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"He appeals every response as a matter of principle: “I don’t care if they’re like, ‘Here’s a bunch of documents.’ Still appeal. There may be something left. Ha

"He appeals every response as a matter of principle: “I don’t care if they’re like, ‘Here’s a bunch of documents.’ Still appeal. There may be something left. Have them perform another search. Because they’re just terrible at it.”" "It’s a letter from the Postal Inspection Service. He asked them for… something. “To be honest with you, I don’t remember,” he says. “This was not even that long ago. Um.”" This guy appears to be wasting bandwidth of the people and indirectly causing bureaucracy he is so hellbent on fighting against. I do agree that we should have more open government, but I think he is going about it in a wrong way.

vinceguidry 12y ago
You're looking at this from the worst possible angle. Government operates by different rules than the rest of society. In business, if something is taking up a lot of resources, that means it's a hog and you have to figure out how to get it to stop consuming so much. In government, using lots of resources is the hallmark of a thriving and publicly useful program. We need a hundred guys like Leopold making the FOIA people look more and more important, making the politicians that protect and support FOIA look more and more right, giving them the power to dramatically expand the bandwidth available. The US government is not a constrained resource-poor embedded device, it's a massive datacenter where every cabinet and area and floor has to fight for its existence, and increased traffic is the goal, not the enemy. If the program isn't used, it'll get downsized or shut down and they'll give the money to military contractors, who know exactly how the game is played.