3 ms·

For the ballpark estimate, I think they just wanted for the request to go away by quoting an insanely high price.

by patd 8y ago

united893 8y ago
It was a reasonable ballpark. Let's say a city prosecutor was working on a organized crime case that involves the FBI and other people. Based on timing of emails this would leak the list of people working on the case, maybe informants and put them at risk. We all lost our collective shit when NSA said they're only collecting metadata. Metadata is Data.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Since they revised the cost for the data they actually sent him down from $33M to $56 (90 days of data at $1.25 for 2 days data), was a ballpark estimate that's over 500,000 times higher than the actual cost really reasonable?
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    The ballpark estimate was for checking the full text of each and every email (which was a misunderstanding -- the author wanted metadata only).
  - slavik81 8y ago
    The actual cost of servicing this request was much greater than the $56 estimate.
    - late2part 8y ago
      Especially after the city made a mistake!
  - nzealand 8y ago
    $32M is not a cost the requestor bears, but an estimate of the cost the city bears. IT estimated the requestor fees to be $21k/year assuming 10TB of data. Clearly, IT were estimating the costs of releasing all email text, because FOIA mistakenly changed the words "please provide the following information:" to "including metadata:" Once they figured out the request was for header information only, the city came back with an estimate of under $60.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > Metadata is Data And in many cases metadata is just as useful as the payload, in some cases even more useful.
cheeze 8y ago
Long long term resident with a connection to local government They don't have a choice. Seattle IT is so underfunded that hands are tied because there isn't any resourcing. On one hand, you have to respond to all of these requests (and rightfully so, as it's the law.) On the other, you have no money for your department because it has no funding because the citizens didn't want to spend the money. The person who did this isn't malicious. Just very overworked and did a data pull wrong. They probably didn't give a shit to check because their job kinda sucks and they have too much to do already.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  A good chunk of this is caused by our city repeatedly choosing awful vendors that bilk the city for crazy amounts of money, and provide trash as the final product. City Light and the new meters/new billing system are great examples, all the new power meters have no encryption, and use FSK for modulation. Asking City Light about this got me a response that FSK was the encryption, and the gal was dumbfounded when I pointed her to the Wikipedia article on FSK. On the billing side, an Oracle salesman ran off with over $100 million in city funds for what is essentially a CRUD app, and the worst part is they didn't bother to customize this system, just forklifting this in place and letting the chips fall where they may. The prior billing system had quite a bit of data validation and business logic that has yet to be implemented or replicated on this new system. The same actions when you call customer service now take significantly longer. Both these vendors fleeced the city for broken, insecure systems, and neither is having to face the music for it. Worst part is, eventually someone may attempt a fairly trivial exploit of either system, which could wreak havoc in our city.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    The vendors may be horrible, but it's still on the shoulders of the city for choosing the vendors. This is really down to the fact that most decision makers have no idea how to understand or differentiate between options. It's been like this for decades. When a secretary of state doesn't know the risks in running a private independent email server and how to ensure those risks don't become issues, how do expect much lower level city governments to make any better decisions. Honestly, the IT workers are often underappreciated, underpaid, and underskilled. I usually don't blame the IT people. If they could work at FANG, they would. If they get into a rut where they end up not caring anymore, it sucks. But let's put blame where it belongs, it's on leadership to develop a culture where people care and on leadership to invest money and resources accordingly. Edit: though I shall add that it unfortunately is sometimes not possible to build a new culture without firing incumbents. That one is a really unfortunate situation. It's not the fault of low-skilled IT workers if they are enabled and rewarded for poor skills and attitudes. But if an organization wants to make good cultures, it sometimes requires hard decisions. Still don't blame the workers, just like I don't blame factory workers that get automated. It's just an unfortunate thing that can happen that most people don't deserve.

For the ballpark estimate, I think they just wanted for the request to go away by quoting an insanely high price.

by patd 8y ago

For the ballpark estimate, I think they just wanted for the request to go away by quoting an insanely high price.

It was a reasonable ballpark. Let's say a city prosecutor was working on a organized crime case that involves the FBI and other people. Based on timing of emails this would leak the list of people working on the case, maybe informants and put them at risk. We all lost our collective shit when NSA said they're only collecting metadata. Metadata is Data.

Johnny555 8y ago
Since they revised the cost for the data they actually sent him down from $33M to $56 (90 days of data at $1.25 for 2 days data), was a ballpark estimate that's over 500,000 times higher than the actual cost really reasonable?
- jakobegger 8y ago
  The ballpark estimate was for checking the full text of each and every email (which was a misunderstanding -- the author wanted metadata only).
- slavik81 8y ago
  The actual cost of servicing this request was much greater than the $56 estimate.
  - late2part 8y ago
    Especially after the city made a mistake!
- nzealand 8y ago
  $32M is not a cost the requestor bears, but an estimate of the cost the city bears. IT estimated the requestor fees to be $21k/year assuming 10TB of data. Clearly, IT were estimating the costs of releasing all email text, because FOIA mistakenly changed the words "please provide the following information:" to "including metadata:" Once they figured out the request was for header information only, the city came back with an estimate of under $60.
jacquesm 8y ago
> Metadata is Data And in many cases metadata is just as useful as the payload, in some cases even more useful.

cheeze 8y ago

Long long term resident with a connection to local government They don't have a choice. Seattle IT is so underfunded that hands are tied because there isn't any resourcing. On one hand, you have to respond to all of these requests (and rightfully so, as it's the law.) On the other, you have no money for your department because it has no funding because the citizens didn't want to spend the money. The person who did this isn't malicious. Just very overworked and did a data pull wrong. They probably didn't give a shit to check because their job kinda sucks and they have too much to do already.

StudentStuff 8y ago
A good chunk of this is caused by our city repeatedly choosing awful vendors that bilk the city for crazy amounts of money, and provide trash as the final product. City Light and the new meters/new billing system are great examples, all the new power meters have no encryption, and use FSK for modulation. Asking City Light about this got me a response that FSK was the encryption, and the gal was dumbfounded when I pointed her to the Wikipedia article on FSK. On the billing side, an Oracle salesman ran off with over $100 million in city funds for what is essentially a CRUD app, and the worst part is they didn't bother to customize this system, just forklifting this in place and letting the chips fall where they may. The prior billing system had quite a bit of data validation and business logic that has yet to be implemented or replicated on this new system. The same actions when you call customer service now take significantly longer. Both these vendors fleeced the city for broken, insecure systems, and neither is having to face the music for it. Worst part is, eventually someone may attempt a fairly trivial exploit of either system, which could wreak havoc in our city.
- PakG1 8y ago
  The vendors may be horrible, but it's still on the shoulders of the city for choosing the vendors. This is really down to the fact that most decision makers have no idea how to understand or differentiate between options. It's been like this for decades. When a secretary of state doesn't know the risks in running a private independent email server and how to ensure those risks don't become issues, how do expect much lower level city governments to make any better decisions. Honestly, the IT workers are often underappreciated, underpaid, and underskilled. I usually don't blame the IT people. If they could work at FANG, they would. If they get into a rut where they end up not caring anymore, it sucks. But let's put blame where it belongs, it's on leadership to develop a culture where people care and on leadership to invest money and resources accordingly. Edit: though I shall add that it unfortunately is sometimes not possible to build a new culture without firing incumbents. That one is a really unfortunate situation. It's not the fault of low-skilled IT workers if they are enabled and rewarded for poor skills and attitudes. But if an organization wants to make good cultures, it sometimes requires hard decisions. Still don't blame the workers, just like I don't blame factory workers that get automated. It's just an unfortunate thing that can happen that most people don't deserve.