A Mom Asked for Public School Board Records. They Charged Her $33M | Hacker News Reader

A Mom Asked for Public School Board Records. They Charged Her $33M

thefp.com

3 pointsfortran779 comments

It’s unreasonable to request six months’ worth of emails simply because they contain the term “anti-retaliation.” What’s the goal here? Are you hoping to find a smoking gun? And if you do find it, what’s next? To me, this feels like an abuse of resources and a counterproductive approach. When you lack influence, the more strategic move is to find someone with the necessary authority and align incentives to make progress.

Additionally, I wouldn’t categorize this as a roadblock, but more as an opportunity to remind the requester that there are real costs associated with their unnecessary demands.

Once she's identified emails that identify her as a target, she can build a case. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I FOIA government agencies frequently. Asking for a keyword in specific mailboxes for time windows of one year is not overly burdensome, and I’ve paid a subject matter expert to provide an opinion on appeals. You can also request retention schedules and email information system data to reinforce this approach, as well as FOIA request logs to understand if others have requested what you’re looking for.

Reasonable costs are up for debate, that is what the process is for. Hourly rate * quantity of artifacts requiring review for potential redaction is a rough approximation of what cost outcome will be. As a technologist, I know what the effort is to perform discovery in Google Workspace or O365, others should be able to demonstrate this trivially.

> an opportunity to remind the requester that there are real costs associated with their unnecessary demands

Well first of all it's not up to you whether this is an unnecessary demand or not.

The district response is clearly in bad faith. There are 21,514,288 emails related to her request over a 6-month period? REALLY?

REALLY? Do you really think so?

Nuisance FOIA requests to jam up the staff are a real thing. So government needs to require its IT systems to efficiently support this access.

“ she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.”

Bari Weiss is a right-wing grifter. Nothing she publishes in her "Free Press" should be trusted, and Substack is still a Nazi bar.

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/substack-announcement-bari-we...

Calling people Nazis who aren’t actual Nazis is in very poor taste. Also Bari Weiss didn’t write this piece.

I notice your profile calls Hacker News a “Nazi bar”. Why are you here? Maybe you’re a Nazi!

Well, if it ain't a Nazi bar it's certainly the Hotel California. I'd happily delete my account if that were permitted, but it isn't, and I'm sure as hell not going to email the management and say "pretty please".

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