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The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
- ajkjk 3y agoWow, this person seems really annoying and entitled.
- NegativeK 3y agoI, personally, would be annoyed if governments were bureauc-walling me from information that I'm legally entitled to.
- QuercusMax 3y agoI'm extremely unsurprised that the Seattle Police and Human Services depts were holdouts from returning this data. Police are notorious for stonewalling these types of disclosure requests.
- chaps 3y ago<3
- internetter 3y agoReally? Do you agree this data should cost 30 million dollars to retrieve? Do you agree that 10tb of storage should cost 1000s of dollars? Would you be mad if someone sent you data you did not ask for and then threatened legal action if you did not grant full access to your personal data in return? I don't agree with all his takes. It's absurd he toyed with the idea of asking to keep this data, for instance... But I think he is rightfully pissed.
- ajkjk 3y agoSounds like he was fucking with people who work for Seattle and then acting indignant and affronted when he gleaned even the slightest bit of irritation or frustration in response.
- QuercusMax 3y agoIf the city employees don't want to follow the laws relating to disclosure of public records, they should find a new line of business. Just because they're incompetent doesn't mean the public should suffer for it.
- ajkjk 3y agoWhat does that have to do with it? The writer could easily, with no additional effort, treat people more respectfully and get the same results. We should not celebrate casual meanness.
- chaps 3y ago"slightest bit of irritation or frustration in response." I'll admit I could have been kinder, but I'm not sure I'd call their irritation "slight". You're really downplaying the (clearly intentional) audacity of their response as well as how often these sorts of audacious responses happen. It's hard NOT to get aggressive in these communications when their intentions are clearly rooted in just making me go away. It's a very common pattern and a very frustrating one at that, especially when the gov folks are intentionally obstinate on top of everything else. Here's another example of an agency that started off aggressively and got egg on their face from their hubris to show what I mean: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/vermont-80/email-metadata-55744/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/vermont-80/email-metadata-55744... From: "The production of the requested records for March 5, required the time of 5 interns (3 unpaid) who all worked 6 hours cutting and pasting the emails from paper copies. This also required staff time to collect and print the emails and review for the security concerns we indicated in an earlier email. The estimated cost, which was not charged to you, was conservatively, $412 for the record we produced:" To this, followed by the records for free, after I sent them instructions: I have been working with our IT folks and may be able to extract to a spreadsheet to fulfill your request. But anywho, whenever I teach FOIA stuff these days I always start out with the advice to always be kind. So it's a lesson learned.
- actuallyalys 3y agoMaybe he could have been more polite, but the author‘s responses here and other blog posts make it clear that he was actually intending to use the metadata and wasn’t just “fucking with“ city employees.
- thsksbd 3y agoThis person is doing the dirty ground work of protecting our rights, and incurring legal fees because of it. The entitled prima donnas are the public employees of Seattle that seem to have the attitude that they shouldn't be bothered to do their jobs properly.
- not_a_shill 3y agoIf this is your attitude, I hope there are people in your line of work that make it their personal hobby to bait you into getting you fired like this guy did. What this is is pure scumbaggery using the guise of public service. It's akin to those "first amendment auditors" on YouTube.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thsksbd 3y agoHe's not trying to bait anyone to loose their job. He's trying to ensure that governments have processes in place to quickly and effectively serve citizens according to the law. I actually expect them to serve us with a smile and good manners not unlike the courtesy expected from the good folks at any Chick-Fillet.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BHSPitMonkey 3y agoAnnoying, no, but very much entitled. As in, he (like everybody else) is legally entitled to have access to records our government is responsible for making available, in the interest of transparency and accountability. Be thankful there are people out there volunteering to do the testing necessary to make sure our rights are working properly.
- coding123 3y agoPass it to someone else and say you got hacked. Dirty secrets need to be exposed.
- b20000 3y agowhy should anybody be able to request this data???
- refulgentis 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pvg 3y agoThe author's email is at the bottom of their post if you need to reach them to tell them off about their failings from 5 years ago.
- refulgentis 3y agoIts the author, and idk if the snide extra bit about informing them about their failings from 5 years ago makes any sense. This was posted today.
- chankstein38 3y agoBro the date right under the title on the article says "March 27, 2019"
- refulgentis 3y agoCorrect I'm not sure an appeal to not comment because it's irrelevant because it happened 5 years ago makes sense This is a site that provides a place to discuss news. It was posted here today.
