FBI launches eFOIA System for faster FOIA requests | Hacker News Reader

FBI launches eFOIA System for faster FOIA requests

fbi.gov

82 pointsdan-silver27 comments

Glad for the FBI. Getting something like this in place is a massive undertaking.

These organizations are all clamoring to get this sort of thing in place, it's a serious game changer, but it's frankly hard as hell.

I hear a lot of people suggesting these guys are dragging their feet on FOIA requests because they don't want to release their documents. So wrong. Anyone who has worked with large government or private sector document management knows the problems here.

No one (except really young organizations) has the centralized infrastructure in place to make this easy. They're looking at huge amounts of legacy systems, decades worth of warehouses filled with paper records, millions of new e-mails created daily. None of these systems are effectively integrated.

The company I work for has one of only a handful of FOIA systems being shopped to the government right now, and after seeing the hurdles going on here I can tell you first hand that these backlogs aren't because people are dragging their feet. We've been doing ECM stuff for 30 years now, and whenever we come into an organization like this it takes us ages just to help them sort out how to connect this stuff together.

But it's totally worth it. Every organization so far that has managed the move to an electronic FOIA system, despite the slight uptick in requests, has taken a huge bite out of their FOIA backlog just because electronic centralized systems make the FOIA response process so much easier.

Again, congrats to the guys over there. I'm sure this was incredibly hard to put in place.

They're trying to spin this as a "good" thing but I believe the reason they're doing this is more selfish: they're trying to stop people from making multiple, slightly different FOIA requests on the same topic and getting back different censored results. On one request, some parts might be censored, but on another that part may be uncensored. By making multiple requests you can open more and more windows on the actual document.

Here is a 2013 article on someone cleverly abusing this tactic [1]. With the new system in place they'll be able to spot and prevent these tactics more easily.

[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/foia-ryan-shapiro-fb...

The FBI is surprisingly responsive and "human" for FBI file (e.g. dead people records) requests, at least for the non-controversial ones. For example, MuckRock sent a records request for "Leslie Nielson" with no proof of death and yet the FBI (as far as I can see in the message chain) didn't give them a hard time about it: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...

I recently sent in a request for Paul Newman and got nothing back (which was both very disappointing and surprising, given Nixon's well-known hatred of Newman, and Newman being an all-around big name and businessman)...the only hold up was that they required a snail mail address to send things to. I thought they had dropped my request but realized they had sent the "no records found" letter to my mailbox well before the required deadline.

My dad put in a FOIA request for my grandfather's FBI file back in April and has gotten nothing but a form letter with a case number so far.

The FOIA law requires agencies to ordinarily respond with twenty business days, thirty business days in "unusual circumstances" and longer than that only in "exceptional circumstances".

However, as bad as the FBI's disrespect for the law is, it doesn't hold a candle to the State Department which has been sitting on a FOIA request of mine since July of 2013. Their attitude seems to be that they don't have to comply with duly enacted laws until and unless compelled to do so by a federal judge.

That's exactly how we should think of things too; mechanically. Even if the FBI today were morally ideal and responded to serious requests within the limits of their bureaucratic ability without stonewalling, that's not something we should depend on.

We should depend on levers and mechanisms.

You can also just email FOIA requests to foiparequest@ic.fbi.gov

Emailing also doesn't require uploading a scan of your driver's license or limit you to one request a day, which the new system does.

"eFOIA is currently closed. Typically, eFOIA operates Sunday through Saturday, 8am to 10pm Eastern time.

Please try again within those hours."

sigh

Eh, you know, I wish more businesses would actually do this with their online activities. This kind of inconvenience, would force people into doing other, perhaps more fulfilling activities and remind them of the physical aspect of life -things begin and stop. I'm not saying a FOIA isn't fulfilling, but if Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, could "close down" for given times zones during a wee hours window, it might not be a bad thing. If nothing else, I'd like to see the outcomes.

Now, of course, no one is going to jeopardize sales and do that... but I'm glad some of the gov't tries to keep it's business hours based on human labor concepts. A kind of skeuochron.

Why should their schedule decide?

"If you are requesting information on a deceased individual, you will need to upload proof of death unless the deceased individual is more than 100 years old."

The FBI doesn't know who is dead?

