Federal law enforcement documents about Aaron Swartz, released under FOIA
swartzfiles.com
swartzfiles.com
If our criminal justice system had more concern for the dignity of the people that went through it, perhaps we'd see less tragedies like Aaron's.
This likely happens dozens of times a day across the US and Canada. I think this is to be expected when you encounter law enforcement in this situation.
Regardless, yes, this is to be expected. But reality isn't normative - it just is. The question is, ought it be that way.
Can't? Unfortunately, no.
This is unpopular, but I believe it to be true, I think.
Aaron was a great kid, but the majority of people brought into the station aren't.
>This is unpopular, but I believe it to be true, I think.
Your belief is simply wrong. The risk of dying in a line of duty for cops is quite low, being a LE is not even in the first top 10 dangerous professions. Most deaths are due to the traffic incidents.[0]
>Aaron was a great kid, but the majority of people brought into the station aren't.
Who defines that? Police? Nice circular logic you've got there. Until the court says otherwise they are citizens whose rights should be upheld as much as possible.
Also it's great that US has such upstanding citizens as you, protecting the real opressed minority - policemen. If Aaron would be wearing his shoes, who knows what grave harm could he do to a police station full of armed cops?
EDIT I digged a little deeper and found out that number of police deaths in the line of duty during latest years had been around 100/year[1].
At least 1450 were people killed by police since May 2013[2].
I don't wish that on you but there would be a certain ironical justice if police apologists like you would experience non-lethal brutality themeselves. Maybe then you would learn something.
[0]http://www.theagitator.com/2007/12/28/how-dangerous-is-polic...
[1]http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.htm...
[2]http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count...
You need to go spend some time in a police station, do some ride-alongs.
Here's a number, in 2012 ~53,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty. Those assaults could have happened from arresting a dangerous gunman to booking a 130 pound 24 year old for B&E.
It's important to have perspective about what police do and deal with everyday. They aren't acting irrationally. There really are reasons for why they do what they do, even if we disagree with their actions.
Sure they aren't. Most of them are psychopaths(yes,"psychopath" term is not a perfect model for describing personality disorders, deal with it) who are using their privileged position and monopoly on violence to satisfy their urge for power and control.
It is perfectly rational if you understand that police are NOT there to "serve and protect" you and not legally obliged to protect you and are blue wall of silence covers up "the bad apples".
That's quite a claim. Demonstrate it.
But yeah, I was too irritated by apologists and didn't use enough guarding. I'll admit that I have no proof of "most" police officers being psychopathic. I am sure many of them are, though.
One of those assaults was a suspect bleeding on their uniforms as he was having his head stomped. They charged him with destruction of government property for his blood stains.
Of course, I don't think just one of those 53,000 was like this. It wasn't a fluke.
I'd be interested in independent and unbiased studies of violence against police officers if you have any.
Here's another number, most of those numbers are BS incidents reported by the police as "assaults" (much like the black guy shot that was said to "hold a gun"), and a lot of those are provoked by the police too.
Ask yourself how Germany (1/5 of the US in population) manages have its police use a total of 85-100 bullets in a whole year (for every city / policeman / incident in aggregate!), whereas a US police team can fire more than 90 in just one incident:
http://www.theweek.co.uk/crime/46907/us-police-fire-more-bul...
That's
a) not a number
b) prove it
American police are definitely out of control. No disagreement from me on that matter.
But their job also has risks, and unlike what vdaniuk and other naive people here seem to think the two options for an officer are not "make it through their day having pleasant exchanges with every person they meet" and "die in the most horrible manner possible".
I understand that you don't like the police. Most people, myself included, have trouble with the amount of power the police have assumed and the amount of power the courts have allowed the police to hold on to. But I'm also capable of rational thinking on the matter instead of diving into immediate hyperbole whenever the word "police" are brought up.
I understand that it makes you emotional and brings up all kinds of feelings of injustice. But your arguments just become troll fodder when they start the way you've started your argument. And you've only simulated the appearance of rationality by bringing German police shootings into the matter, something almost completely non-sequitur and demonstrating your lack of rational thought on the issue.
This is why policy shouldn't be made on emotional input like yours. Because then the system would be optimized for petty theft and people that swear on Sundays and have no capacity to handle higher modes of human failure, or it would be the opposite and be completely punitive regardless of the arrest circumstances.
