FBI will no longer accept FOIA requests by email | Hacker News Reader

FBI will no longer accept FOIA requests by email

techcrunch.com

250 pointsrmason98 comments

Previously-accumulated USDA data (that has already been paid for and is technically a public good) has been blacked out also. Source: https://sunlightfoundation.com/tracking-u-s-government-data-...

The USDA announced that public access to that information would now be mediated through Freedom of Information Act requests.

There was a dog food poisoning reported [earlier this week](http://patch.com/illinois/hydepark/s/g0ven/illinois-company-...) The "supplier" of the poison dog food is probably pretty happy the public can't figure out which other pet food manufacturers (Besides Evanger's) they vendor.

This move was likely designed to hide facts from the public and to make investigative journalism a lot more difficult. Public health and safety data needs to be public and squelching it is akin to public endangerment.

[edit: thx for grammar correction.]

>technically a public good

I don't think you know what public good means

You may think of yourself as a slave, but that doesn't mean you can't strive to be a better person and a productive member of society.

Not that wikipedia is a definitive source [1], but I think you could make the case by its definition that data gathered by the government on our behalf should be provided to us as easily as possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

I don't disagreewith the overall point, but I'm not sure it's grammatically possible to be "calculated[ly] reckless"

Sure it is! You know that, due to the sort of thing you're doing, you ought to try to be careful. But you make the decision not to.

Think about driving. I can easily imagine making the conscious decision to simply not drive very carefully--whether for fun, because there's an emergency, because I want to hurt people, etc.

You might think of it as analogous to willful ignorance. You know that there is something you ought to know, but you make a decision to either not seek the knowledge out, or to insulate yourself from it.

Well, there's a (hopefully) easy way to solve this problem: submit a FOIA request for the missing data, and post it publicly.

Does anyone know of a place to post such things?

Edit: To be clear, I think there is no good reason for this to be hidden behind a FOIA wall. But, assuming that we're stuck with the FOIA wall...

It's not going to be easy or cheap and there will be a significant discovery problem for others. To be effective, we need to abandon the nonprofit silo model and switch towards an open unitary model, a wiki-web built on relationships rather than centered on ownership or exclusive curation content.

I understand the first half of your post, but not the second. Could you explain? (Or just drop a link to something I can read?)

MuckRock[0] is the go-to site for this. They took part in a panel run at HOPE X[1] with GovernmentAttic.com

[0] https://www.muckrock.com/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5rp3nJ62Nc

I've also noticed that USCIS has been making materials that were previously publicly available inaccessible, like immigration guidance documents. The links are still there on their homepage, but now they just point back to the host page.

Someone pointed out that there's technically a web portal that requesters can use. That web portal, however, goes beyond the law to add a bunch of restrictions including:

  * Limiting you to one request per day.
  * Not allowing you to request internal memos and a variety of other classes of documents.
  * The website doesn't work on weekends.

More detailed look how bad the website they launched to replace email is:

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/feb/07/fbi-foia-...

Websites that don't work on weekends (of which I've seen more than a few) are really quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I shudder to think that somewhere there was a requirements document that details what days the site should and shouldn't work...

The UK National Lottery website is non-functional overnight, presumably to prevent drunken gambling. That's the one good reason for implementing that sort of restriction I've seen.

Even support chats it annoys me - support open Mon-Fri 9-5 - fine, but can you not just take my message and let's do it over email, or send me a reminder in opening hours with a link that automatically starts a chat with the request I type out now?

truly sounds as if they don't staff the receiving end with anyone who has authority on the weekend to either approve or or even accept the requests. part of me wants to think its just work place rules but the cynical side keeps thinking they do this on purpose to make it annoying

If only they could use a server to cache the requests until Monday, when they do staff someone to receive it.

The folks who built it couldn't make it stable, and they can't be made to work overtime or be on call. So the website just doesn't work off hours.

That's how it goes for banks, anyways...

I had to file some forms on irs.gov about a year ago, and the web portal was only open on weekdays between 9am and 5pm eastern time.