- pvg 3y agoThe email has the advantage of being unconstrained by various HN rules about not being a jerk to internet strangers.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
- chaps 3y agoHah, that's a much simpler title. :)
- mordechai9000 3y agoIs this your site? It's not loading for me - I think we gave it the ol' Hacker News denial of service.
- chaps 3y agoWeird! Not somewhere where I can give it more juice, but in the meantime try this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230129193630/https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-gave-me-32m-emails-for-40-dollars4997.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230129193630/https://mchap.io/...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chankstein38 3y agoHow do I find more information out about FOIA requests? Also, in your post I think you mentioned "FOIA junkies" or something along those lines, this implies to me there's a community of people who understand this stuff and talk about it. That sounds really interesting to join. Is there a subreddit or something?
- datadrivenangel 3y agoNational Freedom of Information Coalition or Foia.wiki are great places to learn more. https://www.nfoic.org/ https://www.nfoic.org/
- eli 3y agohttps://foia.wiki/wiki/FOIA_Basics https://foia.wiki/wiki/FOIA_Basics
- chaps 3y agoMuckrock.com is a wonderful source of information as a starting point. It has many, many, many requests publicly online. They also run documentcloud.org, which has many millions of documents received through FOIA. There are definitely groups out there that have collectively caught the "FOIA bug". It's a very fun culture of sharing and holding those in power accountable when they otherwise wouldn't be. I recommend just submitting a random request to a random agency about something you're interested as another alternative starting point. What tends to happen, amusingly, is that once someone submits their first, then something kinda clicks in their head and they submit another, then another... then they sue. It's all very organic and it's very uplifting to see someone grow in this field. We generally try to do our best to teach others what we've learned (tactics, strategy, wording, techniques, etc). So if you pick something up, definitely share the love.
- froh 3y agowow! in Europe, this request 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date correlates person-related information (who was in contact with whom at which date and time). storing it, let alone processing it is only admissible on a need to know basis. even if you jump through the hoop of an officer acting on behalf of Seattle is not a person any more, which is a stretch already, even then all email addresses outside the Seattle gov domain are completely taboo without a court order and a cause (and being criminal investigator) oh privacy ...
- nostromo 3y agoIn the US emails to and from government workers are generally considered public record. It's important for transparency.
- techsupporter 3y agoI agree that government records should be open and are good for transparency. The problem comes when people don't realize that something they're doing would put all of the personal information they've submitted into the public record, or when it's required to do this to access a service. In Washington, and Seattle specifically, doing something as simple as reserving a park space or signing up for a constituent newsletter means a public record has been created. Data brokers and people who want to "just reach out for a simple conversation" and political parties routinely make grabs for this data to populate mailing lists and the like. That's annoying and shouldn't be a function of public records laws. We exempt utility billing records, even when the utility is owned by a city, and library card data and so on. Asking for a service from the government should be wholly exempt.
- shadowgovt 3y agoThe counterpoint is that as a citizen, I should be able to find out who keeps renting out the park and ruining the grass because ultimately, we the people hold the government accountable. In the early years of the rollout of federal income tax, the government lacked an IRS to enforce the code. They addressed the issue by making income tax filings public knowledge, so that if individuals saw that, for instance, their neighbor was claiming poverty income on their spacious mansion with the new well-appointed carriage house, they could sic the feds on them. Today, many states still post the voter rolls (and their status, such as "out of town for this election") at voting places because it's considered to be part of the public's right to defend the vote by noticing that Steve said he'd be out of town (or moved last month), but here he is in the voting line; is he trying to double-vote?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 3y agoThere are few joys in the world greater than getting access to forbidden data sets to do whatever you please with it.
- ahsteele 3y agoArchive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20231024164822/https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-gave-me-32m-emails-for-40-dollars4997.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231024164822/https://mchap.io/...
- bradley13 3y agoGovernment IT is famously expensive, and so often a disaster. I recently needed to open an account with a local agency. The fun started with two date fields on the web form, which turned out (trial and error) to require different formats. I finally received my credentials, but they didn't work. Assuming that the password was likely the problem, I tried the password reset function, only to get a 404 error. The person I corresponded with was very polite, but it took three resets on their end, before I could finally log in. A private company with these issues would go out if business. The government probably just hires another incompetent dweeb, who will have a job for life.
