Any and all meeting agendas, memoranda, or internal emails relating to the establishment of an unmanned aircraft ban in the National Park System.
This letter is in response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests dated November 24, 2014, in which you requested 1.) e-mails or other correspondence relating to the April 2012 confiscation of an SD card from an unmanned aerial vehicle at Grand Canyon National Park; 2.) Any and all agenda, memoranda, or internal e-mails relating to the establishment of an unmanned aircraft ban in the National Park system; and 3.) Any and all internal correspondence relating to the Yellowstone Grand Prismatic Spring aircraft crash, including a copy of the incident report.
Although you originally submitted three separate requests for this information we are aggregating these requests under a single tracking number NPS-2015-00174 in accordance with 43 CFR 2.54. We are doing so because the information you have requested in all three requests relates to the single subject of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. All future correspondence relating to any of the three requests you submitted should reference this tracking number.
In your request(s) you indicated that you were requesting a statutory fee waiver. In your request you had asked for a statutory fee waiver. In accordance with 43 CFR 2.45(a)(1) the National Park Service will grant a fee waiver when disclosing the information is:
1. In the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of government operations or activities, and
In determining whether your request is in the public interest, the National Park Service considered the following criteria:
(2) How disclosure is likely to contribute to public understanding of those operations or activities;
(3) How disclosure is likely to significantly contribute to the understanding of a reasonably broad audience of persons interested in the subject, as opposed to your individual understanding;
(4) How the public's understanding of the subject in question will be enhanced to a significant extent by the disclosure.
The records you have requested relate to the management of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones within by National Park Service lands. Accordingly your request meets the first public interest criterion.
In your request you failed to provide any information documenting that you have the skills or abilities to analyze or disseminate the requested information in such a manner as to be informative to a reasonably broad audience. You indicated that you are a member of the media, however, you failed to provide any documentation showing that you are an individual whose primary job involves gathering information relating to a current events or that would be of current interest to a segment of the public and using their editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributing that distinct work to an audience. Because anyone can purchase an account on the MuckRock site, we have no way to verify that you are a representative of the news media. Additionally, you indicated that you planned to make the information available to the public on the MuckRock.com website. You have not provided any information suggesting that MuckRock.com is a place that a broad section of the general public is likely to go for information on the subject of your request. We are therefore unable to determine how the release of this information to you would be likely to contribute to the public’s understanding of the operations or activities of the National Park Service rather than your personal understanding. Accordingly, your request fails to meet the second criterion.
Your request for a fee waiver request also failed to address whether and to what degree the information you are requesting has been previously released. In addition to the information relating to the ban that has been posted on a variety of NPS.gov sites, including http://www.nps.gov/fire/aviation/safety/unmanned-aerial-systems.cfm, there have also been articles published by Forbes (May 3, 2014), Wall Street Journal (June 20, 2014), and on Dronelife.com relating to the issue of drones within the National Park System. It is therefore unclear how releasing the information you have requested would significantly contribute to the understanding of a reasonably broad audience of persons, as opposed to your own understanding. Accordingly your request fails to meet the third criterion. For similar reasons, it also fails to meet the fourth criterion.
Lastly, we have no information relevant to whether releasing the information would be primarily in your commercial interest.
In order to grant a fee waiver, the applicant’s request must meet all of the requirements listed above. Because your request fails to meet the second, third or fourth criteria your request for a fee waiver is denied.
You have the right to appeal this fee waiver determination, if your request has been denied. You may file an appeal by writing to:
Your appeal must be received no later than 30 workdays after the date of this response. The appeal should be marked, both on the envelope and the face of the appeal letter, with the legend "FREEDOM OF INFORMATION APPEAL." Your appeal should be accompanied by a copy of your original request and copies of all correspondence between yourself and the National Park Service related to this request, along with any information you have which leads you to believe our decision is in error. Please note appeals received after 5 p.m. EST will be considered to have been received as of the following day.
Also as part of the 2007 OPEN Government Act FOIA amendments, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) was created to offer mediation services to resolve disputes between FOIA requesters and Federal agencies as a nonexclusive alternative to litigation. Using OGIS services does not affect your right to pursue litigation.
Because your fee waiver request has been denied and we are unable to verify that you qualify as a member of the news media, we have classified you as OTHER for the purposes of calculating fees. This means you are entitled to two free hours of search time and up to 100 free pages. However, it appears based on our preliminary review of your request that the costs to process your request will exceed that amount. We will therefore be preparing a fee estimate for your review and until the issue of fees is resolved we will be unable to begin processing your request or provide you with an estimated response date. We hope to have our estimate to you by December 10, 2014.
