1. Definitely a lot of laziness from the FOIA officers. Some are really great, but others not so much.
2. There's no standardization in how it's handled within the city. Departments in the same buildings have very different idea of what should be rejected, their helpfulness, looseness of FOIA interpretation, etc.
3. They're truly not technical in the slightest. At one point I asked for a database dump, excluding sensitive columns and tables. The response was "Wikipedia defines a Data as:", so I had some fun explaining that one.
4. Fighting the process takes a very long time, so a rejection is an easy way to get someone to go away.
5. Not a reason, but still annoying.. They wait the maximum days to respond to your requests. Of the 50 or so I've submitted, I'd say 45 of them have been last minute. 25 times out of the 50, sure... but most?
It's a lot of work if it gets to that point, yep, but I've only ever needed my lawyer to file a suit. The average FOIA might take me 5 minutes to write, so it's not really that much time - especially considering what you get for it.
Yep. (This post got a lot longer than I was hoping. Hope you find it interesting!)
That ticket data is actually managed by IBM, so that even adds an annoying translation dynamic.
This current suit is because the city thinks it's 'unduly burdensome' to resolve city-owned phone numbers to names that were dialed by Chicago's mayor. Initially I could have understood that, but it became pretty clear pretty soon that they really didn't want me to have those records with these rejections:
Some more detail on the rejections I've been through this past year and 4 months:
-Original request asked for the mayor's records. Rejected for "no such records". Heh.
-Second was for the FOIA officer's phone records. Again, "No such records". (This was just a test to see if the mayor's phone was the only one without any records..... and it was kinda funny ;))
-Sent a request to Chicago's IT dept for their VOIP logs, which got me a file with the first 6 digits of all of non-government phones that were dialed. Government phones were completely redacted for "privacy" reasons. So, so many things wrong there.. especially since FOIA specifically disallows that sort of redaction.
-Sent a "Request For Review" to the attorney general's office, who took 6 months to agree with me and told the FOIA officer to give me the records. Chicago's lawyers then threw the VOIP request out, since they don't have VOIP. The assistant attorney general on the case and my lawyer both said (paraphrased) "They're right, but that's a total dick move and they know it."
-Submitted a cleaned up request, without "VOIP". They sent the same file from before. Same creation time and everything.
-Now we're waiting through the long court process...
About the attorney general's RFR process, though..
You can submit FOIA requests anonymously, but you can't submit RFRs anonymously! Their reasoning was that I need to have a valid signature with my named spelled out in plain text, despite ESIGN allowing pseudonyms. So - don't like that anonymous person? Just don't respond to their request and they'll either have to sue using their name or submit an RFR using their name. I fought that one for about a month and eventually submitted a FOIA request to the AG's office asking for the email chain that led to that decision. That got rejected with something like "deliberation discussions cannot be released."
That's really interesting. Sounds fairly hostile. Although I guess from the opposing party's perspective, there is no advantage to sharing information, only potential disadvantage... and its not something you can undo.
Not sharing information gets in the way of progress and established laws. Politics really shouldn't have anything to do with it, honestly. But since it does, collectively as a group, we should be doing more besides just voting and walking on pavement ;)
I got involved with this after working with one of the old mayor candidates, Amara Enyia. The plan was to give her the parking ticket data which would be used for her campaign. The day we were supposed to meet, two of the candidates and an ex-senator effectively colluded to get her kicked out of the race by questioning her signatures. The guy who submitted it was related to Dock Walls and friends with Ricky Hendon, iirc. Her campaign manager then went to Bob Fioretti's campaign, where they invited me over, where I gave Fioretti's campaign manager and Amara's campaign manager the full data. Fioretti's manager called it "fucking golden"..... I never heard back. A bit later, he made parking tickets a big part of his campaign.
After seeing Dock Walls, Ricky Hendon and Willie Wilson colluding to get Amara out of the race (seriously, they talked about it on facebook, publicly), it seemed a little suspicious that Fioretti's team didn't bother responding, considering how much they liked it. The phone records request was just a probe to see if the collusion ran deeper. Whether it's true or not isn't the point since, 1. I don't care enough about politics. 2. It's the principal of the entire thing.
For what it's worth, Fioretti dropped out of the race and gave Rahm his support the weekend before the election. :)
I agree that not sharing is problem. Sometimes when I describe the opposition's point of view it sounds like I am defending their position. I think in order to fight an opponent, you have to understand their point of view.
Your story is concerning, but I'm not surprised. In my opinion, the system itself filters for this sort of behavior - and it gets worse in the upper echelons of the competition because in the upper echelons it becomes less and less feasible to deviate from an "optimum approach". My assumption being that the "optimum" approach includes participation in unfair and antisocial techniques.
Sorry - didn't meant to come off as aggressive or combative.. There's just a surprising amount of hostility from those who like Rahm or think Rahm is a built-in in Chicago. "Why don't you just move?" and calling me unpatriotic were pretty interesting to hear.
The idealist in me thinks those behaviors can be fixed even though it's "turtles all the way down". Though, if enough people do enough tenaciously peaceful civics work, then hopefully things will get slightly better. By treating everything as a mystery as [0] and [1] talk about, things become manageable.
1. Definitely a lot of laziness from the FOIA officers. Some are really great, but others not so much.
2. There's no standardization in how it's handled within the city. Departments in the same buildings have very different idea of what should be rejected, their helpfulness, looseness of FOIA interpretation, etc.
3. They're truly not technical in the slightest. At one point I asked for a database dump, excluding sensitive columns and tables. The response was "Wikipedia defines a Data as:", so I had some fun explaining that one.
4. Fighting the process takes a very long time, so a rejection is an easy way to get someone to go away.
5. Not a reason, but still annoying.. They wait the maximum days to respond to your requests. Of the 50 or so I've submitted, I'd say 45 of them have been last minute. 25 times out of the 50, sure... but most?
It's a lot of work if it gets to that point, yep, but I've only ever needed my lawyer to file a suit. The average FOIA might take me 5 minutes to write, so it's not really that much time - especially considering what you get for it.
Here's an example one with some pretty neat data from it: https://github.com/red-bin/chitickets