20 ms·
Governments turn tables by suing public records requesters
- dvdhnt 9y agoMany of us love to pat ourselves on the back for all the "free" knowledge and information available thanks to the internet, ignoring that most of what is available is merely entertainment and opinion. Stories like this are a good reminder that the most valuable information is still being concealed by those with the power. They use their position, money, and authority to protect it at all costs. We still have a long way to go.
- manigandham 9y agoLong way to go until what exactly?
- ramy_d 9y agoUntil relevant information is free.
- killjoywashere 9y agoAll information is relevant to someone, somewhere, who doesn't already know. We all have secrets.
- dvdhnt 9y agoUntil organizations who should act transparently can no longer impede the free-flow of information, because as they have proven time and time again, they cannot be trusted to do so willingly.
- heymijo 9y agoI'm grasping at straws, but it seems relevant to this branch of the thread... Wasn't there recently an uproar in the U.S. about a [state/municipality/or some such] that gave copyright over to their [regulations/building codes/or some such] to a private entity? Thus, citizens had to pay to know what the law was and couldn't make copies. This seems right along the lines of what op was talking about. My memory is too fuzzy to get a good search result so if anyone could help out with the specifics I would appreciate it.
- nobodyorother 9y agoIt was Georgia state law, two years ago, essentially saying that while you can have the text of the law, you can't have the annotations that inform the interpretation of the law: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-activist-violated-copyright-by-publishing-georgia-legal-code-online/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a... However, since court decisions about US law are based on prior rulings, the text itself is mostly useless and doesn't actually tell you what the whole law is. It's like an Ikea assembly manual without pictures.
- mikeyouse 9y agoThere have been several cases, mostly along building standards, but the state of Georgia famously sued Carl Malamud for infringing on the copyright of state laws when he publishing the full annotated version of their laws online: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-georgia-copyright-wall-20150727-column.html http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-state-of-ge... Malamud had worked with Aaron Swartz on opening up Pacer: https://public.resource.org/crime/ https://public.resource.org/crime/ And he was joined by the EFF defending against a suit by the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors Association after he published the details of a Federally-mandated safety standard: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevails-free-speech-case-over-publishing-safety-standards https://www.eff.org/press/releases/publicresourceorg-prevail...
- apendleton 9y agoSo there are a couple different issues here. One is just states claiming copyright on their actual state criminal code or whatever, and selling the rights to republish it to Lexis or WestLaw or whatever as a state revenue source. This is happens, but is not actually that common in the US, and there's pretty broad agreement that it's shitty, and it doesn't happen at the federal level because the US federal government can't own copyrights. Much trickier is "incorporation by reference," which is when the official law or regulation says "as part of our building codes we're going to adopt the 2012 version of the International Building Code in its entirety, and then amend it as follows..." without actually including the text of the IBC (or the fire code, or whatever), which is a document created by a private entity, and is copyrighted. This happens all the time, across levels of government, and it pretty clearly poses a problem, but it's not really clear whose fault it is or what to do about it. Individual city governments don't have the requisite expertise to concoct an entire set of fire codes for themselves, and it's not clear you'd want them to: we arguably all benefit from having the greatest experts in the country craft the best possible code, and product makers that sell across markets benefit from having a uniform standard. But because professional associations end up taking on this role since no single government will, it's not clear how to pay for the work of researching and writing the code, so they end up self-funding by selling the text itself. It's not clear that either the governments or the organizations are in the wrong, even if the public ends up suffering.
- jxramos 9y agoPretty scary thought; makes me think about the Magna Carta and the idea that you couldn't be pulled into a court and charged for things not explicitly spelled out in some body of law that folks could possibly know in advance. In other words administrative bodies could not produce some novel "law" on the spot and charge you with it. I long to see the day when laws and other civic documents are compiled and evolved in some source control like git or something domain specific for such documents.
- pc86 9y agoThis "git for law" meme is a nearly constant refrain but it is simply not appropriate for legal text. Yes, for de minimus yet important changes, like changing a "shall" to a "may," it makes sense. For anything beyond that, trying to shoehorn legislation into a format and workflow design for software is a fool's errand at best.