My fantasy explanation is that the form feeds directly into a printer, and they have a guy who takes the printouts, staples them, and puts them in a box. If the website is open 24/7 then when Stapleman shows up to work Monday morning the backlog might be discouraging. Not to mention if the printer jams during off hours and nobody's there to notice, filings may be lost. Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

I realize you're speculating, but ...

I'm not sure if the IRS is trending towards a paperless office or not (is that even still a thing?), but triggering a print job for every form submitted via a web portal sounds very wasteful. I'd hope they have have some sort of workflow system in place instead.

Another theory I have involves concessions to webserver unions and/or acknowledging the need for time off to take care of the child processes. These fantasies are the only place I can find closure and sanity when my carefully filled out submission is rejected by the website because it is now 4:01 pm and that's Miller Time on the east coast.

You're actually closer than you realize :)

It's a government worker union thing. They don't have a contract for being called at 4am when the website breaks, so you better shut it off at 5pm.

If you think this is the stupidest thing in government you should ensure you never have to work in that environment over your lifetime :)

I'm not sure there are many government web services run by actual government employees.

The IRS hasn't had a budget in many years now. Congress passes emergency reauthorizations every year that's just enough to keep the lights on, but does not allow for any kind of long-term planning or upgrades. I'd imagine that, if they do have crazy systems like this, they'd love to get rid of them but can't.

FWIW Mnuchin wants to boost funding for the IRS: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/steven-mnuchin-makes-a-we...

It sounds good, but I'm going to wait for the budget to actually pass before popping the champagne. Considering everything we've seen so far, my confidence that Trump's appointees will actually live up to their smash-the-system claims, and not just be more crony capitalists, is quite low.

It's not [entirely] a fantasy

> the web portal was only open on weekdays between 9am and 5pm eastern time.

Most likely: they don't have anyone on call outside those hours for breakages, so they only turn the system on during working hours.

The IRS has 79,890 employees. $12B annual budget. So...

edit: Another comment linked to a good explanation as to why the site isn't up 24/7. TL;DR legacy COBOL that everyone is terrified of touching. Just in case the Secretary of Treasury is reading this: I, for one, would gladly have my tax dollars go to modernizing irs.gov. Oh wait, I just remembered healthcare.gov. Nevermind.

Most Healthcare dot gov website issues were resolved later. Don't exaggerate.

Except that those issues were an un-exaggerated mess, originally. The emergency steps they took after launch pretty much proves the point.

Washington Post reports that $319 million has been spent on healthcare.gov. Is that sane?

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

It was a hugely complex site that had to manage and connect to a large number of existing systems for each insurer that was part of the market place. It also had to be done in an extremely short time frame because the details of the site and it's operation weren't solid until the law was signed.

Yes?

Far more has been spent on Facebook and Twitter (for example), and they don't do anything nearly as important as providing health care coverage to people.

My account still doesn't work and it won't let me continue further, claiming I do not exist.

"Better not have any unplanned downtime" --> "Make it all planned downtime, then..."

You joke, but that's exactly it. Not letting people submit requests at all is a lot better than silently discarding requests due to unexpected errors.

Having worked in passing with the IRS and their tech groups, I can safely say this is the most plausible explanation I've heard for a site like that.

A little more eco-friendly but no less insane explanation: the software processing forms is running on someone's regular work machine, which they turn on each morning, and then turn off when they go home...

The power options are controlled by group policy, and as yet nobody's been able to take a week off from their work to track down "the administrator" and convince them to add an exception.

A while ago I had the pleasure of visiting a government office that indeed had such a box with the writing "internet" on its side, with printouts of all requests that arrived by email. But as far as I recall, the email server and printing were asynchronous, so I had that going for me...

In Japan, quite a few ATMs would not work during weekends and evenings, I've always speculated that they hired people to sit in the atm and hand over the money. It also would explain why credit card fees are higher when withdrawing money during weekends (in the few ATMs that allows you to do that)...

That is magical. I love it.

The help desk for users outside the Service is only up during those hours weekdays and is constantly having its scope reduced. On the weekends the mainframe is processing several million transactions that went on during the week. Even though it is a Web 1.0-looking interface, those web-based bits are a peripheral to a fairly ancient mainframe running COBOL. That mainframe still updates several millions of individual accounts and cranks through millions upon millions of account updates at night and especially on the weekend.

