This whole "open data" and "Freedom of information" thing is really falling short on me these days. As I keep going further in attempting to get Chicago's offic

This whole "open data" and "Freedom of information" thing is really falling short on me these days. As I keep going further in attempting to get Chicago's office of the mayor's communication records, I keep getting more and more push back. 4/5 times it's essentially, "We don't have the infrastructure to make your request possible." The remainder is either incompetence or "malice". Why does it take an extreme amount of effort, a year and a half (and counting!) to receive government communications (which is considered within the public domain) when these guys have such amazing ease doing the same towards the general public? It's unbelievable. Here's part of a response I got today after requesting communications - including email - for six of the numbers's communications, derived from [0]: The email system’s tool set cannot identify the department where an email user works, and therefore, a search cannot be based on a department. Parameters that would assist the Mayor’s Office in conducting an email search include: (1) the e-mail address of the account you wish searched; and (2) the e-mail address of each individual’s mailbox, if you seek e-mail correspondence to and from two individuals. After dozens of these, the only way I read responses like that is, "We're not clever enough, or willing enough to work with other departments to help you out. You're probably going to give up after this rejection, but if you don't, you'll give up eventually." To get around that, I submitted a FOIA request to their IT FOIA group requesting the domain names/sent times for all emails sent out of the mayor's office. Just so that I can get the the timeframes for the Mayor's office to search through. And.. just to add to the fun in attempting to prevent more rejections, another request to their IT department to send me their DNS resolution logs for the timeframe in [0]. Oddly, I don't think they can claim unduly burdensome on this one, either, since it's just pulling log files with maybe some awk commands and some nslookups on a machine outside their network to check if it's in "public domain". [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hgG79eIr8MbkjYrCvcTRN8n876KL8aXYYu5it8Lg0g8 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hgG79eIr8MbkjYrCvcTR...