FBI vexsome filer list | Hacker News Reader

FBI vexsome filer list

muckrock.com

124 pointsaw3c256 comments

tl;dr -- While many frequent filers are legit book-writers/journalists/legit-folks-who-I-honestly-wish-well, sometimes they're essentially spammers, so I can see why some offices might keep a list of those who are to be bottom of piled because of their patterns (although nowhere I ever worked did, god I wish we did).

As someone who once in the past had to handle (an ungodly amount of) FOIA requests, should there be a list? I don't know, primarily because I don't know what the utility is. That said, some opinions derived from experiences:

1) Some people are serial filers. They haven't bothered to do the research up front to ask relevant questions and after a bit when you see their names you know that when you read the next paragraph it's going to be asking about a) things you know you cannot disclose (not for some BS reason but because of things that actually should remain secret), b) aliens (no we don't have them), c) blatant evidence of government conspiracy, generally of the NWO sort (duh and or hello? Project BlueBeam doesn't keep paper records!).

2) There were also frequent filers where the requestor isn't a crackpot, a FOIA spammer, or asking for something they know in advance could not be provided. These were generally authors. We always got these people what we could and even though my shop didn't keep a list me and the other poor souls stuck on FOIA duty knew them by name. This meant that we basically knew what they wanted when they filed which helped us get them their stuff faster with less overhead. (N.B. this did not stop us from cursing them for their curiosity and the resultant carpal tunnel).

those who are to be bottom of piled

You can call it humanity, but this is the government: it's not the FBI's job to exercise this kind of discrimination. In fact, anything other than FIFO should be illegal, or at least cause for firing for corruption. These agencies simply should not be able to do this, and if the employee doesn't like it, they can get another job. Petty tyranny is highly distasteful.

... in which case, these nuisance requestors will be executing a denial-of-service attack on legitimate requestors.

Buy more capacity.

Congrats! I think you just solved the unemployment problem...

Sarcasm aside, a FIFO is probably more efficient than what is occurring now.

Which means more taxes...

Not necessarily. It could also mean fewer wars and warrantless surveillance programs. How many FOIA requests could be satisfied with just e.g. $10MM more in the department's budget?

Think of it as a sort of QoS for FOIA requests. The offices that have to deal with FOIA requests have finite resources, and each individual filing requests should get a fair share of those resources, especially if they aren't filing requests that are going to ever generate useful results (e.g, the crackpots BWStearns refers to).

How about to stave off the problem of duplicate requests, all documents satisfying FOIA requests are published on a webserver permanently?

That sounds nice. The only downside I can think of is losing the benefit of seeing one document redacted differently by different reviewers.

Can you describe how that is a benefit?

It's pretty rare, so probably not worth fretting over, but IIRC sometimes multiple people will request the same document, and different words or sections will be redacted in one and preserved in the other.

This is a benefit for people who want to know what different reviewers disagree on treating as sensitive, as those could be interesting topics to research further.

So, no downside then.

Deduping the process would be nice, but a lot of requests are for information regarding personal data (for lawsuits, tax purposes, personal reasons), and therefore it would add an extra step and inevitably another approval process (so glad I quit government). This would increase latency. It might be worth it overall, but never underestimate the negative impact of an approval fetish.

So the government should process the FOIA requests completely naively... sounds like good use of tax dollars.

Sure, why not?

Is that how you read your email? I think you've probably found the optimal way to allocate your time. The analogy isn't perfect, but you can imagine some requests are abuse to the system e.g. spam.

A goal of "minimize average latency per person", which comports very well with their goal of serving all citizens equally, precludes FIFO per request when there's a skewed distribution of requests / person.

Serving citizens' information needs responsibly includes hiring enough staff to handle the load.

They have one name on the list that is noted as (Gawker Media). This should be interesting to watch. Grabs some popcorn

Part of me thinks this is more about getting their fees than spying on anyone. Uncle Sam never misses a dime.

Unless you're very wealthy and know how to exploit various loopholes...