- KingPrad 9y agoI disagree that version control is inappropriate. I worked for a company whose primary product was tracking government legislation through a database built on Subversion. (acted as a DB but used Subversion for a variety of reasons. I know it sounds strange). It seemed to work fine to record incremental changes, tag specific revisions as being checkpoints for various stages of review and approvals. And anyone could search current and historical versions. The overall legislation system needs flexibility to deal with complex and changing workflows, but storing documents (with change over time) and the links between them can be encoded just fine. As long as there are flexible ways to string them together, they can be represented in whatever structure makes sense: final law with all current amendments; original law, with amendments as annotations, separate pieces of legislation, linked by the overall law, etc. None of that has to be encoded in a super-strict heirarchy, but as long as it's all being stored in can be presented however one wants. I don't see the fatal flaw. I see imperfections and compromises, but not the flaw so bad as to say "don't bother".
- jxramos 9y ago
- Chathamization 9y agoThat's true, but there's still a ton of useful information freely available out there that gets ignored. For the vast majority of people the problem isn't lack of access to information that the government is concealing, but rather lack of interest in useful information they can access in seconds. That's not to say that lack of access isn't a major problem - it is - but even when you solve that, you're going to be left with the much bigger lack of interest problem.
- Markoff 9y agoi don't think the problem is really lack of interest, but form in what is information delivered. if you give me 200 pages text document ful of numbers, nobody will bother to read it, if you make simple infographic based on this document you will see people are interested
- abakker 9y agoIn other words, if you do the analysis and the work, and provide the opinion and results for free?
- lovich 9y agoWhat you said is technically true, but it is literally impossible for someone to be up to date on every piece of information that affects them. Even just limiting the domain to legal terms, the US government doesn't know how many laws it has. How is someone supposed to "do the analysis and work" on all of that, on all of the terms of services for every single product that exists, all the information pertinent to their health, for companies they never even consented to work with ala Facebook and Equifax data tracking, etc? It's extremely disingenuous to call people lazy for not analyzing all of that when there is not a single person on the planet who has done so
- specialist 9y agoSteep learning curve. It took me a long time to figure out what was going on, much less figuring how how to ask useful questions.
- hellbanner 9y agoMay I interest you in the Black Iron Prison: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php
- ringaroundthetx 9y agogotta use the lawyer to file on your behalf, but in any case a more streamlined process could be codified. all persons, natural or artificial, will always have the courts as a remedy.
- twiss 9y ago> The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards. Weird. Don't you at least have to allege that the defendants did something wrong to start a lawsuit? Even if the requested documents don't have to be released, the requesters didn't do anything wrong. I feel like these lawsuits should be dismissed.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoProbably using the same law to weed out "troublemakers" that ask for a bazillion records simply because they can. A nation of laws and all :) The judges will sort it out and no one can (really) complain.
- evilduck 9y agoYeah I’ve seen this first hand when I was a government contractor. A guy would come into the public information office once a week and request all the data for a thing be printed for him. From 1973-present, every week. It was reams and reams of paper and he could have just asked for the historical data once and the previous week’s data each week if he was really interested in anything besides being wasteful. Afaik it was within his right to ask for it and the office had to comply.
- colejohnson66 9y agoDoesn’t the FOIA allow the government to charge a “reasonable” amount for labor?
- pc86 9y agoYes, which at the very least could be the actual cost of the paper and the cost of the person's time fulfilling the request.
- evilduck 9y agoI’m not really well versed in the legal side. This also was a regular, well used public info resource, not a singular FOIA request. It just happened to be abused by an individual.
- fortythirteen 9y ago"Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret" - Julian Assange
- rflrob 9y ago> State freedom-of-information laws generally allow requesters who believe they are wrongly denied records to file lawsuits seeking to force their release. If they succeed, government agencies can be ordered to pay their legal fees and court costs. Suing the requesters flips the script: Even if agencies are ultimately required to make the records public, they typically will not have to pay the other side's legal bills. IANAL, but this seems to me to be a perversion of the intent of the laws. I would assume there are pretty clear statutes that indicate when one party can be forced to pay the legal fees of the other (and that those statutes vary from state to state), but aside from the labels of "Plaintiff" and "Defendant", the roles of "Government" and "Citizen requesting records" seem more natural, and should be what's relevant to the outcome of a contested FOIA request.
