CURRENTS
Keeping "TRAC"
A Tool for Mining Federal Data
John Ashcroft's hostility to the Freedom of Information Act is well known, so it came as little surprise last fall when the Justice Department announced that it would no longer release information about the number of terrorism cases it refers for prosecution. The stated reason was security. In the new war on terrorism, wrote a department lawyer, such information might tip off terrorists to an investigation, and endanger lives.
For some senators, however, that explanation did not wash. Only months earlier, Congress had used that information on the FBI's focus to demonstrate a continued reluctance by the agency to shift its priorities from investigating bank robberies and narcotics cases to terrorism. And The Philadelphia Inquirer had used the data to show that the FBI was artificially inflating the number of cases it defined as "terrorism" by including garden-variety crimes like drunk airline passengers and prison riots.
Both the irritated congressmen and the grateful journalists got the FBI data from an often-overlooked nonprofit that has been shining a light into the dark corners of the federal government since 1989. Called TRAC, or the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, this Syracuse-based partnership between a statistician and a former New York Times reporter regularly mines gems from the federal bureaucracy, using FOIA, and posts the information to a vast online database. An enterprising journalist could use TRAC stories ranging from tax enforcement to environmental protection to federal judicial performance.
Susan Long, a Syracuse statistician, and David Burnham, formally of the Times, have collected massive and evolving criminal, civil, and administrative enforcement statistics that tell stories about the full sweep of federal acronyms — FBI, INS, ATF, DEA, IRS — as well as statistical profiles of nearly every federal prosecutor and judge. They also maintain records on federal staffing and spending, both of which can be searched down to the county level going back more than twenty-five years. Some material and analysis is free on the site, but access to its detailed material ranges from $50 to $2,000, depending on the number of queries.
TRAC is part of a small group of organizations — including Investigative Reporters and Editors and The National Security Archive — that do FOIA work on behalf of the public and journalists and sometimes, as in the FBI case, on behalf of Congress. Senators Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, have relied on TRAC. They called the FBI's decision to cut off data that TRAC analyzed "troubling." In a letter to Ashcroft, they wondered why information that had been publicly available for a decade was suddenly such a danger. The proper response, they wrote, is to "address the legitimate concerns about their enforcement priorities, not to blind Congress and the public."
TRAC has since sued Ashcroft to force the release of the terrorism data, adding to a continuing lawsuit that was filed against former Attorney General Janet Reno. A ruling is expected in the coming months.
For more information, visit:
TRAC: trac.syr.edu (free site) and tracfed.syr.edu (subscription
required).
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