My Journey to the Heart of the FOIA Request | Hacker News Reader

My Journey to the Heart of the FOIA Request

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68 pointssamclemens25 comments

Good sauce. FOIA has been somewhat of an obsession of mine for a few years now and I can't recommend its use enough. It's difficult, full of legal and non-legal gotchas from front to back in every state I've sent requests to, but damn is it worth it in the end. In particular, the direct visibility into how our government works and how it communicates with requesters is extremely eye opening. It's very, very non-reciprocal.

Fun and ongoing story.. Recently I did a request for the metadata of all emails sent and received by a seattle.gov email address. They first gave me an estimate of 32 million dollars, 320 years for redaction and 25k/yr for storing a few tb. A few months later (and ~$35.00 later) , they ended up sending me millions of emails on accident, thinking they only sent metadata. After reporting it to their CPO and CTO, they decided to escalate the problem by offering me legal indemnification for deleting the files and having a 3rd party company scan my drives for those emails. It was never directly stated, but it sounded like they had full intent of creating warrants for my disks, virtual or otherwise, we're going to be made. Thankfully, they're leaning on an accepting a signed affidavit that states I deleted the emails. All because they sent me the wrong info. It feels very much like a combination of gaslighting and extortion.

FOIA is a strange, strange thing..

On what grounds could they get a warrant? They made the mistake, not you.

I'm not sure what the specifics would be, but it would very likely be related to the emails that contained ongoing FBI investigations. (Which, for the record, is deleted and unshared.)

Possibly the emails contain information that could harm a third party? In that case they would maybe have an incentive to investigate and be sure that the information was destroyed.

I think he's asking what grounds authorities might have to demand destruction of the information.

Is there a legal pretext for going after information like this?

Could the feds POST a confidential JSON blob to an arbitrary server to obtain a warrant to inspect that server's hard drive?

This actually sounds like a legitimate threat vector.

It's a bit like entrapment. You offer something they don't know they want, and then arrest them for interacting with you.

Hell, if they could inspect someone's drives based on sending them data it would make all warrants with computers trivial to get. Write a little script that just sends the data and doesn't even check if message is sent successfully, send a classified file to everyone you want to search, and bam you have legal access to anyone's computer at any time. It would be even more of a joke of probable cause than "I smelled marijuana" if the courts allowed it

Or even worse a querystring containing matters of national security so we need access to your access logs.

Have you ever considered the fact that you might be a genius? An evil genius for sure, but still.

I enjoy thinking about how to break systems. >:)

Fault isn't the issue - possession is.

Although they probably tell the auditors the opposite, there is all sorts of potential data in there that is illegal to possess. Everything from the details of active police investigations, identity of undercover officers, pictures of abused children, investigations of child abuse, to HR matters, to attorney-client privileged information to secret tax data.

In many cases, unaauthorized possession (and disclosure for the government person) is a felony.

People do incredibly stupid things with email.

Make sure you submit this story to the EFF's annual Foilies awards late this year or early next year.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/foilies-2017

My Missouri Sunshine Law request won the Outrageous Fee award this year, and I was "only" being charged $1.5 million. I look forward to passing the crown to you.

Hah, I bittersweetingly accept!

Congratulations, both for the award and for not getting your Sunshine request honored by the state of Missouri. I've filed a series of Sunshine requests with the Department of Natural Resources, and as a result of the awful things I've learned I am quite uneasy about drinking water in this state. After badgering the "Chief of Compliance and Enforcement" about his failure to take any action about polluting facilities "referred to enforcement", he finally claimed that taking polluters to court is a waste of time, because judges in this state always rule in favor of polluters. I'm not sure that's true, but if the official in his office actually believes it, it may as well be.

From my limited exposure, it gets no better at the federal level. One facility I've complained about shut down completely (i.e. went out of business) for half a year (the creek downhill quickly cleared up), but the charlatan at EPA still claimed it wasn't a "recommencing discharger" as used by 40 CFR 122.47, when it sold to a new owner and opened again for business with the same shambolic unengineered leaking lagoons six months later.

Have you found a concise portal / wiki for FOIA resources, information, and tools? I would always find myself tripping on local laws or strange requirements from individual agencies.

I remember when the FBI said they would close the electronic portal down and only allow fax, seemingly just to add another hurdle. I started looking into plugging a web interface into a cloud faxing service that would let people submit just as easily, but they reverted the rules under pressure.

(If I remember correctly, they still only allow electronic submissions during a certain set of "business hours", even though it's just a webform that probably pops your request into a database / email anyway. Truly a head-scratcher.)

https://www.muckrock.com

Muckrock as another poster mentioned, but they're not as comprehensive as I'd hope and their business model kind of ironically paywalls information. A good strategy I've used is to read similar requests beforehand. It's a great way to see what's possible.

Reporter's Committee for the Freedom of Press wrote a guide for every state which I use as a great goto: https://www.rcfp.org/open-government-guide

I've been compiling this for a bit for my own notes, which you might also find helpful. "PRs" welcome :) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pdFYkO5QRMi0w2HeCwWm...

> It feels very much like a combination of gaslighting and extortion.

So very much like all government interactions with it's citizenry?

If I am allowed to go a bit side-ways, I am curious to ask what is other HN members' opinion on the writing style of the article.

I find it particularly difficult to follow, jumping from "history" to "anecdata" then to "data", back to "particular history", then a note or two about the actual request, then again some "law history", then something about the actual response obtained, etc., and again back to "history", mixing in all of this some "opinions", and back to "anecdata", some attempt to "humour", back to "history".

Is it just me, or is it objectively "confusing"?

I don't know about 'objectively' but I'd say the mix of the author's story along with the ex-black panther story was slightly off. It seemed like two stories with vastly different weights ('I was interested in this thing' vs 'I was tracked by the FBI for years').

And the paragraph about the 'Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo' sort of went nowhere - I actually had to go back and try work out why it was there.

But I'm not a journalist or an editor so could just be wrong

What is the scope of the FOIA? If the government hires a contractor to do something and the contractor delivers it to the government are you able to FOIA the information the government has on this product? Can you request records from the company?

You can probably get the contract(s) and all information surrounding the governments use/knowledge of the product(s) or companies in question, but in my understanding it doesn't extend into private companies, that would be weird and creepy.

NASA has a nice summary of the rights the government has to contractor created works.[1]

A contractor may claim copyrights, but the government still has a license to the work that allows them under most circumstances to do anything they please (for the public good) with the work (e.g. publish it in the New York Times) and also release copies for reproduction (as long as you reproduce the copy you got directly from the government).

The general counsel of any agency can explain what the agency's rights are for any given work.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/531751main_Government%20Data%20Righ...

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