Delayed, denied, dismissed: How bureaucrats keep you in the dark

Finally, in November 2014 — more than 3½ years after I filed my appeal — I received a final response: Denied. We are at war, I was told, and I am not entitled to the records. There was no explanation of how doctors would be put at risk by releasing their names. No sense of when or if this “war” would ever end — or whether the DOD could use it as an excuse forever.

More than 40 projects were terminated before they even began. The agency was releasing so little information, the GAO said, that it was difficult to determine if the program had worked. "We are left with a program that spent $3 billion,” a GAO investigator told Politico last summer, “and we really don’t know what became of it.”

In November 2013, a U.S. customs official refused to let Toronto resident Ellen Richardson board a flight to New York because she had been hospitalized for depression — and was therefore considered a mental health risk. A Canadian privacy commissioner investigated and found that Ontario police were routinely uploading suicide calls into a database that was accessed by the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.