5 ms·

Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?

tptacek 1y ago
I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.
barbazoo 1y 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 1y ago
  they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
- butvacuum 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
        1y ago

I don't know about WA, but not, in any practical sense, in IL.

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 1y ago
they can reroute the money they were paying for Flock with
butvacuum 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
      - 1y ago