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.
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.
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.