In April of 2006, Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen sued the United States Customs and Border Patrol under the Freedom of Information Act. Poulsen won the case, and yesterday the trial court granted Poulsen $66,000 in attorney’s fees.
Poulsen had asked CBP to disclose under the FOIA documents about a computer failure suffered by the US VISIT system, which was established to screen foreign nationals entering the country against terrorist watch lists. CBP refused, then asked Poulsen to drop his request, then denied the request. claiming that if the public knew what caused the outage, it would harm national security, among other reasons. Poulsen believed that if the problem was fixed, as it should have been, the public had a right to know why the US VISIT computers were malfunctioning.
On summary judgment, Judge Ilston in the Northern District of California ordered CBP to release documents and the documents revealed that the computers were infected with the Zotob worm, a common Microsoft Windows vulnerability.
The Zotob infection and CBP’s management of it was one of many technological and bureaucratic problems that ultimately led the government to abandon the US VISIT program, after almost two years and $1.7 billion dollars. Talk about information the public has a right to know.
