Hacker News Reader

Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> The records are no less public in either situation? They can be accessed by anyone

No, that's not true. If you have to physically go to the county clerk's office then you have to physically be in the country. That is a significant barrier.

An example that is even more salient than 911 records: if you make any political contribution in the U.S. you are require by law to give your home address which then becomes part of an FEC database that can be accessed by anyone on earth with an internet connection.

View on HN

You're correct, it is a barrier, it makes things more difficult for the requester.

How you request it or where you are when you make the request doesn't change the legal status of the record itself if a data set has been made public by your state legislature.

If your local laws say you have to make the request in person, so be it. It's still an open record that can be queried and retrieved by members of the public.

If your local law say you may make your request online at a specific web address, so be it. It is still an open record that can be queried and retrieved by members of the public.

The mechanism or methodology of requesting a public record does not change a public record factually and legally being public unless local law says so (or FOIA if we're dealing with a federal agency, but since the context here is 911 calls, this is much more likely going to fall to a how a state legislature decides to protect/expose public records).

Everything you say is true. Nonetheless, as someone who makes political contributions, it matters to me whether a Rumanian hacker can get my home address while sitting in their basement in their underwear, or if they have to get a U.S. visa and travel to my home town in order to do it. That is a salient difference to me, irrespective of the legal status of the information.

You have a valid concern. I do not intend to dismiss it but I will offer this is why I put forward the caveat previously that absent legislation that acts as a buffer against unauthroized or illegal use of public records (which almost every state has provisions in their record keeping laws over already), the mechanism doesn’t change or alleviate these concerns.

We need to weigh the purposes and drawbacks of policies and try to strike a balance in practice. In the case of public records, the purpose presumably is to fight corruption and maintain an informed electorate; the injury to personal privacy a major drawback.

Adding a cost to get the information is one way to adjust this balance— it ensures that the person making the request values the information for some purpose, at a level higher than the imposed cost. Then, when you pass regulations about appropriate and inappropriate motivations for using this information, there’s a standard against which the judge and jury can compare the proffered reasons for accessing the data.

100% agreed. Monetary costs for records is a common approach to this, although many agencies allow for the costs to be waived at the request of the querying individual. It's entirely up to the queried agency to decide if they want to waive those costs or not, and it's a roll of the dice if that agency will bless you with waived fees.

Another way agencies have added "cost" to the requesting practice is through complicated and lengthy forms that are mailed to the local agency (and some agencies, I will offer, absolutely will NOT let you just walk in and hand over a form ABC-123, and require it to be mailed with a postmark). At least, complicated for the individual making the request. These forms though I think do a very good job of helping records divisions enumerate the type of requests that come in, the volume at which they are received and provides an excellent catalog for the types of data most commonly requested by the public to make searching and disseminating the requested records more expedient for clerks and court reporters.

But I absolutely agree, additional policy crafting is necessary to answer some key questions:

1) What should be released and how

2) What is the appropriate mechanism for making a request and what systems of work are engaged by jurisdictions in issuing a release

3) What are the conditions for a legally appropriate and publicly-interested release

I think this is as true for 911 calls as it is querying a comptroller for city budget items.

You're talking past each other. One of you is talking about whether or not it's public, the other about how accessible it is. They're distinct, but closely related, topics.

Scale, rate, time, and distance matter.

Fundamental changes to these, matter. Even small ones. Especially big ones.

Moving the needle a few percent (or fractions of a percent) can be game-changers in business or politics through threshold effects.

Moving the needle by orders of magnitude is effectively an entire new physics regime. And that's what we're seeing here.

Just because Y is "the same as X" doesn't mean that Y is X, if the rate of change is 10x, or 100x, or 1000x, or 1,000,000x greater. A 10x change gets you from walking speed to a car. 100x is an aircraft. 1,000x is an ICBM. The Tsar Bomba is Greek Fire ... at scale.

Infotech advances change costs by factors of millions to billions, far outside the scales above: ICBMs compunded, several times.

And such changes have massive unintended consequences.

Information technology is the perception and feedback system of society as a whole. Changing properties of information perceptibility, parsibility, storage, retrieval, processing, and distribution of information fundamentally changes entire social orders, and often not for the better. Lowering costs makes marginally "profitable" -- often in the rents-extracting sense -- applications more tractable. In that context, religious and political propaganda, yellow journalism, advertising, noise pollution, popular demagogues, urban legends, email spam, robocalls, stalking, harassment, pseudoscientific myths (flat earth, antivax, truthers, birthers), media (social or otherwise) smear tactics, and automaded extortion are entirely predictable outcomes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com