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Comment by ryanlol | Hacker News Reader

Is this not a super standard FOIA response?

Yes. The tweet crops out a following paragraph that says it should not be taken as evidence that an investigation is underway. So this is fake news.

You can see the full letter here: https://twitter.com/CryptoWhale/status/1429819156052983816

"We can't give you these records because it'd interfere with law enforcement activities, which may not exist" seems like it'd be a pretty big loophole in FOIA if you could use it that way.

That's not what it's saying. They didn't say law enforcement activities didn't exist, they said a violation of the law may not exist.

In the case of literally any law enforcement activity, information is collected before law enforcement can come to any conclusion whether or not a law was broken.

> they said a violation of the law may not exist

The claim made is "under undisclosed SEC investigation", not "has already been convicted".

A FOIA response of this nature indicates there's some level of investigation occurring, or they couldn't use that reason and would have to find another reason to deny it.

>A FOIA response of this nature indicates there's some level of investigation occurring

How is that possible when it says "the Commission does not disclose the existence or non-existence of an investigation"?

If there were no investigation, they couldn't legally use that FOIA rejection reason. They'd have to give a different reason.

The question itself presupposes that there is an investigation, so they are essentially saying that if there were such materials it would be covered by that reason.

FOIA would be abused like crazy to unearth classified information if this method of questioning worked

Have you ever filed a FOIA request? I guess not.

Denials for outright false reasons are the norm, responses routinely take 10x longer than legally allowed. Just go browse muckrock for a while to see what a mess it is.

Why does this get downvotes? It's simply how things are, FOIA is a rather adversarial process. If you spend any time on muckrock you will see that only a very small % of requests actually get serious replies from the government, more often the responses seem like straight up trolling "Hey, we were supposed to reply to you 2 years ago but didn't feel like it. Are you still interested in this request?"

For example, look at some of these requests pending (since 2019) with various agencies: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/multirequest/foia-outliers-queu...

Most of the replies are clownish at best.

"the Commission does not disclose the existence or non-existence of an investigation" seems to make it clear that law enforcement activities may not exist either. In order to comply with that, they would not be able to answer something like 'we do not have any records because there is no investigation', so you necessarily get a vague letter like this that seems like it may be suggesting there is an investigation.

This is exactly how FOIA works, it’s rare that you get a real response without appealing at least one of these denials. Very often they will not comply unless you file a lawsuit to show that you’re serious.

Others are now reporting this such as coin desk: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/09/24/sec-hints-at-teth...

The same form of letter was sent a month ago, so that just reflects badly on them

Only if there's an active law enforcement investigation the FOIA request touches.

I don’t think that your comment acknowledges the reality that FOIA responses are decided by RNG unless you sue.

> Only if there's an active law enforcement investigation the FOIA request touches.

Right, but that doesn't mean that the named entity is either the target or even a subject of the investigation. Because the FOIA request is for all documents relating to the entity, if there is even one document related to any investigation of anything that mentions the named entity in any capacity, it is going to be withheld for that reason.

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