Monday, April 06, 2015
Written by Frank N. Wilner, Contributing Editor

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While cash-strapped Amtrak is scaling back retiree healthcare insurance subsidies, its law department is buying black markers in carload lots to obliterate customer complaints from prying public eyes. Astoundingly, the Freedom of Information Act’s sword is no match for the Amtrak Law Department’s black markers.

Could a handful of customer complaints made public really damage a brand that has 31 million souls eager to purchase tickets each year? Amtrak’s own managers once complained that conductors inherited from legacy railroads were “untrainable.” Yet the brand survived and grew. Seriously, what’s a mouse or two in the aisle in a nation where cockroaches and bedbugs are occasional inhabitants of even prideful homes and four-star hotels?

So what is the Amtrak Law Department up to with those black markers purchased from the public purse? Any public relations practitioner worth their daily dram of Scotch will remind you how Tylenol actually burnished its brand through open and honest public communication following a dreadful product tampering episode in 1982. Exxon (“You talkin’ about me?”) should have been so savvy when its oil tanker Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989 with horrific environmental results.

Amtrak’s latest carload order of black markers followed a Freedom of Information Act request by MuckRock.com, which sought access in June 2014 to customer complaints relating to Amtrak lounge cars. After nine months of exchanging emails with Amtrak’s Law Department, MuckRock.com received 318 records, with virtually all so smeared with obliterating black marker ink that you’d think the customer complaints contained data on coalition troop movements in Iraq; the notes of whistleblower Edward Snowden; some of the private emails of Hillary Clinton; or, gasp, more selfies of Carlos Danger, the alias of former Congressman Anthony (“look at my genitals”) Weiner.

March 19, 2015
by JPat Brown

This Sunshine Week, we've seen agencies go to great lengths to prevent disclosure of domestic drone programs and plots to read your mail. But as these Amtrak complaints show, government cover-ups aren't always a matter of life and death. Unless you ordered the tuna salad. Then you should seek immediate medical attention.

Last June, MuckRock user Conor Skelding requested all complaints Amtrak received regarding its lounge cars over the past two years. Last week, after nine months of processing, the responsive docs finally came in, and boy, those must have been a busy nine months.
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On one hand, Amtrak could have just done their due diligence on B6 exemptions and saved everybody a whole lot of time ... but on the other, then we would have this gem uncovered by Andre Francisco, a strong contender for greatest redaction of all time: