No more 50 cents per copy. No more limited opening hours. And no more flashing ID just to enter the reading room. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database is expected to go online soon.
The Department of Justice database is an exhaustive list of lobbyists representing foreign governments and politicians. For the online project, over 80,000 documents detailing contracts, meetings with public officials, and public-relations campaigns will be put on the Internet. Previously, that information was available only in Justice’s dusty public reading room at 1400 New York Ave.
{mosads}But Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), a forceful advocate for putting the FARA records online, said yesterday the project is lagging.
“I had an expectation that this would have happened sometime in the first quarter this year. Now I hear that their answer is ‘soon.’ Well, I need to quantify how ‘soon’ is,” said Schmidt in an interview with The Hill.
Schmidt and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) have held several discussions with Justice since early 2006 on putting up the database. But Justice officials asked the representatives to avoid legislating on the issue by convincing them that the department would post the records in 2007.
Schmidt, while disappointed, would not say Justice was late on its word. But she added, “I don’t think they will be late until it is the half-year. Then I think they will be late.”
Schmidt’s comment came on the heels of a recent report in the Sunlight Foundation’s blog, Real Time Investigations, which quoted unnamed FARA officials saying the database would be on the Internet in “three or four months.”
But Justice officials have avoided giving a more detailed time estimate, citing legal concerns over privacy as well as contracting and technology issues.
“We want this data up in a Web portal where the information will be far more accessible and searchable by users as quick as possible,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice spokesman.
Tom Susman, a partner at Ropes & Gray and co-editor of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Lobbying Manual, speculated that Justice might be concerned that information in the FARA database, once online, will have implications for personal privacy.
“I am a little hesitant to say that there is nothing [to that argument], but they are already public documents,” said Susman.
Congress passed FARA in 1938 to keep track of German propaganda agents in the United States before World War II. Currently, individuals representing foreign governments, political parties, politicians and even majority government-owned companies, like the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, are expected to register with Justice.
FARA is much more extensive in its requirements than the Lobbying Disclosure Act, and requires reporting not only of lobbying activities but also of public-relations efforts.
According to Boyd, the revamped website will have a search portal granting online access to FARA’s scanned documents as well as certain statistical data that was not previously available to the public. Lobbyists and other foreign registrants, however, will still not be able to file their forms electronically.
“It is absolutely historic. It would bring us into the 21st century,” said Joseph Sandler, a partner at Sandler Reiff & Young and an author of chapters on FARA for the ABA’s Lobbying Manual.
“If that is the new process the Justice Department is going to use, then I am fine with that. We follow the rules and we file the forms,” said Peter Madigan of Johnson Madigan Peck Boland & Stewart Inc., who has several foreign clients. “If the Justice Department wants to put it online, that’s good because it is public.”
Complaints about FARA have been frequent over the years.
“By late ’05, I realized we could not get this data,” said Schmidt. “I truly believe the best disinfectant is sunshine. It is best for the public to have these records at a mouse-click.”
To bring FARA online, Schmidt added an amendment to the appropriations bill in 2006 covering Justice. Upon the department’s request, and in return for speedy progress, Schmidt later withdrew the amendment.
As a part of a larger effort to upgrade the FARA computer system, Justice’s contractor, the Unisys Corporation, has been working on the Web portal aspect since August 2006.
The FARA Unit has also switched offices recently. In 2006, it left the purview of Justice’s Criminal Division and came under the authority of the department’s new National Security Division, created by the Patriot Act reauthorization.
Despite the Justice Department’s progress on the database, Schmidt has threatened to reintroduce legislation if she does not see results.
“If I don’t see improvement and assurances that they are serious about getting this done, I will reintroduce the bill,” she said. “We live in a technology-savvy world. The public expects this.”