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Comment by wmhartnett | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the inspiration! As someone just said on Twitter, "we really should just FOIA the cost of everything with a .gov, just for fun."

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As much as I'd love to do that, I think casting a broad net in FOIA is very difficult and potentially counterproductive. FOIA offices have very limited resources already, so asking for literally everything at once or as lots of little requests performs a DoS attack on the one office of the government that I really like! It does make a good point philosophically, but practically, I think it might be counterproductive. The FOIA law itself also requires requests to be fairly specific.

I bet there are some _specific_ things that members of this community want to know (cost/sources of software, policy memos, etc.) that could be requested, received and processed in a more timely and useful fashion than if we just asked for "(asterisk).(asterisk)".

Or a better solution, everything that's eligible for a FOIA request should just be made available on the existing Open Government page [1] rather than making people request it and go through the process. What is the point of this security by obscurity nonsense? If it can be released under FOIA, there's no reason to not release it without a FOIA request.

[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/open

there's no reason to not release it without a FOIA request.

How about the cost of digging up that information? Or the effort to ensure each piece of information released is indeed safe for release? Or the effort to put it all together in a coherent set?

The government has a TON of records. Releasing them is not as simple as picking the "public" checkbox in the settings pane.

There might also be a general concern that if someone had access to the entire database of records, they could mine that database and start to infer other information that is not supposed to be known. This sort of tactic has been used in wars past. Compiling supply chain records to infer troop movements, for example.

I accidently upvoted you. So please mentally -1 for this post.

I'd characterize your reply as concern trolling.

I've done my share of FOIA requests. I imagine I've heard most every excuse. Including "We lost the backup tapes."

Being charitable, the reason public records requests are hard, expensive to fulfill is because efficient records management is rare, making finding and retrieval difficult.

Someone may chime in suggesting CMS, workflow, sharepoint, whatever. Yea. If it was just that easy, everyone would be doing it.

I'm not sure I follow. Are you agreeing with the things I mentioned, or claiming they are not valid?

You're preaching to the choir, man! :)

My MuckRock username is 'TransparentByDefault' for a reason! :)

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/user/TransparentByDefault/

Hmm, that might be our next big campaign after we get our Drone project a little more under control ...

I'm waiting for someone to close the loop by complaining about the cost of FOIA compliance as a contributor to overall project cost.

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