I’m not super-well read on the federal FOIA, but am responsible for public information requests at my city, which follow state regs.
At least at my level, the big one is that the government does not have to create documents to satisfy a request. If the data is not in a readable format, we essentially don’t have responsive data and are not required to go through the conversion process because that would be creating data.
We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.
My example of when we used it was a request for every copy of a specific formthat had been rejected in building applications. It would have required manually scrubbing tens of thousands of building permits to look for specific forms that were not always turned in using the same name and looking for versions that were rejected (which may have been part of accepted applications if the applicant corrected the form later).
It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them “no.”
This sounds sideways, as FOIA processing is a part of city services, and state services, and federal services.
Treating it otherwise has always seemed to invite abuse.
We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.
How is that a legal workaround against FOIA? Literally every response to FOIA causes a ‘disruption’ to city services in that context. This sounds like a strategy from management that is incompetent or intentionally unethical trying to avoid processing FOIA requests. “Undue disruption” reads as a convenient scapegoat to hide things from the public, a public that the government is there to serve in the first place.
It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them “no.”
~165 hours for ever 10k documents to review at 1 min avg per doc.
45k documents = 750 hours = 25 work weeks @ 30hrs.
That’s $11,250 @ $15/hr wages. Call it $16,000 for FTE total costs as a govt employer.
You can engage 10 local contracted temp workers to process the data in a under 3 weeks.
Once you have done the review, the dataset to that point has been compiled and can be used for other such requests without additional expenditures towards recompiling data up to that date.
I’m sure budgets are carefully crafted to avoid including FOIA processing.
A building permit can involve hundreds of documents, some of which are hundreds of pages long. All of which need to be reviewed to see if that form was included in the packet. We came up with the time requirement by processing 100 permits and averaging the time it took to review each permit case. The fucking database won’t load a permit in a minute.
And after that we have to redact information, which in this particular example basically makes the request worthless anyway.
And it’s not some City Manager excuse. It’s literally written into the Public Information Act. We can’t stop providing city services to everyone elae because one jackass asks an overly-specific question that will require months of work.
And we can’t use contractors because of the requirement to redact certain information before contractors can see it.
The issue there is redaction. A form may have sensitive information that we’re not legally allowed to release, so we have to redact information. I’m not talking about classified info, but things like driver’s license numbers or or medical information.
It’s often stuff we tell people not to give us, but when they do it still requires redaction from a PIR. It’s one of the primary reasons they’re such a pain in the ass - we have to manually review every page for 30 different kinds of protected info.
We can’t let a third-party just sift through that data, because we don’t have the right to share that information with them.
Can I bitch about that redaction for a bit? Someone hit our car while it was parked on federal property. There were cameras, and the security people figured out who did it (and called them, and they denied it). When we finally got the police report, all of the information for identifying the guilty party had been redacted, along with the officer’s name and any other useful information. For a literal fender bender. Shitty driver got away with it. The police report was completely useless. I can only imagine my insurance company was like, “We waited 3 weeks for THIS?” They might as well have sent over a blank page.
I get the idea behind redacting stuff in general, but that one just pissed me off.
It’s frustrating for me too, but state law requires us to redact certain things on a PIR even when we think it’s stupid.
I have to redact homeowner information even though it’s available through the appraisal district. That means I have to manually check for homeowner names on every page of every document, even though another agency has it labeled on the map. It adds hours and accomplishes nothing.
With a total staff of 11 I’m guessing there’s not a huge budget for outside contractors to do the work.
If it came down to it the remedy is to challenge it in court. An impartial judge should be able to look at the argument from the local government and determine if their argument is legitimate or not.
Right, hence the payment. With the payment, the city could hire someone to free up time for someone to handle and redact the documents. Or pay someone overtime. Or however else the city thinks is reasonable. So instead of saying “no”, offer a labor price.
Legit reason: Chain of evidence. They can’t bring in an outside expert that hasn’t been vetted, and they especially can’t use equipment that has been outside their control and hasn’t been verified intact. Damn near zero youtubers would pass NSA vetting, which clearly rules out their equipment as well. The fact this is such an outdated tech means there’s no verified-trustworthy experts within or contracted with the government that can work with it, so they really are stuck not being able to do anything with this tech in house. Digital obsolescence is a very serious problem, especially in government (why do you think they pay so much for COBOL developers?) and this truly is a nontrivial issue to overcome.
… Which is the bureaucratic legitimacy behind this claim. Obviously they could fix this, I mean duh. But it’s an actual hassle, and they see no benefit to going through it to reveal something they don’t see a point to revealing. So they just hide behind the legit issues, shrug, and know we can’t do anything about it.
I know several youtubers that could be trusted with solving that issue. Why can’t they find someone with the skills?
Edit: Thanks for the replies I see now it’s not a technical knowledge problem, but a security+law+regulation problem.
Because it’s a bad excuse to avoid their legal duties because they’ve probably broken some laws while thinking there would never be any consequences.
Ofc they could digitise it, easily, they’re the fucking NSA, not a tech-illiterate grandparent.
I’m not super-well read on the federal FOIA, but am responsible for public information requests at my city, which follow state regs.
