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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

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.

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... 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.

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.

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.

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