It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
“Oh, sorry, we are dealing with unusually high wait times. The current wait time is 8 hours” type stuff.
Malicious compliance isn’t just for individuals!
For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.
First example is that most folks don't care about police checkpoints, simply because they are rare, and when they do happen they are over pretty fast. You do have some that care and think they are an infringement of rights, but they are a loud minority, and even those that do have issues with them, just bite the bullet and provide them their license and tell them where they are going.
Some things we don't care that much about is simply because they can't be abused that much. For example, majority of the population doesn't care too much that the NSA is hoovering up all traffic including encrypted traffic, because there's no way to practically decrypt it a mass scale.
But if quantum computing or some other method makes it cost effective and allows them to effectively decrypt this traffic, we would see a lot more people calling their lawmakers complaining of government overreach.
Another current example is that most people never cared about the fact that ICE or border patrol can require ID and have warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border simply because the stops weren't front page news.
I seem to recall FOIA provides pathways for overloaded clerks in situations where there's mass requests. But, it only grants an extended period in which to respond (eg, 14 days instead of 48hrs). But, you can take escalate with the State government like you can with denied requests.
This is tinted with my knowledge of my Locaal (long a), and the areas I've made FOIA requests with.
And, turns out if you want to affect change- you have to make the bureaucrats care- Not the officials.
You literally can't be a high touch, high jackboot, administrative state unless you have enough wealth to skim off it to run your enforcing operation.
There's a reason that places with less wealth to dip into are either more hands off or go full speed trap town to pay for it all.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one thing.
When you have to actually find people to do the work of reviewing ALL video footage as $small_fraction of 200million people request every second of recorded footage from every camera... You're(as a city) kinda screwed. If they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them?
I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time.
I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
That seems like the incentive structure of the law working as intended.
We know there's no retention because they say there is no retention and we believe them.
Why is this so hard to accept? Do you think people can lie?
Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
What Is a Photocopier?
Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).