- ta1243 3y agoThe government probably has outsourced this to the only company which bid based on some "anti-corruption" or "fair-trading" rules which were passed. There is of course no way to hold that outsourced company to account.
- legitster 3y agoIf you actually read the story, this was directly with Seattle's IT department.
- lainga 3y agobradley13's local agency was Seattle's IT department?
- kelnos 3y agoMore like the company made the lowest bid, and their bid was intentionally lower than the actual cost of building what the agency wanted built, so they did the least work possible to get it to vaguely work, and moved on.
- ta1243 3y ago...and internal rules will mean that the lowest bid will have to be taken. Probably a bit of both. I'd be very nervous about jumping through the hoops that come with supplying to government -- hoops the people working in the government don't want, but ones that have been put in by politicians for various reasons.
- oh_sigh 3y agoWhat happens if he refused the lawyer request to scan his hard drive?
- shadowgovt 3y agoThe article unpacks that a bit. IIUC, he did refuse the request, and purged the files and verified the purge using his own tools. With lawyers involved, the city became inclined to accept that as sufficient to protect city interests. Had he dug in completely, the city was treating the situation as if they would bring charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (which I don't think precisely fits, but might have been the only leverage the city had to prevent a potential bad actor from capitalizing on their mistake).
- legitster 3y agoCriminal proceedings. Honestly, the city had no way of knowing that he hadn't already sold the entire dataset on Silk Road, so they were instilling a huge amount of trust that he was being a "Good Samaritan".
- kelnos 3y agoHe did refuse it, and nothing bad happened, it seems. Unfortunately, he had to get his own lawyer involved, who likely negotiated with the city's lawyer in order to get them to back off. That kind of assistance was probably not cheap for OP.
- ender341341 3y agoIANAL but the city could sue, whether or not they would would win IDK, if I were fighting it I'd argue along the lines of "if I meant to misuse the data I wouldn't have told you I had it and scanning my hard drive opens up my personal data to the same potential mis-distribution that I notified the city of." I agree with the author's reaction though, and any non-court ordered scanning of my system would have to happen under my supervision, with strict agreement on the how.
- nsnick 3y agoThis is an old post from 2018
- chaps 3y agoYep, someone in a separate thread was curious about similar work so I figured I'd post it again. Edited the title to make it clear it's from 2018.
- bombcar 3y agoSpecifically, someone had asked how a "single line of Powershell" could be useful in a FOIA request (in the marshell thread I think). This is the example.
- nfriedly 3y agoAlternate links since the site seems to be under some significant load right now: https://archive.ph/MmPmU https://archive.ph/MmPmU https://web.archive.org/web/20231024164822/https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-gave-me-32m-emails-for-40-dollars4997.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231024164822/https://mchap.io/...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jawns 3y agoThe most interesting part of this story is the potential legal risk of holding onto the records that were improperly disclosed. Had the author not notified the city that they had royally screwed up by divulging far more sensitive information than they had realized, they likely would have never realized the error, and he would have been free to do whatever he liked with the data. But once he notified them of their error, and they realized that the data was now in the hands of someone who should not have been given access to it, there is an interesting legal question about whether he has the right to keep it. If this were physical property, or money, then there is a lot of case law around what happens when you find yourself in possession of something that was given to you by what was clearly a mistake. If a car dealer accidentally drops off a new car at your address, but later realizes it was intended for another address, you don't get to keep the car. Likewise, if $100,000 shows up in your bank account because it was mistakenly deposited there, that's gonna get clawed back. But what about data? Mere information? I think there is a pretty good legal argument that there are categories of data (e.g. trade secrets) that a person can be ordered not to possess. So I think the author made the right call by agreeing to cooperate with the city's request, even if it was the city's own colossal error that put him in that position. Nevertheless, it would have been nice for the city to reward him for his bringing the issue to their attention, rather than immediately trying to threaten him if they didn't help clean up their mess.
- ska 3y ago> and he would have been free to do whatever he liked with the data. I think that's a pretty strong assertion.
- jawns 3y agoYou're right, my wording was imprecise. My point was that he could have continued to delve into the information without anyone hassling him, unless the city independently discovered their mistake. But you are right to point out that he still would have been somewhat limited in what he could do with the data without arousing suspicion.