Not sure what's trollish about it. There are lots of instances of police reporting BS assaults just in order to arrest someone. People have spoken about such experiences in HN too. Not to mention the recent thing in Fergusson, were the same kind of incident happened twice in the span of a month.
I'm not in favor of "proving" things with numbers outside of hard sciences. In real life numbers are dirty themselves, tailored, manipulated etc. Either you know about some things from experience and/or can draw conclusions from the limited input that you read and learn about or not. Statistics ain't the answer, official statistics even less so.
>And you've only simulated the appearance of rationality by bringing German police shootings into the matter, something almost completely non-sequitur and demonstrating your lack of rational thought on the issue.
Not sure how it's non sequitur in any way. It was an argument that police forces can and DO operate differently in a modern, advanced, western country.
If you want to argue that the US is not as advanced and civilized and as such it's more dangerous for policemen, I might agree, but that's another point. And it might be one caused by the way the police/justice/prison system itself works here too.
Is it because police and official documents have been historically proven inherently trustworthy?
Data are just collections of anecdotes.
Everything in the end goes down to trust, if you trust official statements then you probably haven't read enough history.
There are anecdotes that are more accurate and trustworthy than "data" on the same subject. For example, would you believe the official "annual report on poverty rates" by the government of South Korea? Or would you believe a person who lived there and is recounting the conditions?
I wouldn't believe official records of police "assaults" that the police has compiled itself either. Like I wouldn't believe official records that show how police was totally "racially blind" in Missouri, etc.
I find this obsession with data on non hard-science issues, especially social issues, idiotic and mechanical. If anything it obstructs with getting to the truth of things.
Here are how some of the official responses (that people esteemed as "data") turned out:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in...
No, actually they aren't. Pretty much the rest of anything you can say on the matter, and anything about how you view the world is invalidated by that simple belief.
You see, the problem is that you've decided to build a world view off of unfalsifiable beliefs, not fact. You pretend to sound like you're questioning the veracity of facts, which is normally a reasonable thing to do, but what you're actually doing is preventing anything from shaking the preconceived notion that you've decided to glom onto. It's simply a ceremony you follow to help reinforce your beliefs.
When you enter into a "debate" like this one, you aren't there to change people's minds, or have your mind changed, your simply shoving the iron bar of your belief system down everybody else's throat and see if you stir up sympathetic ears to help continue to justify what you want to see in the world.
When you can't find support for your notions, you rely on semantically connected, but otherwise nonsequitur references, a classic redirection technique.
The issue that started all this is "was Aaron treated well in police custody", some people were shocked at what the inside of a police station looks like, but Aaron was treated just fine. Meanwhile you're off in Denmark and South Korea talking about poverty and experimental Danish maximum security prisons. They both involve "the man" so they must be relevant to the discussion, no?
No. They aren't.
Unfortunately, on the interenets, hyperbole wins. I just flag articles with discussions that have gone off the rails like this.
Also: http://ordrespontane.blogspot.it/2014/07/brandolinis-law.htm...
I am, on the other hand, capable of realizing that police officers do have a dangerous job (by definition, actually), and that it is their right to protect themselves and their fellow officers, as well as our fellow citizens.
I am not excusing any sort of unjust death or brutality, but nobody was brutalized here. I watched the video just like you. Yes, they gave him a hard time for not knowing his social security number; that could have been handled better. But that's it.
As for who defines whether he is or isn't a good kid: that's just my point, it is /not/ the booking officer. That is, the booking officer has no idea whether Aaron was just brought in for a stolen bicycle as a suspect, or whether he had been seen beating a helpless old man with his own cane. Nobody defines it for the officer, I am simply stating the obvious: Aaron was a good kid, but it is entirely possible that a worse kid could have been brought in, with worse intentions, and the officers who were booking him would have been none the wiser.
Amazing how other western (and Asian, etc, not sure) countries managed to do it, with far more civility and far less incidents of officers being hurt too, then.
To "be expected" stasticially, based on experience of how those things happen, yes.
But not "to be expected" as "par for the course". No civilized citizenry should accept that thing.
Please highlight where those systems provide a particularly good experience for the suspect and where they need work. Compare and contrast to the booking procedures in a typical American police station.
Maybe do it as a series of blog posts, with diagrams, furniture photos and fabric selections?