- randomdrake 9y agoThere is plenty of precedence for this in the United States and elsewhere. There are even laws against it in a number of states and countries but it is very difficult to write legislation for and enforce. This category of abuse of our legal system is called "Strategic lawsuit against public participation" or SLAPP. More information can be found on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ... I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned in the article. I am not a lawyer, but it would seem that these types of suits would fall squarely in the SLAPP definition.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoPerhaps the solution is for the new policy to be that these datasets be kept online (e.g. gcloud) with public, anonymous read-only users. Then the entire problem is solved. This is already done with a number of data-sets and should be the gold-standard.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agoThe problem is that at least some of the freedom of information requests conflicted with privacy rights.
- markvdb 9y agoThe solution is called automated anonymisation of data.
- ralmeida 9y agoThat would be the major fundamental problem, yes. Another more logistical (but still very important) problem would be the costs of availability. Digitizing, categorizing, paying for storage, etc, could create a spending issue.
- Veelox 9y agoI think there are two cases that are brought up in this article. The first is that some agencies file suit to stop or delay giving out the records that will make them look bad. The second is that the agency has a legitimate concern that if they disclose the info, then they will violate privacy rights and get in big trouble. Does anyone have suggestions on how to keep the first case from happening while making sure privacy rights are respected?
- nvr219 9y agoOh how the turn tables...
- kareldonk 9y agoThis is especially good for those who think government exists to 'serve' them and is their 'servant.' Maybe this will make them wake up to the reality of who is actually the servant (slave). ;)
- smsm42 9y agoMisleading title. While technically lawsuit names the requesters as defendants, what is implied - that they are under threat of civil or criminal penalties as retaliation for requesting the info - is not what in fact happens. What in fact happens is that the agencies ask the court to keep the records unpublished. Which sucks, but it's not an action against the requesters - it's just an attempt to keep the records from being disclosed, and in no way threatens people personally. It indeed sucks that you have to go to court, at your own expense, to defend your lawful right to see information that has to be public. But that has been the case for years, nonprofits like EFF or Judicial Watch has been doing this for years, supported by donations. There's nothing new in this.
- dclowd9901 9y agoI didn't know they had mechanisms like this to prevent divulging of public information, so this is definitely news to me. I don't think dismissing something you know to be true as "business as usual" helps. There's nothing misleading about the title: they are suing to prevent disclosure. Just because the immediate notion of lawsuit that comes to mind is associated with recuperation of damages doesn't make the title false.
- smsm42 9y ago> I didn't know they had mechanisms like this to prevent divulging of public information, so this is definitely news to me Well, the mechanism is simple - you send FOIA request, they decline it because national security, or some regulation, or policy, or it's too hard, or pick another of 10 thousand excuses they can find. Or they send you the documents with all text blacked out (that happened too). Next step, you have to sue, because while they can play any games they want with a regular citizen, with complete impunity, playing the same with a judge would be much more risky and only very well-connected people like top federal officials can get away with it. The rest would probably choose to comply. > I don't think dismissing something you know to be true as "business as usual" helps. I'm not dismissing it. I'm saying the title implied agencies retaliate against requestors by suing them, it is misleading - they are doing the same thing as before, clamming up and refusing to provide records. It is still important, but the title is misleading since it gives wrong impression about what's going on. > There's nothing misleading about the title: they are suing to prevent disclosure. But the title doesn't say that, and if somebody tells you somebody sued you, that's not the first thing you think of.
- Gibbon1 9y agoThis is what we did in California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation#California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
- smsm42 9y agoAnti-SLAPP is great, but the kind of lawsuit described in the article has nothing to do with it, since the suits do not attack the speech rights but seek to prevent disclosure. That's a completely different (and sort of opposite, since they don't seek to prevent speech but to prevent them from being compelled to speak - or, disclose documents) thing.
- dqpb 9y agoCan these agencies be counter sued for using tax payer money to sue tax payers seeking "their own" data?
- pdshrader 9y agoLawyer here, but not your lawyer. Anti-SLAPP laws are pretty limited, but a peer over in /r/law had a phenomenal idea for addressing this, which I'm copying over here. There's a little something called a "'Motion to dismiss for failure to exhaust administrative remedies.' The fun part is that this is normally used by government entities against citizens. I just don't see any obvious reason it couldn't be used by a citizen against a government agency that has filed a lawsuit the entire point of which is to thwart the exhaustion of an administrative process. After all, citizens aren't allowed to sue for open records until the open records process is completed, one way or the other. Why should a government entity be permitted to sue before then?"