Wanted: Dead or Deader
This program files FOIA requests every time someone dies
AN UNDERAPPRECIATED genre of writing is the Great American Celebrity FBI File. Think of government agents as taxpayerfunded paparazzi, invading the lives of private citizens for the supposed good of the country. The FBI has files on many popular figures, including John Lennon, Lucille Ball and Biggie Smalls. Many of these files are open to the public, or at least open- ish. One just has to ask for them via a Freedom of Information Act request. Not all information is free, of course. There are nine exemptions. Exemption 1, for example, locks down any files that might compromise the “interest of national security.” Exemption 6 “protects information that would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy of the individuals involved.” The latter exemption becomes void when the individual in question dies.
Artist and activist Parker Higgins figured out a way to automate the process of releasing these records. No, not by murdering people; that would be terrible and time-consuming. He created a program that monitors the New York Times obituary section. Anytime a new article appears, it automatically files an FOIA request. He calls it FOIA the Dead.
So far, he’s released 2,136 pages of FBI records, including the files of 28 public figures, such as Morley Safer and King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Each person gets a page on the site with a brief description and scans of his or her documents. The inspiration for the project grew out of a routine. “For a long time, I had sort of internalized the act of sending a FOIA request as a marker of an admired celebrity’s death,” says Higgins. “I think it was after Lou Reed died that I thought: I should really be doing this in a more standardized way, because the really surprising FBI file is naturally going to be the one that nobody expects exists.” So: automation. “A lot of the people who are showing up in the obituaries pages were active during eras of what we now consider real FBI overreach: the Red Scare, to civil rights crackdowns, to COINTELPRO and similar. In many cases, all of the above,” says Higgins. “So it’s actually pretty plausible that anybody who appears in a obituary in 2017 could have a file for no good reason.”
(If there’s an ideal type of record to uncover, it would be something like what William T. Vollman unearthed. The author discovered, after filing an FOIA request for himself, that for a brief period, unbeknownst to him, he was suspected to be the Unabomber. )
The documents have an interesting aesthetic appeal, but more than that, there’s also a meta-voyeuristic element to the project. This is about not only the subjects but also their pursuers. The files allow us, in some sense, to watch the FBI watch.
When asked about FOIA the Dead, the FBI press office told Newsweek it had no comment, but Higgins is fairly certain it isn’t a fan. “It’s pretty clear to me that they don’t like the project, and some of their acknowledgment letters have started to sound a little exasperated. They have—as of [March 1]—stopped accepting emailed FOIA requests, and it’s easy to speculate that has something to do with me.”
It just might be enough to spur someone in the FBI to start a file on him.