Calmly and professinally. I've witnessed arrests in at least 2 of those places (and in general in England, France, Amsterdam (Holland) and Denmark). Not even comparable to things we see in the US.
Here are some examples:
1) People CAN and DO get out of their cars when a policeman stops them. They don't stay inside until he approaches out of fear they'll get shot as violent criminals no questions asked.
2) The British police don't even carry guns.
3) Tasering is something that simply almost never happens. Not something the police would use for the first wino or homeless person out in the street.
4) For most simple arrests you are not tied anywhere. You are just taken to the station were they verify your identity and/or temporarily hold you in a holding cell with others.
Plus, you keep mentioning B&E. Most cops are able to tell B&E with assault weapons by some thugs in a house from a nerd getting into a university lab for hacking, and treat each case accordingly.
b) #4 that's not true everywhere, even in the U.S.
c) didn't answer the question. How should it work?
d) "Most cops are able to tell B&E with assault weapons by some thugs in a house from a nerd getting into a university lab for hacking, and treat each case accordingly." That's what it looks like to me. They didn't have a group of cops there to subdue Aaron in case he got wild, or any other escalation procedure. They made him "mildly uncomfortable" at best.
If standing in one place for half an hour is some kind of dehumanizing terrible treatment, then the DMV should be on trial for war crimes.
Look, I get it, you don't like the police at all. You get all kinds of bent out of shape whenever they do any minor part of their job except greet you. But you're attempting to draw a fantasy picture here that simply doesn't exist.
The simple fact of the matter is, sometimes things go smoothly, sometimes the police have to tussle. They optimize for the tussle. That's why you see half a dozen police subduing a taxi driver in London during a protest, or Garda blocking in an ongoing arrest with cars. It only takes a guy throwing a chair during his booking a couple times before future suspects are put behind glass. Only idiots invite harm. The police may be brutes, but they aren't stupid.
No, I get it, you are an American, and are conditioned to have the police treat you like a criminal even when not convinced of anything.
You might even think it's OK how the treat black people in the streets, because after all "so many blacks are criminals, how would they know".
Under those conditions bending over is understandble.
"Powers that be have always treated people outside the system as sheep."
Isnt it that people inside the system are sheep? People outside the system are considered renegade, some how dangerous to the system, and there for the enemy? People inside the system are implicitly going along with the system, and while they do, no problem.
And if you try to fight from with in the system, the system is designed to quickly put the threat you pose down.
How that applies to Aaron, I dont know. Was he inside or outside? And frankly, is there a difference these days? Cant help thinking that one of the big illusions these days is the notion that one is off grid, outside the system, and not part of it. The system seems to know no boundary and we are part of it no matter what we want or choose.
No matter how much we cry that politics has gotten worse or that criminals have gotten power, if you look historically smart criminals always had power. And power is the way they work.
So, Aaron was indeed NOT part of the system. Neither are you nor me. We, the people, have gotten somewhat into the system by getting involved into politics via democracy. But in reality there is more propaganda about its infallibility than reality. That is where Aaron got caught. He was hacker, he saw the system, and started using it logically (which is like calling APIs, so to say). The problem is that the system doesn't work for you or me or Aaron. The APIs are self-contradictory and designed to entrap you. It works for itself. People are only to be pacified to avoid mass movements. It is true for USA and it is true for China, only difference is how much people get to exert pressure. Quite fucked up! :)
Now, there is no demarcation as such, and law abiders also become law enforcers etc. But if you look at the extremes you can see it very clearly. There is a murder, I forget his name, who is serving his sentence because he killed an abusive jailer, then there is Obama who has ordered more drone strikes than anyone in human history because USA has been threatened.
I hope I was clear. I will be AFK for sometime.
If the person in the video was a 270 pound guy on his 3rd arrest for B&E and had an arrest history that included violent assault, you'd want him to be chained to a bar without shoes while he was booked.
Aaron was a slightly built kid, with no priors, on a non-violent arrest. But those kinds of details don't filter down to the booking officer, and most police stations are equipped to handle difficult "customers", that's why there's 3 inches of protective glass between the officer and Aaron. There's no special "well he looks like a nice kid" booking room.
