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We suggest that any charge for reviewing records may vary widely from agency to agency, depending on how the matters are handled.

It is true that Section 1 (ii) also states that the search and duplication charges can be reduced or waived if the agency determines this burst of generosity is in the public interest, because furnishing the information might primarily benefit the general public and not commercial or other private interests.

It also states that all other charges, presumably including the reviewing or "processing" costs, can also be waived if the agency determines that the information is not sought for any commercial use or if the information is being requested by an individual or educational or noncommercial scientific institution whose purpose is scholarly or scientific research or if sought by a representative of the press or by a nonprofit group that intends to make the information available to the general public.

In January 1983 the Justice Department issued a new set of guidelines telling federal agencies how to process fee waiver requests under the current Act. Though the guidelines purport to be merely a "restatement" of policy, their major goal appears to be to urge agencies to collect more fees and be more stringent in granting fee waivers.

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It appears to us that this committee could strengthen the fee waiver provision for all users. We would ask now, as we have asked before, if it benefits the "general public" in any way, why do we need that awful adverb "primarily" in there? Couldn't we--or rather you--boot it out?

Section 1 (c) would permit the government to charge

"a fair-value fee" for records containing commercially valuable technological information. While S. 774 as passed by the

Senate eliminated the original language allowing the government to "charge a fair-value fee or royalties," it still raises serious public policy questions in our minds. As you are aware, the Copyright Act makes it a no-no for the government to obtain a copyright on any of its works. The theory being that governmentproduced material belongs to the public and that the government should not profit from the dissemination of such material. To us it appears that this phrase "a fair-value fee" opens the door to the government's acquiring the protection it could not obtain through copyright. Instead, the government would do it under the guise of recovering costs.

Section 2 of S. 774 concerning time limits should be viewed in the light of the history of the Freedom of Information Act. Prior to the 1974 amendments, the House Committee on Government Operations concluded "the efficient operation of the Freedom of Information Act has been hindered by five years of

foot-dragging by the Federal bureaucracy

. . obviously in

(1) U.S. Congress Committee on Government Operations, Administration, and Freedom of Information Act, p. 8.

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Congress took action to impose time limits on responses

to the Freedom of Information Act in 1974.

This bill would allow an extension of up to thirty days under "unusual circumstances," while now the law provides for an extension of only ten days, and that 10-day extension is contingent upon showing that there is a need to collect records from field offices or that a requester--that word again--seeks a voluminous amount of records or that another agency must be consulted.

We question whether a need has been shown for increasing the extension from ten days to thirty, or for broadening the definition of "unusual circumstances."

I'd like to give you an illustration of how the excessive use of extensions contributes to the art of foot-dragging. It's an experience we had at The Wall Street Journal. I should say we use the FOI Act a good deal, and we've found it helpful in most instances--especially in prying information from reluctant

bureaucrats.

But in this particular case we were frustrated--totally. Two of our Washington reporters had got onto a story about the sales of arms to Egypt during the Carter Administration. It seems that a mysterious Egyptian businessman joined an American, fresh out of the CIA, to form a company that seemed to be making a killing by overcharging on arms shipments to Egypt.

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Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department nor the Justice Department wanted to talk about the case. We tried the FOI Act. We promptly got caught up in extensions--you can spell it D E LAY S--that went on for months. We kept being told that "further consultations" between the three departments were necessary before they could respond. And incidentally, we were not asking any military questions about the arms themselves--we were just interested in the business end of the deal--the sales contracts, and what they were costing the U.S. taxpayers.

Eventually we got the story on our own and ran it as the lead story on page one on October 1, 1982, under the headline "Weapons Windfall." We'd received not one document through the FOI Act. But seven months later, documents began to trickle in to The Journal. One of them was a copy of our story, "Weapons Windfall," marked DECLASSIFIED. We asked the State Department how a story that had been printed on the front page of a paper with over 2 million circulation could have been classified. Eventually, a pleasant young woman told us that the story had never been classified. She explained: "It's our standard practice to stamp declassified on everything we release, whether it was classified or not." She said it saves time when large quantities of material are being released. For the record, I'd like to enclose an editorial page piece we ran on this experience with the FOI Act.

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Section 3 covers "Business Confidentiality Procedures." As we have said previously, ASNE doesn't object to notifying business concerns that an FOIA request has been made, but we do object to an attempt to broaden the present (b) (4) exemption. The Act currently exempts from disclosure under FOIA

(b) (4) "trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential."

S. 774, in Section 3, states in the new (7) (A) (1):

"A submitter may be required to designate, at the time it submits or provides to the agency or thereafter, any information consisting of trade secrets or commercial, research, financial, or business information which is exempt from disclosure under subsection (b) (4); . .

We need to make one thing clear here: The terms "research" and "business" do not appear in the exemptions of the Act. This provision of the bill allows a submitter to claim an exemption that is nonexistent in the Act.

In the definition section of S. 774, the term "submitter" is defined as "any person who has submitted to an agency (other than an intelligence agency), or provided an agency access to, trade secrets, or commercial, research, or financial information (other than personal financial information) in which the person has a commercial or proprietary interest;