July 2009

I remember practically the exact moment when I came up with the idea for Holy Hullabaloos. I was sitting on my gray couch reading Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, really enjoying her bizarre road trip to all these places having something to do with the country's three non-Kennedy-related-presidential-assassinations (Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield) when I suddenly realized-hey, I can go on a road trip too! I was about to begin a sabbatical after six years of teaching church/state law, and what better way to spend my time than to go check out these places I had been teaching about and writing about for so long? I had always wondered what the Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel was like (was everyone there a Satmar?). I had always wanted to view some legislative prayers (how many people were on the Senate floor during the prayer?). I had always wanted to see a Friday Night Lights football game at Santa Fe High School in East Texas (are they still praying before kickoff even after Santa Fe v. Doe?). I think I got up from the couch and started knocking out the proposal that very day.

It's one thing to take a road trip and see a bunch of places, though, and quite another to discover stuff that people might want to read about. In the back of my head I think I always knew that I would have to actually talk to some people in these places if the book was going to be at all interesting. But since I'm kind of an anti-social weirdo, the prospect of interviewing people was kind of terrifying. I hadn't conducted an interview since junior year of high school, when I interviewed Mr. Robinson, a young new physics teacher at our school. I asked him if he wanted to teach for his entire career, and he told me he planned at some point to go back to grad school. Unfortunately, in the paper "grad school" came out as "grade school," and Robinson, who was already kind of struggling as it was, subsequently lost control of his class entirely. Oops.

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By Nate Cardozo, Open Government Legal Fellow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

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This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit to compel the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other members of the intelligence community to turn over documents detailing their concerns about their own misdeeds. We sued under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows anyone to request information about the federal government's activities. President Obama has called the FOIA "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government."

The documents we're seeking involve reports to the little-known Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), which was created within the Executive Office of the President in the aftermath of Watergate. Until last year, the board was the primary body within the executive branch providing accountability for the intelligence community. Every intelligence agency was required by executive order to send the IOB quarterly reports of "any intelligence activities of their organizations that they have reason to believe may be unlawful or contrary to Executive order or Presidential directive." The IOB reviewed and summarized this information for the President, and forwarded reports of misconduct that it believed violated the law to the Attorney General for prosecution. With few exceptions, reports to the IOB have not been made public.

In February, 2008, President Bush issued a controversial executive order undercutting the IOB's oversight role, shifting much of the board's responsibility to the newly created Director of National Intelligence (DNI). While the IOB still receives reports of the intelligence community's questionable activity, it no longer has the authority to refer those reports to the Attorney General for prosecution. That job that now falls to the DNI. Intelligence agencies do not have to file reports with the IOB or the DNI quarterly, but rather when "appropriate."