Records relating to the activities of WikiLeaks 2007-2009

Fake Ben Laurie made this Freedom of Information request to Ministry of Defence This request has been closed to new correspondence. Contact us if you think it should be reopened.

The request was successful.

Fake Ben Laurie

Dear Sir or Madam,

I understand the MoD holds a number of records or documents relating to the whisleblower protection organization WikiLeaks. I request these items.

In order to make the search cost effective, I request that it be limited in the following manner:

1. Time period covered: 2007 until the present.

2. UK Government held records electronically searchable by the FOI officer or his or her agents, starting with the most comprehensive database first.

Yours faithfully,

Ben Laurie,
Advisory Board,
WikiLeaks

CIO-FOI (MULTIUSER),

2 Attachments

Dear Mr Laurie

Your correspondence dated 3 May 09 has been considered to be a request
for information in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
You requested the following information:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I understand the MoD holds a number of records or documents relating to
the whisleblower protection organization WikiLeaks. I request these
items.

In order to make the search cost effective, I request that it be limited
in the following manner:

1. Time period covered: 2007 until the present.

2. UK Government held records electronically searchable by the FOI
officer or his or her agents, starting with the most comprehensive
database first.

Yours faithfully,

Ben Laurie, Advisory Board, WikiLeaks

Please find enclosed the information you requested. Some information
has been removed in accordance with Section 40 of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000. This comprises personal information. Section 40
is an absolute exemption and it is not therefore necessary to conduct a
public interest test.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. You are free to use it for your
own purposes, including any non-commercial research you are doing and
for the purposes of news reporting. Any other reuse, for example
commercial publication, would require the permission of the copyright
holder. Most documents supplied by the Ministry of Defence will have
been produced by government officials and will be Crown Copyright. You
can find details on the arrangements for re-using Crown Copyright from
the Office of Public Sector Information at:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/click-use/index.htm.

Information you receive which is not subject to Crown Copyright
continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or
organisation, from which the information originated. You must ensure
that you gain their permission before reproducing any third party (non
Crown Copyright) information In keeping with the spirit and effect of
the Freedom of Information Act, all information is assumed to be
releasable to the public unless exempt. The MOD therefore will be
simultaneously posting the information you requested, together with any
related information that will provide a key to its wider context, in our
online FOI Disclosure Log at http://www.foi.mod.uk.

If you are not satisfied with this response or you wish to complain
about any aspect of the handling of your request, then you should
contact me in the first instance. If informal resolution is not possible
and you are still dissatisfied then you may apply for an independent
internal review by contacting the Head of Corporate Information, 6th
Floor, MOD Main Building, Whitehall, SW1A 2HB (e-mail [email address]).
Please note that any request for an internal review must be made within
40 working days of the date on which the attempt to reach informal
resolution has come to an end.

If you remain dissatisfied following an internal review, you may take
your complaint to the Information Commissioner under the provisions of
Section 50 of the Freedom of Information Act. Please note that the
Information Commissioner will not investigate your case until the MOD
internal review process has been completed. Further details of the role
and powers of the Information Commissioner can be found on the
Commissioner's website, http://www.ico.gov.uk.

CIO-Access
Ministry of Defence
Main Building
Level 6, Zone E
[MOD request email]

Fake Ben Laurie

Dear CIO-FOI,

Thank you very much for this partial release. From my reading of the material it seems that there should be related documents.

Subsequent to this release, the Guardian newspaper released a story based on the material presented. I believe the story has triggered additional MoD correspondence which may make it easier for you to find related records.

Please consider this request a demand for an internal review.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Laurie, Advisory Board, WikiLeaks / Sunshine Press

MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Dear Mr Laurie,

Your request for an Internal Review was not made within a
reasonable period after the 40 working days of the date on which
you received the response to your request for information. You are
therefore out of time for such a review. It is important that we
concentrate on responding to requests for IRs that are in time,
making best use of the limited manpower resources at our disposal
for this work.

With regard to your specific query, some additional work was
already in hand to try and identify any extra material in scope of
your request prior to publication of the article in The Guardian.
You will be notified of the outcome shortly. I hope this is
helpful.

