FOIA requests can be frivolous, but the actions of government can be both frivolous and extremely harmful. Transparency is a fundamental tool of preventing gove

FOIA requests can be frivolous, but the actions of government can be both frivolous and extremely harmful. Transparency is a fundamental tool of preventing government from being frivolous and extremely harmful. Fielding FOIA requests is going to have some wasted effort due to frivolous requests, but that's an unavoidable side effect of effective transparency in government, which is fundamentally, critically important. If anything, I'd rather see a policy of default-open rather than default-closed--if people want to classify information they should need to provide a justification for why it needs to be classified, not the other way around.