At least in part money related, it seems - Check out the key to the color codes on the bottom of the fourth page - 'Aggregating fees' and 'Need to be assigned a permanent fee coordinator'.

Keep in mind one of the categories on this list is "Needs to be Assigned to a Permanent Fee Coordinator". In other words, they're free to file FOIA requests, they're just filing enough of them (and consuming enough resources in the process) that they've got an account with the office to handle those fees. I strongly suspect this is the category Gawker has fallen into.

Yeah that was my thought as well. In government you need to be accountable at all times for the time and money you spend on any effort. They track anything and everything if they think it may help cover their asses when someone asks "why did you spend all 40 hours last week on FOIA requests"? Or "why aren't these people, who have made request after request, being charged for that time"?

That's my hope at least. That it's not some list of ne'er-do-wells.

Kind of funny how a lot of people are all bent out of shape about surveillance, privacy and what not. But then this guy published a list that the FBI has of people who have requested a lot of docs... and he included their full names. I don't think it is unreasonable at all that the FBI keeps a list of people who are making a lot of FOIA requests. That is their data to track if they want to. But I do think it is irresponsible for the guy to publish all those names.

If the information is public, what's the difference? Any citizen could issue the same request and get the same list. You say it's "their data" but the point of FOIA is to free the data. Would it be wrong to publish a page from the White Pages listing names and phone numbers?

If a very small number of people keep making large numbers of requests that bog down the team working on fulfilling them, it might make sense to prioritize requests from other people instead.

Alternatively, improve the process of fulfilling FOIA requests so that it cannot be "bogged down" by someone making requests (which is a manual process).

One such improvement would be to publish all this information publicly in the first place.

The whole idea of FOIA requests is broken - it only exists to compel the government to disclose the information that they are legally required to disclose but don't feel like it unless someone takes the time to specifically request it.

So every document, email, and memo should have a redacted version generated at the same time as it is generated? Every time omeone creates a spreadsheet or DB table, they have to review which parts of it are revealable under FOIA? That is... an insane burden.

I believe they already do something like this. In some declassified documents, each sentence or paragraph is labelled with its classification level.

I think this makes it easier for the FOIA processors to redact.

This pertains to word documents.

"One such improvement would be to publish all this information publicly in the first place."

As a tax payer I'd prefer they not do this. The cost of having every document redacted would be enormous.

I'm sure many documents contain PII of citizens and agents so redaction is definitely required.

Why not generate a redacted version at the same time as you compile the official version.

In fact, why not label the report with verious levels of security clearance so information can be selectively revealed to those who have cleareance?

wait... you mean make government more efficient by making everyone fill out everything in duplicate? :)

What makes those other people's requests more deserving to be answered?

Why not hire more people? Same reason regulatory and public defender agencies are kept underfunded and (consequently) understaffed: it's by design.

My point about it being their data to track was in regard to the tone of this whole topic... like "holy shit the FBI is tracking the people that make a lot of FOIA requests!" not any sort of ownership of the data. Who cares that they keep a list of people who make requests? I'm not even sure how they would go about fulfilling the requests if they didn't keep some sort of lists. And sure anyone can request the list. But a lot of arguments against mass surveillance are rooted in the idea that technology has made it far easier today to track someone than it was years ago. So the issue seems to be more along the lines of "it is just too easy now so we need to stop it". So now... this published doc makes it all too easy to get the info... compared to everyone who wanted to know requesting it themselves. I see a bit of hypocrisy in this. But that is just my opinion of the situation.

It could lead to discriminisation of people (or topics). They should not keep the information about who requested what any longer than needed to fulfill the request.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were required to keep the info for auditing purposes to report on how many FOIA requests they get, if they responded in a timely manner, etc. If they dumped that info, I can see another group of people all pissed off that the government is hiding the stats about the whole FOIA request/response procedure. It really doesn't matter what the government does... there is always going to be some group of people that will complain about it.

Ok, so the topic might be worth keeping. But your examples show no need for keeping the identification of the requester.

