DoT Gives Blank Stare on LightSquared
November 15, 2011The U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT) has responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by GPS World magazine for its recommendations to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) regarding LightSquared interference with the GPS signal. The DoT wrote, “We are withholding two pages [of thirteen relevant pages] in part and eleven pages in their entirety,” and enclosed two completely blacked-out pages.
Kathy Ray, the DoT FOIA officer, added that “We have determined that the release of the redacted and withheld portions would foreseeably cause harm to the government’s deliberative process.”
The blacked-out DOT letter is dated August 25, 2011. How it differs from the agency’s July 21 “LightSquared Impact Assessment,” publicly available courtesy of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, cannot of course be known.
The Department of Homeland Security wrote in response to GPS World’s FOIA request, “We conducted a comprehensive search of files with the Science and Technology Directorate’s Homeland Security Enterprise and First Responders Group, and Cyber Security Division for records that would be responsive to your request. Unfortunately, we were unable to locate or identify any responsive records.”
The National Institute of Standards and Technology of the Department of Commerce replied, “NIST has no documents that are responsive to your request.”
The Department of the Interior provided the same documents that were previously made public by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee; see above link.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration made a similar determination, but did not send a document, referring instead directly to the Committee’s public website.
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