On May 11, 2011, CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy (OIP), seeking records of DOJ’s implementation of 5 U.S.C. 552(c). That provision of the FOIA authorizes agencies in certain limited and specified circumstances to treat certain records as not subject to the FOIA’s disclosure requirements, including where the agency has an active pending investigation of which the investigation’s subject is unaware. A requester has no way of knowing when an agency invokes this exclusion, as the agency is not required to inform the requester it has done so. A district court in California recently chastised the government for refusing to disclose to the court its invocation of the exclusion, which insulated the government’s actions from any judicial review. DOJ recently published proposed regulations that would grant to OIP the authority to clear all component requests to invoke the exclusion.