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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?

If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.

they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with

FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20.

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.

I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.

Service fees is the counter-tactic here.

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.

Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.

It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data. My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.

Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit.

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.

The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras.

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.

It's not really meaningfully different than existing closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR plate/ID records they create, which states are simply going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.

Sure. But until then, the US at large can hammer them to dust. And, I expect adding ALPR to an exemption was for simplicity's sake- since it's already general knowledge they don't have to create anything for a FOIA request. Easier to just make it explicit so they can point to the law/code.

> Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.

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?

Not sure where you got the idea I thought TXDOT was not being honest. No retention, live public views, only keep aggregate metrics needed for traffic flow (the official purpose for those cameras- PSA's for traffic jams and expansion plans.).

Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.

Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.

That seems like the incentive structure of the law working as intended.

I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.

What Is a Photocopier?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZbqAMEwtOE

There's been multiple incidents of that. Including one where they wanted a per page fee for a DVD. Did not go well for the recording office.

Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).

This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.

Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.

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