David Morrissey

It began as a routine Freedom of Information Act request but ended in a tangle, a computerized Catch-22. In 1985, the non-profit organization, Public Citizen, requested that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) provide an array of records detailing workplace hazards. The Washington-based public interest group routinely monitors compliance with workplace safety rules to see if OSHA is enforcing laws that protect employees. The regional OSHA office approached by Public Citizen told the group that searching paper documents to fulfill the request would be time-consuming and expensive, but that OSHA’s central office was increasingly computerized to overcome just this type of problem. “They told us that in order to produce what we wanted they would have to go through every file by company name, to look for certain violations, but their computer, (in Washington), recorded it by violations,” said Patti Goldman, a Public Citizen attorney. “They had the paper records but they said it was far too cumbersome to look through them.” The group’s next stop was the OSHA Office of Management Data Systems, which