The police in the video appeared courteous and non-aggressive. Nobody was tased, beaten or abused. Aaron was arrested and was cuffed and detained, the same as for any other person. As they went through their processing of him, they asked him politely, thanked him for compliance, assured him things would go smooth and he'd be out pretty quick. They asked him about his medication, verified what it was, asked when he needed his next dose. In terms of police treatment of a person under arrest, this is pretty nice. Of course he's going to be handcuffed, he is in police custody after all.
They're not going to just find a comfortable chair for him and ask him if he wants to share in the squadroom's latest pizza delivery while the booking officer runs out for lattes?
This is what being under arrest actually looks like.
Standing for 23 minutes is hardly cruel or unusual. He wasn't being badgered, they weren't using coercive tactics on him, they didn't even ask him any questions about his case. It was Aaron after all who admits to walking onto MIT's property without a question being asked of him!
As tragic as what happened to Aaron is, and the feelings about it that I'm sure you and I both share on the subject. Messing around with other people's property and consequently the law enforcement the might come from that is not something you want to be doing ill prepared.
Was MIT's handling poor? Was JSTORs? There's a healthy debate to be had about that. But w/r to the police and the circumstances of his arrest he was treated about as humanly as the system allows for now.
In the end, Aaron took his own life. The same naïveté that caused him to look at a closed service door and think "that's a place I'm going to set a computer up and harvest hundreds of thousands of research papers, nobody will know" is also what caused him to buckle under the immense pressure of legal entanglement. He wasn't put to death, executed, beaten to death, tortured or any other horrible thing. He did something against the law and ended up in the grind of the system. The system, instead of treating him like a sensitive special snowflake like we'd like them to have, treated him like any of the other thousands of people it handles every day.
It's a shitty way to be treated, but if you want to be in a public fight for your principles, it's something you have to be mentally prepared for. If what you are doing might get you arrested, this is how the legal system works. Be prepared.
You make it sound like something unavoidable. Most western countries in Europe have managed to offer a much better experience.
>The police in the video appeared courteous and non-aggressive. Nobody was tased, beaten or abused.
That's a pretty low bar.
I've actually been in police stations in a few countries (not under arrest) and they all look about the same.
What exactly, in your imagination, do you think police stations look like? A comfortable memory foam massage chair and complimentary espresso bar while a soft voice introduced them to their customized "arrest experience"?
> That's a pretty low bar.
Well, comments here seem to think that his treatment was somehow unusual or egregious when it's pretty normal and pretty nice and the things that could have turned it into a black eye for the police didn't happen. It's just nit-pickery, people looking to blame somebody other than Aaron for taking his own life.
It sucks, it's shitty, I feel bad about what happened with him, I'm pretty upset about it also, but I'm not going to get ridiculous and start pointing fingers at places where there's no pointing to be done.
No, I've actually seen people being arrested in several Western Countries in Europe (and in the US). And have been in a couple of police stations (and many more in my home country, were we also go for bureacratic reasons, like getting some permits, passports, etc).
>What exactly, in your imagination, do you think police stations look like? A comfortable memory foam massage chair and complimentary espresso bar while a soft voice introduced them to their customized "arrest experience"?
About that memory foam massage chair. Here is a prison in Norway compared to a US prison:
http://theday.co.uk/politics/lessons-in-law-from-world-s-mos...
Check out images from Swedish, Danish, Swiss, German etc prisons. The worst are perhaps the French ones, and even them can be better than US conditions.
Oh, and yes, some arrests involve coffee with the interoggator and soft voices. Especially for high profile persons, which would include someone like Aaron.
Prey tell?
The "rifling through belongings" is to stop people taking drugs or weapons, even improvised ones, into cells. This is especially important for the nice people who have suddenly been arrested for the first time - because it's when the cell door closes that they are at their most vulnerable and people can either self harm, attempt suicide, or take whatever drugs they happened to have on them. All of which the specific officers booking him in have a legal duty of care to prevent happening. You always leave your shoes outside the cell, you lose your belt, the drawstrings from clothes etc.
It's procedures honed out of years of "best practice" being identified from things going very wrong. Officers are often given very little discretion, because it saves them from themselves letting something go wrong.
Children and vulnerable adults (i.e. people with learning difficulties) get treated slightly better, but then they are also held to be less responsible for their actions.
If you think what happened to him was demeaning you really need to see what happens when someone with a history of drug addiction, self harm and assaulting the police comes into custody, it's a world away from what happened here.
