FOIA and FOIL and Sunshine Week, oh my!

Yesterday's entry was about the FOIA the Freedom of Information Act. In New York State there is also a Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL. Maybe the Federal government should change theirs to "Law" and go after the agencies and people that won't comply in a timely manner. I once met a man who checked his file and found that he was being spied on while working for my employer in Puerto Rico, he a native to the island. I read the transcript and the "observer" sounded drunk, which begs a question about one person watching another, who happened to be just screening earth. Of course there's the famous "FOIA" files released in the 1990s of the surveillance of musician and artist John Lennon, who though he applied for citizenship here in the U.S., was a loyal British citizen, according to Yoko Ono who he was married to, another artist and musician, exhibited worldwide. The particular observation that sticks in my craw was when John Lennon visited my alma mater, Stony Brook University, (then I used to go to its concerts in the gym, a Fine Arts Center opened eventually, and I graduated from it and started a Ph.D.) and the watcher remarked that there were mostly "hippies and zippies". How long they had John Lennon under surveillance is a mystery to me. "Zacarias Moussaoui knew about the September 11, 2001 terrorist plot and could have prevented the attacks if he had talked, a prosecutor claimed as jurors began deliberating a possible death sentence. Moussaoui, 37, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, is the only suspect charged in the US for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in which nearly 3,000 people died." - Monsters and Critics Moussaoui has claimed that from the day he stepped foot in America, he was under surveillance, I heard him say on the car radio.