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tl;dr -- While many frequent filers are legit book-writers/journalists/legit-folks-who-I-honestly-wish-well, sometimes they're essentially spammers, so I can se
by BWStearns 13y ago
tl;dr -- While many frequent filers are legit book-writers/journalists/legit-folks-who-I-honestly-wish-well, sometimes they're essentially spammers, so I can see why some offices might keep a list of those who are to be bottom of piled because of their patterns (although nowhere I ever worked did, god I wish we did).
As someone who once in the past had to handle (an ungodly amount of) FOIA requests, should there be a list? I don't know, primarily because I don't know what the utility is. That said, some opinions derived from experiences:
1) Some people are serial filers. They haven't bothered to do the research up front to ask relevant questions and after a bit when you see their names you know that when you read the next paragraph it's going to be asking about a) things you know you cannot disclose (not for some BS reason but because of things that actually should remain secret), b) aliens (no we don't have them), c) blatant evidence of government conspiracy, generally of the NWO sort (duh and or hello? Project BlueBeam doesn't keep paper records!).
2) There were also frequent filers where the requestor isn't a crackpot, a FOIA spammer, or asking for something they know in advance could not be provided. These were generally authors. We always got these people what we could and even though my shop didn't keep a list me and the other poor souls stuck on FOIA duty knew them by name. This meant that we basically knew what they wanted when they filed which helped us get them their stuff faster with less overhead. (N.B. this did not stop us from cursing them for their curiosity and the resultant carpal tunnel).
- rhizome 13y agothose who are to be bottom of piled You can call it humanity, but this is the government: it's not the FBI's job to exercise this kind of discrimination. In fact, anything other than FIFO should be illegal, or at least cause for firing for corruption. These agencies simply should not be able to do this, and if the employee doesn't like it, they can get another job. Petty tyranny is highly distasteful.
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago... in which case, these nuisance requestors will be executing a denial-of-service attack on legitimate requestors.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 13y agoBuy more capacity.
- meddlepal 13y agoCongrats! I think you just solved the unemployment problem...
- rhizome 13y agoSarcasm aside, a FIFO is probably more efficient than what is occurring now.
- SolarNet 13y agoWhich means more taxes...
- rhizome 13y agoNot necessarily. It could also mean fewer wars and warrantless surveillance programs. How many FOIA requests could be satisfied with just e.g. $10MM more in the department's budget?
- duskwuff 13y agoThink of it as a sort of QoS for FOIA requests. The offices that have to deal with FOIA requests have finite resources, and each individual filing requests should get a fair share of those resources, especially if they aren't filing requests that are going to ever generate useful results (e.g, the crackpots BWStearns refers to).
- rhizome 13y agoHow about to stave off the problem of duplicate requests, all documents satisfying FOIA requests are published on a webserver permanently?
- nitrogen 13y agoThat sounds nice. The only downside I can think of is losing the benefit of seeing one document redacted differently by different reviewers.
- rhizome 13y agoCan you describe how that is a benefit?
- nitrogen 13y agoIt's pretty rare, so probably not worth fretting over, but IIRC sometimes multiple people will request the same document, and different words or sections will be redacted in one and preserved in the other. This is a benefit for people who want to know what different reviewers disagree on treating as sensitive, as those could be interesting topics to research further.
- rhizome 13y agoSo, no downside then.
- BWStearns 13y ago
- aet 13y agoSo the government should process the FOIA requests completely naively... sounds like good use of tax dollars.
- fiatmoney 13y agoA goal of "minimize average latency per person", which comports very well with their goal of serving all citizens equally, precludes FIFO per request when there's a skewed distribution of requests / person.
- rhizome 13y agoServing citizens' information needs responsibly includes hiring enough staff to handle the load.