This sort of experience shows how broken the FOIA law is. If it’s in the public interest to make data available, it’s in the public interest to make it available to a person with imperfect understanding of the extreme details of government’s crappy IT systems.
Not sure exactly what the fix is, but one idea is to have a state-wide ombudsman-like office for facilitating FOIA requests. Currently each agency usually has its own small FOIA office, which naturally protects its own turf. A centralized office could
1. …be independent of the agencies from which info is being requested, avoiding conflicts of interest in denying/delaying requests
2. …have commitments to confidentiality so agencies couldn’t justify withholding contextual info (“what’s a better way to ask this question?”) from the ombudsman
3. …afford building up more technical and legal expertise than any single agency-specific office.
I don't think FOIA is broken, it just needs some tweaks. One of the tweaks OP is involved with is changing the FOIA law to allow for the type of request he made. This is the only way to fix the poorly-decided Ill. S. Ct. case now.
There does need to be a better incentive for public bodies to do the right thing, though. I get a ton of weak, half-baked responses, and a ton of push-back. A lot of it feels like laziness. There is no decent punishment in Illinois for workers or bodies that don't make a reasonable effort to respond.
Why aren't all non-classified, non-sensitive public data actually public by default? The time, effort and money they spent fighting the FOIA lawsuit - wouldn't it just be easier and cheaper to just honor the request?
Providing public APIs to such information sounds great and I think it should be done but is also probably realistically expensive and peone to security problems. The government seems to have a very difficult time in general running all sorts of web services, it's a nightmare in some jurisdictions to even pay the government money for e.g. tickets... I had a hell of a time paying a ticket in San Diego and had to visit the the courthouse multiple times and file a paper form because my paymentment became "late" when it never showed up in their online database weeks later. I was TRYING to pay them and even going to suffer through the "convenience" fees because they outsourced the website to some crappy company and they still couldn't get it right.
The first reasonable concern that springs to mind is that correlating a few fields that are individually non-identifying in a dataset can lead to deanonymizing people; in principle, the FOIA process gives the organization being requested time to think about what needs to be masked to protect privacy.
Determining whether or not something is sensitive is not necessarily a trivial activity, especially if you’re asking it to be done for everything that every employee creates everyday.
Because it would significantly de-legitimize the government (particularly state and local) if any and every youtube talking head and blogger could pour over it and find the objectionable things that is supported by few and only tolerated by many because of poor awareness. And that's before you get into the spurious correlations and conspiracy stuff.
I wonder if starting with intentionally getting a parking fine in Chicago, followed by then submitting an FOIA about that fine and all related documents / data would have worked.
I reiterate my point from the comments of the companion post. OP lost even while being represented by some of the best civil rights lawyers in the country.
A lot of FOIA requests die because they receive push-back and the requestor lacks the resources to litigate it. You can do it yourself. FOIA litigation is usually not like OP's struggle over data types -- it's usually just to get the court to smack the public body and tell them they are being lazy or overly strict and the court procedures are much simpler. (often the public body will fold as soon as you file)
Also, I wonder if @chaps can give his reasoning on going directly for litigation? In Illinois there is an alternate avenue where you can ask the AG to intervene. (I hate this route myself because it has become slow and toothless)
Going to litigation made sense here because, tbh, I didn't want to deal with the PAC's office taking three years to complete the RFR while never actually understanding the underlying issue. They really stink at interpreting anything technical. Also, I've never done pro bono (I probably could though), but I don't trust myself on procedural matters!
> Also, I wonder if @chaps can give his reasoning on going directly for litigation? In Illinois there is an alternate avenue where you can ask the AG to intervene. (I hate this route myself because it has become slow and toothless)
There is some discussion here, which you may already have seen:
So dumb that the default behavior of the governments (State and Fed) is to withhold information. This isn't classified information and shouldn't be treated as such.
These things don't make sense together. Chances are, shrinking government will cause information to be withheld even more, since there will be fewer staff available to answer/process requests for data, or to create automated ways to retrieve it. A fully-transparent government needs to be staffed.
[+] [-] jessriedel|1 year ago|reply
Not sure exactly what the fix is, but one idea is to have a state-wide ombudsman-like office for facilitating FOIA requests. Currently each agency usually has its own small FOIA office, which naturally protects its own turf. A centralized office could 1. …be independent of the agencies from which info is being requested, avoiding conflicts of interest in denying/delaying requests 2. …have commitments to confidentiality so agencies couldn’t justify withholding contextual info (“what’s a better way to ask this question?”) from the ombudsman 3. …afford building up more technical and legal expertise than any single agency-specific office.
[+] [-] qingcharles|1 year ago|reply
There does need to be a better incentive for public bodies to do the right thing, though. I get a ton of weak, half-baked responses, and a ton of push-back. A lot of it feels like laziness. There is no decent punishment in Illinois for workers or bodies that don't make a reasonable effort to respond.
This is basically how FOIA responses go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxWQo_vZgR8
[+] [-] akudha|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gleenn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] remexre|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kube-system|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] potato3732842|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
I Went to SQL Injection Court - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175628 - Feb 2025 (433 comments)
[+] [-] joshka|1 year ago|reply
Edit: seems like that was the part of the origin story of this according to https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2025/02/09/fixing-illinois-foia/
[+] [-] qingcharles|1 year ago|reply
A lot of FOIA requests die because they receive push-back and the requestor lacks the resources to litigate it. You can do it yourself. FOIA litigation is usually not like OP's struggle over data types -- it's usually just to get the court to smack the public body and tell them they are being lazy or overly strict and the court procedures are much simpler. (often the public body will fold as soon as you file)
Also, I wonder if @chaps can give his reasoning on going directly for litigation? In Illinois there is an alternate avenue where you can ask the AG to intervene. (I hate this route myself because it has become slow and toothless)
[+] [-] chaps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JadeNB|1 year ago|reply
There is some discussion here, which you may already have seen:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176319
[+] [-] exabrial|1 year ago|reply
100% onboard with shrinking the government.
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] emorning3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|1 year ago|reply
did they really say "publically" in their response? :)