Yesterday, I posted the text of an "Emergency Message" from the Social Security Administration about Social Security's role in the economic stimulus package. Shortly after I posted the Emergency Message or EM, it disappeared from Social Security's website.
Social Security has used EMs, or their predecessor, Emergency Teletypes, for many years to convey important information to Social Security employees. Usually, EMs are not concerned with true emergencies. They just convey staff instructions, usually concerning new issues. As such, they are a matter of legitimate interest to anyone dealing with the agency.
Take a look at Social Security's online list of EMs. Note that they seem to be numbered sequentially. The most recent EM shown is 08013. It appears that the "08" part is the year and the number thereafter is a sequential number. Note how many gaps there are in the sequence. We are up to EM-08013 online, but there are only two EMs showing up online for 2008.
What is going on? JOA on the SSAConnect Board tells us that Social Security is labeling many EMs as "sensitive" and distributing them only to Social Security employees. Apparently, Social Security decided to make EM-08-021 "sensitive" after first posting it online. It appears to me that Social Security has been labeling more and more EMs as sensitive and trying to withhold them from the public.
Why is Social Security doing this? I cannot say, but it is hard to imagine that anything being made available to tens of thousands of Social Security employees is truly sensitive. If the EM that I posted is an example of what Social Security is labeling "sensitive", you have to wonder what the criteria are for determining what is so "sensitive" that it must be withheld from the public. The only thing "sensitive" about that EM was the revelation that the Social Security Administration wants to stay out of the business of advising claimants on how they can obtain a check under the economic stimulus plan. I suppose that this might be embarrassing to the agency brass since Social Security is getting a $31 million appropriation for its part in the economic stimulus plan or because it illustrates the fact that Social Security is short-handed, but that hardly seems to me to make it "sensitive."
Trying to keep these secret seems contrary to Social Security's publicly stated position that "Administrative staff manuals of the Social Security Administration and Instructions to staff personnel that contain policies, procedures, or interpretations that affect the public are available for inspection and copying."
If nothing else, trying to suppress an emergency message that clearly contains no sensitive information after the emergency message has already entered the public domain just makes the Social Security Administration look ridiculous.
I have made a Freedom of Information Act requests for all of these sensitive EMs since the beginning of 2007. Once I get them, I will post all of them. We will eventually see what Social Security is trying to keep from the public. How soon that may be is unclear.
Social Security has used EMs, or their predecessor, Emergency Teletypes, for many years to convey important information to Social Security employees. Usually, EMs are not concerned with true emergencies. They just convey staff instructions, usually concerning new issues. As such, they are a matter of legitimate interest to anyone dealing with the agency.
Take a look at Social Security's online list of EMs. Note that they seem to be numbered sequentially. The most recent EM shown is 08013. It appears that the "08" part is the year and the number thereafter is a sequential number. Note how many gaps there are in the sequence. We are up to EM-08013 online, but there are only two EMs showing up online for 2008.
What is going on? JOA on the SSAConnect Board tells us that Social Security is labeling many EMs as "sensitive" and distributing them only to Social Security employees. Apparently, Social Security decided to make EM-08-021 "sensitive" after first posting it online. It appears to me that Social Security has been labeling more and more EMs as sensitive and trying to withhold them from the public.
Why is Social Security doing this? I cannot say, but it is hard to imagine that anything being made available to tens of thousands of Social Security employees is truly sensitive. If the EM that I posted is an example of what Social Security is labeling "sensitive", you have to wonder what the criteria are for determining what is so "sensitive" that it must be withheld from the public. The only thing "sensitive" about that EM was the revelation that the Social Security Administration wants to stay out of the business of advising claimants on how they can obtain a check under the economic stimulus plan. I suppose that this might be embarrassing to the agency brass since Social Security is getting a $31 million appropriation for its part in the economic stimulus plan or because it illustrates the fact that Social Security is short-handed, but that hardly seems to me to make it "sensitive."
Trying to keep these secret seems contrary to Social Security's publicly stated position that "Administrative staff manuals of the Social Security Administration and Instructions to staff personnel that contain policies, procedures, or interpretations that affect the public are available for inspection and copying."
If nothing else, trying to suppress an emergency message that clearly contains no sensitive information after the emergency message has already entered the public domain just makes the Social Security Administration look ridiculous.
I have made a Freedom of Information Act requests for all of these sensitive EMs since the beginning of 2007. Once I get them, I will post all of them. We will eventually see what Social Security is trying to keep from the public. How soon that may be is unclear.
3 comments:
Mr. Hall:
If you pry that closet door open, maybe a toe bone will roll out. Nothing more.
If you post all those Emergency Messages, you will provoke a widespread outbreak of MEGO syndrome.
Surely there are more interesting things to read. Have you tried Richard Hofstader’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics? It’s a classic.
JOA
As for not "advising claimants on how they can obtain a check under the economic sitmulus plan", this is a long standing policy of not answering questions for other agencies (in this case IRS) to avoid providing incorrect or incomplete information. IRS employees are not to answer questions social security programs for the same reason.
Yes, I too have noticed a lot of EMs and POMS sections being labeled sensitive. SSA isn't the NSA or CIA and I think it's mostly CYA on the part of SSA.
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