Wired:

The Treasury Department wants more than $500,000 to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, a fee an attorney on the case suggested Tuesday might be one of the largest bills of its kind.

“I have not seen one that has been larger,” said Noah Wood, a Missouri attorney suing the government to comply with his nearly four-year-old FOIA request.

[...]Still, the government wants Wood to pay $522,886 for the records. The original tab was more than $26,000, but after some revisions in what Wood was seeking, the government upped the ante — even though not all information sought would be forthcoming, according to the bill.

Saturday night foil:

The most excellent TPM points us to this fascinating interview with Daniel Metcalfe, a senior attorney at Justice who retired in January, and served most recently as director of the Office of Information and Privacy. Read the whole thing; the analysis of "consensus" is crying out to be connected with working toward the Fuhrer. However, this question and answer, all the way down at the end of the interview, really caught my eye:

Q: Did you ever feel you were pressured in the Bush administration (or any previous one) to perform your FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] work to serve the administration's political agenda?

And Metcalfe's answer:

It's funny, I spend so much time on the Internets and I missed this:. Given the Constitution is dead, I'm not surprised. But still, let's all don the foil and imagine why this should be:

Author: Michelle Chen
Community Evaluator: Tim Ogburn
Student Researcher: Rachelle Cooper and Brian Murphy

The Department of Defense has been granted exemption from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In December 2005, Congress passed the 2006 Defense Authorization Act which renders Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) “operational files” fully immune to FOIA requests, the main mechanism by which watchdog groups, journalists and individuals can access federal documents.

Happy Birthday, Freedom of Information Act! The most interesting part to me: that corporations, and not reporters or organizations like the ACLU, use it the most, mainly to find out information about contracts and investment opportunities. So perhaps it won't go away completely in the unConstitutional reality that Bush is creating.