At least at my level, the big one is that the government does not have to create documents to satisfy a request. If the data is not in a readable format, we essentially don’t have responsive data and are not required to go through the conversion process because that would be creating data.
We also have a rule regarding conversion of electronic data from internal proprietary format to something the requestor can read that allows us to refuse if responding to the request would cause an undue disruption to city services.
My example of when we used it was a request for every copy of a specific formthat had been rejected in building applications. It would have required manually scrubbing tens of thousands of building permits to look for specific forms that were not always turned in using the same name and looking for versions that were rejected (which may have been part of accepted applications if the applicant corrected the form later).
It would have taken about 6 months for a full-time employee, and our city only has 11 staffers, so we were able to tell them “no.”
This sounds sideways, as FOIA processing is a part of city services, and state services, and federal services.
Treating it otherwise has always seemed to invite abuse.
How is that a legal workaround against FOIA? Literally every response to FOIA causes a ‘disruption’ to city services in that context. This sounds like a strategy from management that is incompetent or intentionally unethical trying to avoid processing FOIA requests. “Undue disruption” reads as a convenient scapegoat to hide things from the public, a public that the government is there to serve in the first place.
~165 hours for ever 10k documents to review at 1 min avg per doc. 45k documents = 750 hours = 25 work weeks @ 30hrs.
That’s $11,250 @ $15/hr wages. Call it $16,000 for FTE total costs as a govt employer. You can engage 10 local contracted temp workers to process the data in a under 3 weeks.
Once you have done the review, the dataset to that point has been compiled and can be used for other such requests without additional expenditures towards recompiling data up to that date.
I’m sure budgets are carefully crafted to avoid including FOIA processing.
A building permit can involve hundreds of documents, some of which are hundreds of pages long. All of which need to be reviewed to see if that form was included in the packet. We came up with the time requirement by processing 100 permits and averaging the time it took to review each permit case. The fucking database won’t load a permit in a minute.
And after that we have to redact information, which in this particular example basically makes the request worthless anyway.
And it’s not some City Manager excuse. It’s literally written into the Public Information Act. We can’t stop providing city services to everyone elae because one jackass asks an overly-specific question that will require months of work.
And we can’t use contractors because of the requirement to redact certain information before contractors can see it.
Can the requestor offer to either do it themselves or pay to have someone do it?
The issue there is redaction. A form may have sensitive information that we’re not legally allowed to release, so we have to redact information. I’m not talking about classified info, but things like driver’s license numbers or or medical information.
It’s often stuff we tell people not to give us, but when they do it still requires redaction from a PIR. It’s one of the primary reasons they’re such a pain in the ass - we have to manually review every page for 30 different kinds of protected info.
We can’t let a third-party just sift through that data, because we don’t have the right to share that information with them.
Can I bitch about that redaction for a bit? Someone hit our car while it was parked on federal property. There were cameras, and the security people figured out who did it (and called them, and they denied it). When we finally got the police report, all of the information for identifying the guilty party had been redacted, along with the officer’s name and any other useful information. For a literal fender bender. Shitty driver got away with it. The police report was completely useless. I can only imagine my insurance company was like, “We waited 3 weeks for THIS?” They might as well have sent over a blank page.
I get the idea behind redacting stuff in general, but that one just pissed me off.
It’s frustrating for me too, but state law requires us to redact certain things on a PIR even when we think it’s stupid.
I have to redact homeowner information even though it’s available through the appraisal district. That means I have to manually check for homeowner names on every page of every document, even though another agency has it labeled on the map. It adds hours and accomplishes nothing.
But it’s state law, so I have to follow it.
Right, so what about the second option, paying for someone to handle the data?
With a total staff of 11 I’m guessing there’s not a huge budget for outside contractors to do the work.
If it came down to it the remedy is to challenge it in court. An impartial judge should be able to look at the argument from the local government and determine if their argument is legitimate or not.
I’m not talking about the city budget, I’m saying the person requesting documents could pay for the labor needed to get the documents.
A third party can’t view the un-redacted documents because the city can’t share them.
Right, hence the payment. With the payment, the city could hire someone to free up time for someone to handle and redact the documents. Or pay someone overtime. Or however else the city thinks is reasonable. So instead of saying “no”, offer a labor price.
That’s how it works in NZ, you can request anything, but the govt can also charge you the costs of collating that data beyond a certain point
Legit reason: Chain of evidence. They can’t bring in an outside expert that hasn’t been vetted, and they especially can’t use equipment that has been outside their control and hasn’t been verified intact. Damn near zero youtubers would pass NSA vetting, which clearly rules out their equipment as well. The fact this is such an outdated tech means there’s no verified-trustworthy experts within or contracted with the government that can work with it, so they really are stuck not being able to do anything with this tech in house. Digital obsolescence is a very serious problem, especially in government (why do you think they pay so much for COBOL developers?) and this truly is a nontrivial issue to overcome.
… Which is the bureaucratic legitimacy behind this claim. Obviously they could fix this, I mean duh. But it’s an actual hassle, and they see no benefit to going through it to reveal something they don’t see a point to revealing. So they just hide behind the legit issues, shrug, and know we can’t do anything about it.
They’ve probably secretly listened to someone unknowingly telling them how to fix it.