I think I understand where you're coming from. It comes down to motive for identification. When 4chan/reddit decide to dox some poor stranger, it usually has specific intent: ruin their life, or get revenge. This is bad. When gov't orgs keep docs on people, it becomes very important to be clear on what their motives are. Are they doing it to avoid disasters? If so, good. Are they doing it to criminalize, to build evidence against (strictly against, and never for), to prosecute & convict? If so, it could be okay (as long as the law is fair, etc). Or are they doing it to specifically marginalize these people, to restrict their freedom (like their freedom to file FOIAs)?

In this case, the author didn't present any call to action. This is good. I hope nobody throws eggs at any houses, but I don't think this link promoted anything like that. More to the point, the request specifically how being on such a list affects processing requests from listed requesters. This would very much clarify & resolve the questions above.

Yes, the link itself is just to the request/response info so it is presented without comment. But in the last few months, how many submissions to HN about the FBI, NSA, etc have been of the "cool... look at all the good these people are doing" variety? Not (m)any. While I did make the assumption that this submission was of the "holy shit look what they're up to now" type... I don't think it was too presumptuous to think the submitter was expecting people to be outraged about it (but not calling for people to throw eggs, per se).

I am curious what they use the list for. If it was used to set their future requests to a lower priority, I'm fine with that as long as the request gets fulfilled according to the requirements. If they just dust binned their future requests then I'd have issue with that. If they sent SWAT to their houses for no other reason than "excessive" FOIA requests then we'd have a real big problem. It kind of looks like it is for collecting fees... which is kind of boring.

You're generalizing the controversy to include your viewpoint, which is normal, but AFAIK at the end of the day the US doesn't really have any kind of law that would cover the right of publicity for publicly available information. It's simply not a mass surveillance question.

Did you read the link? Anyone can request and receive that identical information. If you want to complain about its contents, you will have to complain about the original source.

Bizarrely, it has the names of filers of FOIA requests, but not the FBI personnel. So the names of private citizens exercising their rights can be freely released, with associations even (employer), but the sworn officers of the executive branch must be protected?

Something here is very much upside down.

Yes, I did. Did I say something that leads you to think I did not read the link? Or were you just trying to belittle me?

I am aware that anyone can request that list. It is public info. But for a lot of people so concerned about "privacy while in public" these days... no one seems to care about the privacy of these people. It just seems a little hypocritical to me.

In case anyone is interested, a user has an open request out for an updated copy of this list:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/vex...

Or register yourself and see what you can dig up ;)

https://www.muckrock.com/accounts/register/

One of the people on the list multiple times, Mark Zaid, is probably one of the few people you'd want defending you if one of these agencies came after you.

Recent interview with Zaid as "Snowden, Manning and the Modern Day Whistleblower": http://cherispeak.wordpress.com/2013/08/27/snowden-manning-a...

I guess that answers the age old question, "who will watch the watchers watching the watchers?". The FBI.

Do they keep a list of people who FOIA the FOIA list?

I bet that makes you doubly suspicious.

You could likely FOIA that list as well. It would be sweet to inception the FBI until it stack-overflowed.

We've all cursed the FBI recently, but now we can recurse them.

no.

The FBI's preference for total secrecy, in complete contrast to the law, is a very scary fact indeed. There are many things that I love about living in America - you get to be at the pinnacle of tech development, you can make a good wage, but all that is starting to pale in comparison to the Government's agenda for KGB-like activities. The USA used to be the champion of civil rights. Now it uses that image to perpetrate abuses of public freedoms that would impress the NKVD.

Congratulations, Comrade. You've just made into the Vexsome HN Posters List.

Spasibah. I was vexing them a long time before this.

As explained above: not a NKVDist plot. This is just the result of some poor analysts (I hear they mistreat their analysts at FBI) getting stuck with FOIA duty trying to get through their day. There is plenty that I myself am wary of about how the government conducts itself, but this is seeing corruption for the sake of seeing corruption. Save the panic rant for real problems.

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