A Sidley pro bono team recently secured a rare Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) win against the Department of Justice (DOJ). U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin (N.D. Ill.) issued a Memorandum Opinion and Order granting, in part, our client’s cross-motion for partial summary judgment and concluding that the DOJ improperly used FOIA’s privacy exemptions to redact race, ethnicity, and nationality from records produced to our client in files for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case code-named Operation Vulgar Betrayal (OVB). This is one of only a few decisions across the U.S. where a court has ordered the government to produce information on race, ethnicity, and nationality, and — to our knowledge — the only case where a court has required the production of all three identifiers to a plaintiff.
In his order, Judge Durkin, among other things, found that the FBI regularly left unredacted the word “white,” but redacted the word that followed white, an ethnic descriptor of the subject, which the Sidley team argued was likely to be either “Arab” or “Middle Eastern/North African.” The court emphasized that releasing this redacted information will “further the public interest by shedding light on the extent to which OVB ‘targeted Arabs and Muslims’” in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s. The court also acknowledged that the release of this information is squarely within the core purpose of FOIA, which is “to expose what the government is doing.”
The decision is the latest victory in Sidley’s longstanding pro bono representation of Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker and investigative journalist. Sidley’s prior efforts were featured in Boundaoui’s award-winning documentary, “The Feeling of Being Watched,” which premiered in 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film followed Boundaoui’s investigation of rumors of widespread FBI surveillance in her Muslim-American neighborhood in Chicago, which is now widely known as one of the largest FBI terrorism investigations pre-9/11. Notably, the OVB investigation resulted in zero terrorism-related convictions and was closed more than 20 years ago, but the FBI to this day insists on keeping its investigation shrouded in secrecy, and — prior to this decision — had withheld over 70% of all responsive pages.
The Sidley litigation team included Michael Mann, Alexa Poletto, Danica Brown, Karma Farra, Lucia Radder Quick, Alexandra Bieler, Sophia Blake (all in New York), and Kathleen Carlson (Chicago), with support from co-counsel at two other law firms.
In his order, Judge Durkin, among other things, found that the FBI regularly left unredacted the word “white,” but redacted the word that followed white, an ethnic descriptor of the subject, which the Sidley team argued was likely to be either “Arab” or “Middle Eastern/North African.” The court emphasized that releasing this redacted information will “further the public interest by shedding light on the extent to which OVB ‘targeted Arabs and Muslims’” in the Chicago suburbs in the 1990s. The court also acknowledged that the release of this information is squarely within the core purpose of FOIA, which is “to expose what the government is doing.”
The decision is the latest victory in Sidley’s longstanding pro bono representation of Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker and investigative journalist. Sidley’s prior efforts were featured in Boundaoui’s award-winning documentary, “The Feeling of Being Watched,” which premiered in 2018 at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film followed Boundaoui’s investigation of rumors of widespread FBI surveillance in her Muslim-American neighborhood in Chicago, which is now widely known as one of the largest FBI terrorism investigations pre-9/11. Notably, the OVB investigation resulted in zero terrorism-related convictions and was closed more than 20 years ago, but the FBI to this day insists on keeping its investigation shrouded in secrecy, and — prior to this decision — had withheld over 70% of all responsive pages.
The Sidley litigation team included Michael Mann, Alexa Poletto, Danica Brown, Karma Farra, Lucia Radder Quick, Alexandra Bieler, Sophia Blake (all in New York), and Kathleen Carlson (Chicago), with support from co-counsel at two other law firms.