- 3y ago
- legitster 3y agoIf you can't load the blog: - He FOIA'd all metadata of emails to and from the City of Seattle. - The city IT department pushed back, saying that their policy was to hand-review each email for privacy, and this was 32m emails. - They later acquiesced and just dumped all of the meta-data into files and sent it over - They didn't realize email-preview was also meta-data, which included the first 256 char of each email. - OP informed them that had now committed a very grievous data leak. - The city fixed the issue and legally pursued OP to ensure the data was deleted. All say, I am glad I am not a civil servant. The job seems awful.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- flashback2199 3y ago> The job seems awful How hard can it be to do a sanity check of the metadata?
- legitster 3y agoThe dataset was so large they were probably not opening up the files before sending them over. It was clearly a rookie mistake by someone who had never had to do this stuff before and wouldn't have known what to look for. Again, the vast majority of the emails were automated alert/spam emails. So it's unclear if a random sample of the data would have turned up anything interesting to look at if you didn't know what you were looking for.
- flashback2199 3y agoI don't agree, I think opening any of the files would have made it immediately apparent that the first 256 chars of each email were included, if that's indeed what happened as the article said.
- legitster 3y ago>Some things about the dataset: It’s very messy – triple quotes, semicolons, commas, oh my. There are a millions of systems alerts. For seattle.gov → seattle.gov communication, there are two distinct metadata records Opening a file of that size in Excel would probably crash the desktop. And this was probably a lowly admin without a lot of other tools. The first 256 char of a lot of system emails are going to just have junk html and header tags. If you don't understand that you are looking at HTML, it's not going to be apparent that you are looking at the body of an email. It's a rookie mistake to be sure, but the admin was clearly unfamiliar with what was being requested.
- reciprocity 3y agoThis blog hasn't been updated in some time given this entry is also its last entry. Are you still working with FOIA in some way?
- chaps 3y agoVery much so! Since writing, I've since gone into freelance investigative journalism and nonprofit work focusing on gov transparency. A lot of what I learned has fortunately been applicable to a lot of investigative work. I need to write more about my own work, but time time time. This piece heavily used email metadata requests: https://southsideweekly.com/lightfoot-pac-paid-consultant-while-she-worked-at-the-mayors-office/ https://southsideweekly.com/lightfoot-pac-paid-consultant-wh...
- INTPenis 3y agoThat was a fun read. Having worked as a sysadmin on the other end I can almost guess how his initial request was received. As many others do they only read part of his request and were dumbfounded by the scale of it. So in their minds he was requesting way too much information and they probably spent days at the water cooler laughing at this guy under wrong pretences. Eventually someone realized their misinterpretation and proceeded to make the dire mistake of exporting the e-mail headers with a cut off at a hard coded value I'm assuming. Instead of parsing out the headers from the email. And it wasn't until he pointed this out to them that they started taking him seriously. :D
- cyrnel 3y agoI'm also a sysadmin who unfortunately found that attitude familiar. Some IT groups really do create these toxic environments where it's common to make fun of the people they serve. I certainly don't expect IT groups to bend over backward for every request or be polite in the face of real abuse, but the toxic shit that is said at the water cooler is never that. It's literally insulting people's intelligence or taking pleasure in people's pain, especially if it involves exercising their power over users.
- andersrs 3y agoCompanies and governments will always undermine privacy either by incompetence or because it's good for business. In every case the only party that benefits from more privacy is really the end user. So what can we as users do about this? Is there an email service that can generate unique alias addresses? just.for.bloated.govt.dept.123@xyz.com would really help but I'm guessing the big companies like Google and Microsoft have no interest in privacy.
- jackson1442 3y agoMost self-hosted email lets you set up a wildcard address and blackhole or tag mail send to particular addresses at will. Fastmail has a 1Password integration that automates this and lets you use @fastmail.com as the domain, but using a wildcard with any provider isn’t much more difficult.
- brightsize 3y agoSpamgourmet (https://www.spamgourmet.com https://www.spamgourmet.com, https://github.com/spamgourmet/spamgourmet https://github.com/spamgourmet/spamgourmet), free, has always worked well for me though these days I tend to just use the disposable addresses built in to Fastmail. Addy.io, (https://addy.io/ https://addy.io/), free/paid, is a newer offering with some nifty features like automatic PGP encryption.
- gdprrrr 3y agohttps://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210425
- nixgeek 3y agoSimpleLogin (https://simplelogin.io https://simplelogin.io) is excellent for this purpose.
