intensive and cost-prohibitive task. It will take at least 5 years and billions of dollars.
Q: Well, how about some space dust?
A: … It will take a couple years to prep and deploy a collector unit to low-earth orbit.

For context, this is a less-than-ideal negotiation:

Q: I want the moon.
A: That’s effectively imp-
Q: FUCK YOU I’M SUING!

You get too many of the latter and you get gun shy. Especially when the risk analysis shows that most requesters are unlikely to sue, and most who do sue tend to wait longer if you simply don’t respond. The risk appetite leans toward “If they’re going to sue, let them sue.” And, to top it off, few generals would impede an otherwise excellent soldier’s career because he has less than stellar FOIA performance.

So how do we fix this? Well, that’s the million dollar question, now isn’t it?