That implies that there are people to whom this treatment would be appropriate, effectively saying that it's OK to dehumanise some people but not others. That's not true. It's not OK to dehumanise anyone, ever, regardless of what they're accused of or even what it's been proven that they've done. Dehumanising behaviour not only affects the victim but the whole of society. Living in a culture that deems it normal to treat other human beings badly changes the way that everyone thinks.
There is a one-size-fits-all approach: Treat everyone well.
It takes you and six of your fellow police to bring me into the booking room. While there, I bite you (twice) and draw blood, kick you in the knee, dislocate one of your fingers and break your nose -- after spitting on you. I do about the same to the other officers.
While searching me you stab yourself on a used needle in my back pocket and I try to go for another knife in my boot. I induce myself to vomit on you then pull my pants off and defecate in the middle of the floor.
Please direct me to the comfortable chair I can sit quietly in while you ensure I can exercise my humanity while politely asking me my in-processing questions. At least until I get bored of answering them or get uncomfortable in any way, then we can take a 15 minute rest and stretch break. If I get too tired, I can go home.
If you want to live in a safe, well-balanced, equal society then you simply can't have anyone who isn't treated as well as possible. The measure of a civilised society is not how well it treats the best people, but how well it treats the worst.
The police officers have a right to work in a safe (as far as possible) environment. That means the aggressive/resisting prisoner is cuffed whilst being booked, with no shoes. Your next choice is to either treat all prisoners like the aggressive one, or to allow officers to use judgement as to when someone needs to be restrained heavily.
Equality is a fine goal, but in reality it results in everyone getting treated poorly in this context.
What I'm suggesting is that the default position should always be not restraining people. Removing someone's freedom should never be done lightly. In the case of Aaron Schwartz it was. I would argue that some police officers tend to default to the position of treating someone badly - not violently, but in a way that assumes their guilt, assumes that they need to be restrained, or assumes that they're deliberately hiding something. That is completely the wrong way to do things in a civilised society.
Police officers should only ever act with force if they're protecting themselves or others, and always with the absolute minimum action necessary, and they should always stop when the threat has been removed. Very occasionally that will require restraining someone and taking their shoes, but probably in far fewer cases than actually happens. Restraining someone who isn't violent 'just in case' is an appalling thing to do - and is exactly what results from everyone being treated poorly.
I'm not sure what your proposed solution is, assume the best until someone does attack an officer or tries to escape? I agree it would be nice to assume the best, but it doesn't seem practical. With regard to what Aaron was accused of, I'm not sure why they required an arrest anyway. Shouldn't this have just been a civil case? It seems a bit excessive to arrest and book someone for an alleged copyright violation.
Second once you treat people differently based on perception of behaviour (professional judgement) you need oversight. Once you need oversight you need records. Once you need records booking takes longer. Ok. So now we've got evidence that police discriminate due to race/gender/something and bobs your uncle everyone gets locked down for booking again to undo that.
Armchair policing reminds me a lot of armchair generalling - sure is easy to say what should (have) happen(ed) when you're completely removed from the situation. Police officers are irrational human beings who are influenced by all sorts of extraneous factors on any given day. Not to mention that's with the assumption they're basically good people doing their best to do the right thing™ which probs doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Of course I don't have answers, I just think this stuff is really hard.
I don't want to seem overly dismissive, I agree with you completely that I would want to live in the world you're describing.
It's a shame that both of us don't, and for reasons that are complicated and very hard.
With great power comes great responsibility.
You're concerned about how a cop might feel emotionally restraining a person, but you completely ignore how they might feel physically being the subject of a violent assault by an in-custody suspect.
No person in custody reveals their intentions and being under arrest is stressful. Humans are in fact animals, and like any animal react unpredictably under stress.
I think it's important to look at somebody like Aaron holistically. Not too terribly long after the video was taken, he did in fact violently and tragically kill somebody.
... by hanging. Which, I believe, is why they take your shoes... because you can hang yourself with the laces.
Yes, and I agree with everything you said. But in the case described "treating well" may mean restraint, to keep the person from hurting him/herself.
It's easy to be nice to people who are nice to you. It's hard to be nice to people who are shitty to you, and often times, it's the people who are worst to you that most need basic decency offered to them.