- pierat 3y agoThe real point of the story: Security researchers get FUCKED, hard. They're treated as evil bad hackers who will destroy everything. Why? Cause they made people look bad. The real answer? It was provided as public records. So slap-em into public. Fuck 'em. (Or, sell it to a gray hat data broker and get paid.)
- macintux 3y agoCase in point: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/missouri-governor-slammed/ https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/missouri-governor...
- vladgur 3y agoAfter RTFA, the 32M emails cost more than $40. They also cost a few hours of however much your lawyer charges for interaction with city attorneys.
- patja 3y agoThis is why city council member Dan Strauss, when going door to door campaigning, gives out his personal Gmail address rather than his city of Seattle address. Is this legal? It sure doesn't seem ethical
- ajcp 3y agoHe's implicitly admitting that he conducts civic business via his Gmail account. That means his Gmail account contains public records and is thus subject to FOIA requests. I'm not sure if city councilors are subject to such public scrutiny but it's still really stupid.
- QuercusMax 3y agoIs door-to-door campaigning "civic business"?
- ajcp 3y agoNope, you are correct, I completely over-looked the "campaigning". Campaigning is actually supposed to be kept very separate from civic business. Updating my comment.
- QuercusMax 3y agoSounds like he's trying to keep campaign activities separate from work activities. Doesn't sound necessarily unethical to me. Using your position as a public servant to use public resources for campaign purposes is what strikes me as unethical.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIt's generally illegal for public employees or officers of any kind to make more than incidental use of public resources for any personal, rather than public-business purposes (political or otherwise), and further its even more illegal for public officials to use public resources for political campaign purposes. So, yeah, using a non-city email address as his campaign contact email seems not only legal and ethical, but probably legally and ethically mandatory. EDIT: the applicable Washington state statute on political campaign uses of public resources is: https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=42.52.180 https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=42.52.180 The main body of the rule is "No state officer or state employee may use or authorize the use of facilities of an agency, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of assisting a campaign for election of a person to an office or for the promotion of or opposition to a ballot proposition. Knowing acquiescence by a person with authority to direct, control, or influence the actions of the state officer or state employee using public resources in violation of this section constitutes a violation of this section. Facilities of an agency include, but are not limited to, use of stationery, postage, machines, and equipment, use of state employees of the agency during working hours, vehicles, office space, publications of the agency, and clientele lists of persons served by the agency." EDIT AGAIN: Looking at that again, that is specific to state officers or employees, so may not be applicable to city officials, but represents the kind of rule that is commonly in place.
- _boffin_ 3y agoOh... this reminds me of where the Assessor of my county threatening to call the cops and inform them of me wanting public data; attempting to charge me thousands of dollars more for records that should only cost the amount it takes to duplicate the records; and more... oh the fun it is to deal with public agencies.
- karelpeeters 3y agoFor all emails sent to/from any Seattle owned email address in 2017, please provide the following information: 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date Is this really a reasonable request that the government is expected to answer? Doesn't this expose a bunch of private information about government employees and the people they interact with? I understand this post (and apparently the law) takes this as completely normal thing, but it seems really weird to me. Some examples: * exact times people are getting in/out the office (eg. the time in the morning when a person first answers an email from their boss) * full information about holidays taken by all employees (eg. days/weeks during which no emails are sent) * friendships or relationships (eg. any communication between employees that doesn't follow from the hierarchy or from team delineations) * information from criminal investigations (eg. an investigator sending an email to the parking fine department probably means one of the cases they're working on is related to parking fines) This all seems a huge privacy leak? Should this stuff even be called "metadata" if so much can be derived from it?
- ajcp 3y agoNone of your examples can be derived from the metadata, but at *best* inferred.
- karelpeeters 3y agoSure, it's all slightly fuzzy. I don't think that detracts much from the my point though.
- wolfendin 3y agoThese are all things performed by employees of the government, as they run the government, why shouldn’t they be public?
- arbuge 3y ago> This isn't something I'm even remotely cool with, so we ended the call a couple minutes later, and agreed to have our lawyers speak going forward. ... After that call, I asked my lawyer to reach out to their lawyer and was pretty much told that Seattle was approaching the problem as if they were pursuing Computer Fraud And Abuse (CFAA) charges. For information that they sent. Jiminey Cricket.. Not addressing the main thrust of the article I know, but I am genuinely curious: do a lot of people have a "my lawyer" ready to go?