Fake Ben Laurie

Dear MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

The code specifies "working days", of which under 40 have elapsed since your response, not days, of which 40-42 have elapsed, depending on how they are counted.

I am happy to accept the additional information, provided it does not preclude the review.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Laurie

MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Mr Laurie,

Apologies, you are correct. The time-lapse between our sending a
response to your request (19 June 2009) and your request for an
internal review (30 July 2009) was wrongly calculated by us.

Because you are not yet in receipt of the additional information
that is about to be provided, we can either conduct a review of the
handling of the case to date immediately or, after you have
received the extra information, if you remain disatisfied, we can
conduct a full internal review covering both the handling and
substance of the response to your request.

As MOD staffs do not monitor www.whatdotheyknow.com for requestor
communications, please contact the FOI Internal Reviews Team at
[email address] with confirmation of your preferred option.

Yours sincerely,

FOI Internal Reviews Team

Fake Ben Laurie

Dear MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Should the promised material be released without undue delay, I will be happy to receive it first.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I understand there is no necessity for the MOD FOI team to monitor "whatdotheyknow.com" as the organization is sending emails to your group on my request.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Laurie

MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Dear Mr Laurie,

As I understand it, there are only two instances in which activity
on www.whatdotheyknow.com triggers an automatic e-mail to MOD: the
first is when a request is made; the second is when an independent
internal review of a request response is requested. Other comments
are NOT routinely forwarded by the website owners as the ability to
comment on-line is not linked to MOD e-mail addresses. Hence, the
need to communicate with us directly if you have any issues about
the handling of your request.

Yours sincerely,

FOI Internal Review Team

Fake Ben Laurie

Dear MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Just to clarify, are you saying you did not recieve this message, or the previous one, in email? I assume you receive at least a notification of the message being available at What Do They Know?

Can you please specify an email address, without the @ sign? For privacy reasons, these are filtered by the WhatDoTheyKnow.com system.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Laurie

Francis Irving left an annotation ()

Guardian article using the information released from this request: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/25...

Tweet about this request and "working days": http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/3125...

Francis Irving left an annotation ()

To be clear, WhatDoTheyKnow sends an email to the authority for each follow up message sent by the requester. It does not send an email for annotations (such as this).

The address the email is sent to is initially the FOI contact address that we have for the authority (there is a link on each authority page which lets you view that address), and from then on either the email address the message came from that you are replying to, or the original FOI email address, according to how you sent the follow up.

In this case the 2nd May and 30th July messages from Ben were sent to cio-foi@mod.uk, and the three messages today sent to cio-foi-ir@mod.uk. I've checked our email server logs, and all five messages were successfully accepted by an MOD email server, either mx1.public.mod or mx2.public.mod.

MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Dear Mr Irving,

Thank you for your helpful annotation. We have passed the server
details to our IT support team for investigation and have asked
them to ensure that there are no technical issues affecting email
traffic from Whatdotheyknow.com (or any other external sites).

We have not been receiving a complete correspondence trail from
Whatdotheyknow.com for a number of months now. But, as stated
above, we were under the impression that only new questions and
requests for internal reviews were guaraneteed to trigger direct
emails to the MOD.

While this is investigated (and we cannot be sure how high up the
problems list this will be placed) is it possible to confirm that
your site is configured to direct FOI requests to [MOD request email]
and requests for internal reviews to [email address]?

To answer Mr Laurie's question, if you wish to make a direct
request to the MOD please use the web form on the MOD's www.mod.uk
website at:

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/Contac...

The Information Access Team

CIO-FOI (MULTIUSER),

9 Attachments

Dear Mr Laurie

Please find attached the response with attachments to your FOI request
05052009-174834-008 relating to WikiLeaks.

Regards

CIO-Access

Level 6, Zone E

Ministry of Defence

Main Building

Whitehall

London SW1A 2HB

MOD FOI Internal Reviews Team,

Dear Mr Laurie,

Please would you tell us whether you still require an formal
internal review to be conducted by the MOD Head of Corporate
Information?

FOI Internal Review Team

Francis Irving left an annotation ()

This request has been archived by WikiLeaks themselves here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_Ministry_of...