5 ms·

It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enou

It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".

mixmastamyk 11mo ago
Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
- tptacek 11mo ago
  I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.
- barbazoo 11mo ago
  If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
  - stemlord 11mo ago
    they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
  - butvacuum 11mo ago
    FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20. There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one thing. When you have to actually find people to do the work of reviewing ALL video footage as $small_fraction of 200million people request every second of recorded footage from every camera... You're(as a city) kinda screwed. If they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
- floatrock 11mo ago
  Service fees is the counter-tactic here. If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them? I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
  - tptacek 11mo ago
    Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
    - trollbridge 11mo ago
      It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data. My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
      - tptacek 11mo ago
        Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit. Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
        butvacuum 11mo ago
        The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras. Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time. I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
qchris 11mo ago
You know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson there for this situation.
- some_random 11mo ago
  Hockey is a game, governing is not.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Not sure I can agree anymore in 2025. Maybe in 2027, hopefully.
  - hrimfaxi 11mo ago
    If the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
    - lazide 11mo ago
      Even big cities (and companies!) do this all the time. “Oh, sorry, we are dealing with unusually high wait times. The current wait time is 8 hours” type stuff. Malicious compliance isn’t just for individuals!
      - kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
        My city of 200K provided me with redacted bodycam video a month after the defendant's sham trial. The police are just too busy you see.
    - some_random 11mo ago
      I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests". For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.
th0ma5 11mo ago
FOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term, below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are incorporated they are a city.

mixmastamyk 11mo ago

Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?

tptacek 11mo ago
I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.
barbazoo 11mo ago
If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
- stemlord 11mo ago
  they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
- butvacuum 11mo ago
  FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20. There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one thing. When you have to actually find people to do the work of reviewing ALL video footage as $small_fraction of 200million people request every second of recorded footage from every camera... You're(as a city) kinda screwed. If they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
floatrock 11mo ago
Service fees is the counter-tactic here. If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them? I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
- tptacek 11mo ago
  Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
  - trollbridge 11mo ago
    It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data. My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
    - tptacek 11mo ago
      Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit. Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
      - butvacuum 11mo ago
        The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras. Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time. I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.

qchris 11mo ago

You know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson there for this situation.

some_random 11mo ago
Hockey is a game, governing is not.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Not sure I can agree anymore in 2025. Maybe in 2027, hopefully.
- hrimfaxi 11mo ago
  If the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
  - lazide 11mo ago
    Even big cities (and companies!) do this all the time. “Oh, sorry, we are dealing with unusually high wait times. The current wait time is 8 hours” type stuff. Malicious compliance isn’t just for individuals!
    - kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
      My city of 200K provided me with redacted bodycam video a month after the defendant's sham trial. The police are just too busy you see.
  - some_random 11mo ago
    I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests". For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.

th0ma5 11mo ago

FOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term, below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are incorporated they are a city.