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoIt's pretty common. My wife and I have a lawyer friend who handles small matters for us for the low, low cost of buying her meal the next time we go out. Plus I fix her (aluminum wired) electric.
- bxparks 3y agoThere are 1.3M lawyers in the US according to the ABA. There are 250M adults in the US. I find it hard to believe that this is common (if "pretty common" means more than ~20% of adults?).
- superhuzza 3y agoIt's not like each person has a unique lawyer - One lawyer serves many clients. Especially since most people will only need legal help occasionally. But yes I do agree, it's probably a minority of people that regularly use a specific lawyer.
- bxparks 3y agoYeah, I think took that into account in my estimation. Not every lawyer will be willing to work for free for a friend (it's like doctors constantly being bombarded for free medical advice, or software engineers constantly asked to provide free IT services to fix people's computers/phones/routers/network). I also assume that law is highly specialized, so a lawyer specialized in Constitutional or Patent law may not want to handle Family law, Contract law, Employment law, or Personal Injury law. I figure the number of lawyers willing to do such small favors is in the range of 1% to 10% of the 1.3M (wild guess). So if each of them had 100 friends-and-family "clients", it still wouldn't add up to "pretty common".
- stevage 3y agoArgh. I used to work a lot in open data, including a stint within the open data department of a major city government. This kind of behaviour does nothing to advance the cause. It just perpetuates the belief that open data and FOI are massive waste of time and resources and open legal risks for no good reason. I'm also pretty surprised that people think email metadata from government is legitimate open data. Do you think it should be public how many times you have emailed government and gotten a response, and to which departments? I don't.
- lbschenkel 3y ago> I'm also pretty surprised that people think email metadata from government is legitimate open data. Do you think it should be public how many times you have emailed government and gotten a response, and to which departments? I don't. In Sweden, when you contact the government by web form or mail, they warn you that every communication is by law part of the public record (metadata and contents), and you should not include anything sensitive that you do not want divulged.
- chaps 3y agoNone of this is open data. Open data is data that's released on a discretionary basis; often times a FOIA request for the same data found within open data has a legal requirement for redaction. We see this happen all the time. What's worse is that at the executive level, eg chief data officers are often forbidden by legal teams from interacting with the media and adjacent orgs. I've literally been told by a CDO that they cannot speak with me. My go-to phrase for open data is, "open data is a lie". Because at the end of the day, we have zero legal recourse to validate that what is provided through open datasets is complete, both in terms of available columns and available rows. Very rarely will it ever be explained why, or even if, information is missing. And the subsequent effects of that lead to a deep public misunderstanding of what's going on. And much of it is intentional out of explicit fear that the public will misinterpret the data. So we go through FOIA instead and we end up going through legal battles. There's a reason I've had to do ~10 FOIA suits. tl;dr: open data is nice, but its lack of rigor and accountability makes it effectively useless for anything that requires depth.
- dvdkon 3y agoI have to say, Seattle seems to have some very cooperative clerks. Here requests for large datasets (or extracts thereof) are more likely to be denied based on various phony reasons or the copying valued at ridiculous prices nobody's backing down from. That you got this data without involving at least one appeals process is pretty good. That said, I mostly only make "difficult" FOIA-equivalent requests. Routine requests for specific documents are mostly no trouble here.
- DelaneyM 3y agoSo my big takeaway from this is to never email a government official or agency if at all possible, because that’s how you end up on spam lists via FOIA.
- zippergz 3y agoThe "single line of powershell" thing really undermines this person's credibility. Without knowing how and where this information is stored, how can he possibly know what the level of effort in retrieving it is? I agree that the initial cost estimate was absurd, but you don't win any points by claiming extreme simplicity of a task you don't have full visibility into.
- chaps 3y agoEasy. If I receive an email from them that contains an outlook 365 email header, then they use Outlook 365. So then just send them the command that works with outlook 365. It's literally that simple. I have a good idea of what the amount of work because I've sent the same request about 100 times and have learned quite a lot, both through conversations, email, litigation and other's litigation. If experience isn't helpful then I ask for a small slice and use that to calibrate their estimate. Estimates are usually very wrong, like it was with Seattle.
- l0b0 3y agoObstructionist paper pushers? Check. Computer illiteracy? Check. Blaming the requester for your own fuck-ups? Check. All combined? Priceless.