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Comment by awqrre | Hacker News Reader

"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?

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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.

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