Dealing with bureaucrats in government agencies is not fun, nor is having to tell clients that their work is rejected for reasons of agency incompetence and that the agency will not explain.

Government agencies have taken on a life of their own in ways that most people don't believe is possible in this country. When confronting it for the first time they tend to think that the problem they have is so obviously wrong that someone else, such as their lawyer, can simply push a button and make it go away, then are stunned when they find out it doesn't work that way and that the injustices really do happen in this country.

A lot of otherwise normal people happen to work for government agencies they don't run. Sometimes you can get more information informally from a sympathetic employee you happen to talk to than from FOIA. Starting off with a FOIA request often puts an agency into bunker mentality mode.

Sometimes you can happen to more informally talk to a government employee who understands what is going on and sympathizes with you, letting out more than he is "supposed" to, but who is still constrained in what he can say because he doesn't know you. That may or may not be what led to the hints that you were digging into something political and so needed to reformulate your request.

Relations with sympathetic government employees can sometimes be cultivated over time, with care because they feel threatened, too. (I have occasionally gotten late night phone calls in the form "I saw your name in the newspaper and shouldn't be telling you this and am afraid of losing my job, but ...", but that's another story.)

But if your question was literally what was the basis for low quality, that isn't a request for documents they have. It is unlikely that agency documents would explicitly call for 'lower quality', and putting it that way would only set them off. Maybe that is what the person meant by telling you to modify the request. It would be interesting if you could post the actual text of your request here.

Trying to use FOIA to get at documents with queries relying on inferences that require government agencies to acknowledge to themselves their own failings or corruption in the form of what they think is a 'when did you stop beating your wife' question isn't likely to work. It requires more direct requests for documents based on your own expert knowledge of the agency and what it has been doing.

That can be very tedious and time-consuming with multiple follow-ups trying to pin them down while hoping for an honest government worker who happens to get your FOIA request before it becomes too internally politicized to let them do their job.

I received a phone call that basically told me that if I did not modify my FOIA question I would not get an answer. It was hinted at that I was digging into something too political.

My FOIA question was what was the basis for the PTO assuming that the US patent office had lower quality than say the European Patent Office. I wanted the US PTO to have to justify their actions and their policy of quality equals rejections.

Believe it or not it was not fun to explain why patent applications that you told your clients should issue were being rejected. Not to mention that it is no fun arguing with people who are so illogical that they will tell you green is red with a straight face.

Did you ask on what grounds they were denying it? They are supposed to cite the relevant exemption in the law. If they give a spurious reason you can sue. By issuing only a verbal refusal in a phone call they were avoiding that, but you can sue for failure to respond in writing within the time limit.

Before getting that serious legally, you can also ask your Congressman (if you still have one) to inquire as to why they are ignoring a straightforward, reasonable request for information.

No I was told to not ask for the information and I would not get it if I did.

FOIA can only be used to request documents, not ask questions. Is that what you meant? But government agencies are supposed to answer questions from the public anyway. You can use FOIA to request documents related to the subject if they won't answer or are vague, or if you need documentation yourself to prove what they are doing.

There are specific exemptions for some kinds of documents but the bureaucrats have a history of straining them to hide what they don't want to release. Using FOIA to get information from a recalcitrant agency is both an art and a science, and can come down to eventually threatening to sue or suing by a lawyer with expertise in FOIA in addition to your own.

Here are some of the reasons:

1) Congress steals the fees that inventors pay to the PTO so it does not have the budget to hire enough examiners. This is criminal.

2) The examiners are unionized

3) The Supreme Ct has no idea what an invention is or what property rights are so they create arcane standards that no one can understand to hide their ignorance.

I put in a FOIA request to the Patent Office and I got a call and was told to not ask that question

Official government documents rarely describe how their programs actually work and what they are used for politically.

I can not understand why there is even a three year average (?) delay to obtain a patent? Is it just ineptitude of government examiners or just being too few examiners for the number of applications? Searches should be rather quick in the era of computer data bases so that shouldn't take so long.

It was extreme because it happened to at least a couple of my clients. And it was pure politics - the PTO spin of SAWS is just that spin.

That may be how it started, but it doesn't account for the black-holing that db found. A question is how much of that was deliberate policy of suppression and how much the natural consequences of bureaucracy and incompetence.

"Things that might not work", to say the least, like anti-gravity and perpetual motion machines don't seem to fit the phrase "potentially sensitive applications".

The SAWS was set up to partially keep the USPTO from being embarrassed by granting patents for things that might not work or just were plainly too simple. There are things that people try to patent that need extra consideration, possibly by examiners who have more knowledge in physics, chemistry, engineering, genetics, medicine, sex, etc., so some topics are considered sensitive and worthy of more examination.
The eVideo case seems to have had an extreme delay of a decade without a decision. Could have been some effort to keep it off the market. Supposedly, the USPTO had decided that so few applications were found to be sensitive or disapproved under the SAWS that the program was discontinued in 2015. I doubt that the program was instituted for political reasons to stop or delay inventions from going to market. More likely just a bureaucratic need to make things more difficult.

The FOIA response is hard to read and I couldn't download it, but it looks like it describes criteria for extra scrutiny of applications deemed to be politically controversial. If so, that isn't the same as burying them without explanation, so it isn't the same as the secret program describe in this thread.

Failure to respond to FOIA requests by claiming they don't have documents requested or no longer have them is a typical ploy to hide information. It is true that they don't have to create new documents for a request, but they are supposed to do an honest search and aren't allowed to destroy documents or otherwise hide them. Another ploy is to claim that records are "archived" and demand huge fees to pay bureaucrats to allegedly search, with no guarantee of "finding" anything.

They have lots of roadblocks used to illegally thwart requests for activities they are hiding and deny even though you have other evidence of their existence. The National Park Service has denied the existence of planning documents that I knew existed because portions had leaked out.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/249032641/...

Allow me to revise that to both Bumble Bushes put together.

hear hear

No they already had a program for stuff like that. This was political. I was once told that the Patent Office (PTO) had to be careful about allowing patent applications like the one my client had filed, because the PTO did not want to see my client's patent end up on the front cover of the New York Times. In others damn the law, the PTO has reputation to uphold.

Most of these patents had to do with computers.

Neither Bush was worthy to hold a candle to Reagan.

What's with that, Dale? Is SAWS possibly related to inventions with military application, such as inventions of cryptographic/steganographic communication techniques, or inventions which can be readily weaponised, such as high energy yield explosives or undetectable toxins etc?

What is interesting is that Reagan strengthened the patent system and that trend continued until about the mid 1990s. Clinton tried to softly weaken the patent system his whole term, but he was stopped by Republicans that served under Reagan. By the late 90s most of these were retiring and a bill that fundamentally undermined the patent system was passed in 2000. The Bush republicans have no qualms about undermining patents.

A lot of problems started under that idiot. +1.
Uh, on second thought, surely you're not saying it's all his fault.

This problem started under Bush

Add the Patent Office to the never ending list of corrupt government agencies.
Frustrating!

Ignoring the law appears to be the thing to do throughout the Commander-Of-Grief's entire regime.
Reagan may have been about "trickle down economics."
Appears that the Obama regime's departmental and agency legacy shall be about "trickle down corruption" as long as lib spin meisters are not the ones writing the history books.
If the whole sum of this rancid regime had a smell we would all be gagging.

Yeah, I was afraid that gov't had precluded such recovery, but the fees, legal costs of pursuing, with interest could add up to a significant amount--that we have to pay.
Txs for the reference, and the Post.