They could easily allow you to specify the SSN in the request, and verify it against the Social Security Death Index [1]. They just choose not to make it that easy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Death_Index

Disclaimer: One of my projects TODO is to crowdsource the funding of obtaining the SSDI quarterly from the SSA (its expensive [2]), and then provide it as an open API.

[2] https://www.ssdmf.com/FolderID/1/SessionID/%7B67E8C06C-025F-...

They don't need to request the person's SSN... they could just choose not to release the data that is tied to a non-dead citizen since they already have their SSN, probably.

Their page specifically says if its not a first party request (you requesting information about you), you must submit a copy of the Social Security Death Index showing the person is deceased. Instead of the requestor needing to provide that page, they could simply verify the SSN you're providing, in combination with the person's name, against the Social Security Death Index file internally.

"If you are requesting information on a deceased individual, you will need to upload proof of death unless the deceased individual is more than 100 years old. Acceptable proof of death includes obituaries, death certificates, recognized sources that can be documented, written media, Who’s Who in America, an FBI file that indicates a person is deceased, or a Social Security Death Index page."

Emphasis mine.

Requests for information about living people are covered by Privacy Act (PA) requests, not FOIA requests.

https://m.fbi.gov/#https://www.fbi.gov/foia/requesting-fbi-r...

The original post I replied to asked:

> "If you are requesting information on a deceased individual, you will need to upload proof of death unless the deceased individual is more than 100 years old."

> The FBI doesn't know who is dead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10660342

I'm simply showing a) they do and b) they could make it much easier for specifying this in your request and verifying it.

Are you suggesting that different government agencies work together to accomplish a task efficiently? Perish the thought!

So imagine this was a company and a customer wanted a relative's data because they died. Wouldn't you require they deliver proper proof? The FOIA requests all work this way. They just want a cursory check that the person reasonably died so the government employee is not on the hook for verifying it. If you knowingly deliver false proof you are defrauding the federal government instead of a government employee on the hook for releasing records incorrectly because they made the wrong call. It allows any reasonably trained person to make sure the documentation was supplied correctly and process the request.

Only now in 2015 the FBI fullfills FOIA requests electronically? That is incredible backward. I thought the Department of Interior was bad because they couldn't do global email searches on even global searches within a specific Bureau, but Interior is light years ahead of the FBI.

If you're the FBI, what motivation do you have to implement the system? No one ever use an FOIA request to get info about something good to praise them. It's always to get info to smear them.

Why would they want to make this easier?

Honestly, all branches of the public sector should strive for maximum transparency. I understand why you're asking this question, but in a truly transparent system, if someone is trying to smear a branch doing a good job, there is plenty of ammunition to demonstrate the opposite.

Incidentally this is why I'm a huge believer in open management models. They work great in FOSS. Being scrutinized by outsiders forces you to think more carefully about what you do. Within a company, employees are generally disincentivized from giving negative feedback and often don't have the full picture to judge with anyway. Outsiders don't have that problem.

As a counterexample, the FBI FOIA process is what allowed me to get the only surviving transcription of my grandfather's own words (He died before I was born). I'm incredibly grateful that we live in a system that lets people mine this information for their own reasons. It has been a treasure trove of information for me personally and the staff never hassled me. That goes as well for the NARA archive staff. If anyone on the FOIA team reads this, thank you.

Even assuming that the people at the FBI are altruistic and don't care about whether FOIA requests will be used to smear them, I don't see what incentive they have to make the process easier for people making requests. Once they've complied with what they're legally required to do, other things will get attention in the budget.

Believing in this kind of argument is accepting corruption.

It's kind of like saying "why should the parties in power fix the electoral system if they benefit from it".

I don't think the point of the argument is that it's a good state of affairs. The point is the incentives are wrong, so obviously this will happen. Hoping the FBI's heart grows the sizes won't get you anywhere.

You've been able to submit requests electronically (via email) for years. For releases that are of major popular interest, they post the results in their reading room: vault.fbi.gov

But yes, they typically respond via mail, although over the past five years usually with CDs if it's more than a few pages.

I don't see the FOIA Machine mentioned anywhere: https://www.foiamachine.org/

Kickstarted and now doing amazing things.

How is this different than http://www.foiaxpress.com/ ?

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