[0]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-communic... [1]: http://ogc.mit.edu/
If you were running a service scaled to handle a few hundred requests per minute and somebody starting downloading hundreds of thousands of things as quickly as possible, resulting servers crashing, etc....well it's the kind of email conversations you'd expect as they tried to deal with it, IP address locating, log file dumps, statistics, questions if it's like another previous case they dealt with, cutting off service to MIT, MIT asking why they did that, discussions back and forth over the license and service agreement, making the usage agreement more present for users, etc.
There's surveillance photos of the setup Aaron was using, the room it was all in and him entering and leaving the room.
There's a copy of the Swartz-JSTOR settlement agreement.
Lawyer's emails back and forth, etc.
To be honest, if you've ever been part of any kind of contractual or legal proceeding it's pretty banal stuff and appears pretty cut and dry: Aaron went where he wasn't supposed to go and did something he wasn't supposed to do, it involved 2 aggrieved parties and the local criminal code.
There's not really anything terribly unusual about any of it. If Aaron hadn't taken his own life and hadn't been as well known, it wouldn't be notable in any particular way whatsoever.
Would I have hidden a computer in a campus telecom room to do it for me? Probably not. Were the aggrieved parties over-the-top in the actions they took? Probably.
Suicide also doesn't make this particularly notable. People in custody and under criminal charges are going to have a bad time. Unfortunately some of them do kill themselves as a response to that stress.
In the end, Aaron, and the community around him is what makes this notable.
You may be disappointed though. When FOIA came about, plenty of "activists" requested their files, swelling with pride thinking of all the things that must be in there- only to find just one entry:
03/07/2012: Submitted FOIA request for personal file
The general rule is that anyone, citizen and non-citizen, can make a FOIA request.[1] However, the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court only provides a guarantee to open access for US citizens when making a request of a federal agency. For requests of a state agency, only US citizens residing in that state are guaranteed open access.[2]
[1]: http://www.foia.gov/faq.html#who
[2]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/scotus-foils-foia-advo...
(the secret with FOIA's is that the government still gets to decide if they want to release the information)
I, like most, got a blanket denial from my senator (D. Dianne Feinstein) via email stating they cannot disclose whether or not they have any data about me.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/06/1221694/-NSA-Reject...
Whilst I'm sympathetic to the idea of keeping the NSA's operations under the spotlight, that doesn't mean there isn't significant benefit (or just interest) in other things too.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/benghazi-fbi-fo...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131118/01542825271/fbi-s...
If the FBI released the Swartz data, it's because they felt like it, not because the FOIA somehow actually compelled them to.
For those who were put off by the other article, here's the TL;DR:
A person has discovered that by lodging multiple FOIA requests along with multiple privacy waivers he can get access to data that he wouldn't be able to normally get access to. The article doesn't go into the mechanics of it, but it sounds like each request is hitting a different censor, and each censor censors things slightly differently, and so information leaks out from the differences. These differences give clues as to where to lodge new FOIA requests.
Ironically, this approach is somewhat analogous to mass metadata collection: a single record doesn't do much, but in bulk a very comprehensive picture is built up that wouldn't be available otherwise.
It seems the FBI is arguing this in court, and trying to stop the approach. I can completely understand their concerns, and I'm not sure I have an opinion on which way the court should rule.
(As for the "CanadaFreePress" article: I think the FBI's refusal is completely legal, and even reasonable. Even if you don't agree, there is little legal doubt that the FBI is legally entitled to deny requests regarding ongoing investigations.)
Here's the site that I used to create the letters I sent for each FOIA request: http://www.getmyfbifile.com/
FOIA Requests are only for organizations, businesses, investigations, historical events, incidents, groups, or deceased persons.
Privacy Act Requests are for yourself. You must include Form DOJ-361 or equivalent when submitting.
It's not rocket science. Here's what the FBI has to say about the issue: http://www.fbi.gov/foia/requesting-fbi-records
The CIA, NSA, an just about every other agency have the same information on their site. It's also on Wikipedia.
so if i create a company/business, then i can do the exact same request and it will not be denied? I don't understand the difference between an individual vs a business (which is owned, and presumably, act in the interest, of the individual).
FOIA requests are not magic. It's just a way for people to see things like declassified National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).
If you send a FOIA request on a living individual you usually get either denied outright or sent back documents that are completely redacted to respect the privacy of that individual (even if that individual is you). This is what Privacy Act requests are for.