God dammit. An almost identical thing happened to me after submitting a public records request to Seattle's IT department for email metadata for January 2017.

God dammit. An almost identical thing happened to me after submitting a public records request to Seattle's IT department for email metadata for January 2017. Instead of sending me the email metadata I requested, they ended up accidentally sending me millions of actual emails. FBI investigations, cheating husbands' texts, SSNs, credit cards, zabbix alerts (so many 100% disk space alerts). When I contacted Seattle them to tell them what happened (on my own will), the conversation quickly turned to a point where we had to get lawyers involved. Basically, they told me that if I agreed to have Kroll [1] scan my hard drives to prove that I deleted the records, then they would give me "legal indemnification". They eventually agreed to accept an affidavit that I deleted everything, and had to wipe TRIM and that I wrote a script to confirm deletion to the effect of, "grep -r $FILES_HEADER_FIELDS /". One part that led to such a strong action by them was that they didn't see in their logs how I downloaded everything and thought that I found a backdoor to download all of their emails. They had some annoying rate limiting that prevented too many files from being downloaded at once, so I copied the files from the page's source, then ran a wget against everything. Since the files were being downloaded from S3, their webserver logs didn't include most of the downloads, which led to some suspicion. Funny enough, Seattle told me it would cost $32m and 320 years of employee salary, but I ended up sending them $40. It just blows my mind. https://crosscut.com/2017/10/seattle-information-technology-department-email-leak-city-scrambles https://crosscut.com/2017/10/seattle-information-technology-... [1] https://www.kroll.com/ https://www.kroll.com/