In the meantime feel free to contact me with any questions you may have regarding this request. I can be reached at the address above or by phone at 303-969-2959. I can also be reached via e-mail at charis_wilson@nps.gov.
Please note this request has been consolidated along with your request filed using e-mail address requests@muckrock.com and requests@muckrock.com under a single tracking number NPS-2015-00174. All correspondence relating to the consolidated request will be transmitted to you via the requests@muckrock.com. No further response to this individual request will be issued.
Thank you for your message. To confirm, I would like to restate the contents of your last communication. Three FOIA requests were submitted to you. Specifically, these requests identified the following:
* Any and all emails or other correspondence sent between Bill_Wright@nps.gov, ken_phillips@nps.gov, and Patrick.Schneider@usdoj.gov relating to the April, 2012 confiscation of an SD memory card that was being used to film from an unmanned aerial vehicle in Grand Canyon National Park. Any and all emails containing the words "Raphael Pirker" sent between those addresses. Any and all emails containing the word "drone," "UAV," or "unmanned aircraft" sent between those addresses.
* Any and all meeting agendas, memoranda, or internal emails relating to the establishment of an unmanned aircraft ban in the National Park System.
* Any and all internal correspondence relating to the Yellowstone Grand Prismatic Spring unmanned aircraft crash. I am also requesting the incident report.
These requests have been consolidated into one request, the appropriate email address for which is requests@muckrock.com. The other two request-specific email addresses will no longer be used.
At this point, could you please provided an estimated date of completion for this consolidated request?
Please consider this an appeal of my fee waiver application. These documents will be handled by myself, editor-in-chief of Motherboard (www.motherboard.vice.com), a daily science and technology news website that has more than 5 million monthly unique users and Jason Koebler, a reporter here who has spent the last three years closely covering unmanned aerial vehicles for us (www.motherboard.vice.com/tag/drones) and for other outlets such as US News & World Report (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/23/docs-law-enforcement-agencies-plan-to-use-domestic-drones-for-surveillance) and Politico (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/drones-faa-lawsuit-coming-to-american-skies-102754.html). These documents will be made available both on Muckrock and on our own website, which, as noted, has more than 5 million unique visitors per month.
Motherboard is widely recognized as one of the internet's best web sites for unmanned aerial vehicle news and has covered the regulation of these so-called "drones" quite closely, having broken news about them and explained the implications of regulation regularly for our readers. Here are three examples of stories we have broken that have garnered widespread coverage and readership. (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/commercial-drones-are-completely-legal-a-federal-judge-ruled; http://motherboard.vice.com/read/feds-confiscated-a-hobbyists-drone-footage-to-keep-it-off-the-internet; http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-little-known-fued-thats-shaping-the-future-of-delivery-drones)
As such, all three of these requests are primarily in the public interest and not primarily of a commercial concern for us.
Beyond that, I am not requesting information that has been previously released to the public. Instead, I have three distinct requests (which you have combined here but which I argue are distinct and discrete events, cases, and requests). Nevertheless, I will explain all three separately here:
1) I am requesting internal emails which have not been released to the public relating to the seizure of Raphael Pirker's SD card in April 2012. I know these emails exist because I have seen Pirker's exchanges with NPS officials. Intragency and interagency emails relating to this case have not, however, been released. These documents will help the public understand how the decision was made to seize the SD card and will also help them understand how and when drone footage can be seized by the police.
2) I have also requested "any and all internal correspondence relating to the Yellowstone Grand Prismatic Spring unmanned aircraft crash" and the incident report. As far as I know, none of this information has been released publicly. If it has, I would like to be pointed to it. The release of this information will help the public understand not only what happened in the aftermath of the crash but also will provide a specific explanation of what, exactly, happened.
3) Finally, I am requesting "any and all meeting agendas, memoranda, or internal emails relating to the establishment of an unmanned aircraft ban in the National Park System." These documents will help the public understand why the NPS deemed it necessary to ban the flight of unmanned aircraft in the National Park System. Though several public statements have been made about the ban, there has been very little reported or released by the NPS about the specific events, internal meetings and communications, and lead up to the ban.
For these reasons, I ask that my fee waiver be granted. Please let me know if you have any other questions or need more information.
I wanted to follow up on the following Freedom of Information request, copied below, and originally submitted on Nov. 24, 2014. Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response, or if further clarification is needed. You had assigned it reference number #NPS-2015-00174.