Well call me paranoid but this sure looks like a case of trying to get the camels nose into the tent.  Darrell Issa just wants to make sure FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests are answered in a timely manner?  Next thing you know he’ll be sending donations to WikiLeaks.

Representative Darrell Issa calls it a way to promote transparency: a request for the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years.

But his extraordinary request worries some civil libertarians. It “just seems sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking,” said David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists. “It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good.”

Issa

I have no problem at all with asking for statistics: how many requests; average, mean, longest and shortest turn-around times.  I’m sure there is a lot of stonewalling at the Agency level.  I do not think Darrell Issa has shown himself to be interested in much else but more stonewalling by any means he can get his fingers on.  Keep him out of the FOIA records!

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