Your fantasy explanation is way, way off the mark. Nothing is feeding into a hopper from a printer. It is just a huge mainframe that does many, many things for hundreds of millions of individual taxpayers as well as millions upon millions of businesses and other entity types.

[Is break over yet?]

This is the reason. Anyone who has been around long enough remembers "online hours" and "batch hours" on the mainframe.

The weekend crew is too busy catching up on printing cover sheets and faxing the TPS reports.

Some of my CC's website features don't work on the weekend, holidays, or at night.

Explained here so I will link rather than repeating it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10505251

If only there was some way a frontend system could queue things until a backend system was ready to accept them...

B&H, an electronics store in NYC, won't take orders by web from Friday night to Saturday night but the website itself works otherwise. It is owned by Hasidic Jews (Satmar) and apparently a Rabbi must have issued a responsa that allows them to keep the site on but not to take orders.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is more likely explained by malice.

At last, someone else who correctly understands the phenomena even though it's contrary to the popular saying.

Class warfare.

All those agreeable office workers and higher class people can access the site whenever (including work). All the icky people working in factories, services or places you sweat don't need govt. services anyways.

Yeh if I recall, Companies House in the UK used to do this for some stupid reason.

My alma mater had one like that. Worse, it had operating hours in general: it was closed at night, too.

It was the Student Information System that we used to register for classes, pay tuition, update our contact information, etc. So it was a pretty important system.

One day, I asked someone who would know. I was told that it was because SIS ran on an old mainframe that couldn't read and write the disk at the same time. So it made all changes in memory during the operating hours, and then it shut down and wrote out the disk at night.

(also, our username for SIS was our full SSN... and the password they assigned to us was the last four digits of our SSN)

Currently, the policy appears to be that FOIA requests that take less than two hours of personnel time are free.

https://www.foia.gov/faq.html#cost

This subsidy is plausibly a good one, to avoid discouraging requests from private citizens, but it can also probably justify why FOIA requests would be rate-limited. (In some situations, you might be able to avoid ever paying by breaking you request up into a bunch of sub-requests that can individually be completed in less than 2 hours.)

Are there any sorts of outside investigations that are substantially hampered by the rate limiting? It seems like the turn-around time is going to be more than a day anyways, so you might as well bundle all your requests into one and submit daily. Or is there an aspect of this I'm missing?

Incidentally, are there estimates on how much the FBI (or other agencies) spend to fulfill FOIA requests? This report from 1980 says ~$50M, but that that might be a substantial underestimate since there were large ancillary costs it doesn't cover.

https://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-update-costs-and-benef...

Isn't it reasonable that all requests be provided "at cost"? Maybe at a $/hour corresponding to the federal minimum wage?

I don't think FOIAs should be free nor anonymous. I imagine foreign governments would exploit that to try to probe for information.

We are the "leaders of the free world". Why should we be afraid of foreign governments having access to non-classified information?

Maybe worth pointing out that following media interest/inquiries today, the FBI now claim (according to The Daily Dot) that the website terms and conditions will be changed on March 1st to allow 24/7 access and unlimited requests from individuals.

Also: "The FBI eFOIA portal has been under development and testing for two years." That's a long time to spend developing a website that doesn't work on weekends....

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fbi-foia-records-requests-ema...

>That's a long time to spend developing a website that doesn't work on weekends....

Well, when you're building websites in COBOL...

It would be interesting to fax in a FOIA request to find out the reasoning behind the decision to not allow email FOIA requests. And how the restrictions for the web portal came to be since they are not required by law.

Someone filed a request here:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/foi...

The page gets updated as documents come back.

Well they don't respond with information either, so they may as well only accept carrier pigeons.

I don't know why people have down voted you. It's not as if the US government has a history of accessibility and transparency.

Call a spade a spade.

Obama promised a new era of US government transparency and Wikileaks delivered it

Who is going to be the hero that converts FBI FOIA emails into automated faxes and offers it as a service?

My non-profit, MuckRock, offers that service for the FBI and 6,000 other agencies:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/create/

You can also browse almost 30,000 other requests filed by users:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/

This is amazing, thank you.

Read this, and immediately went looking to see if you have a careers page, because this seems like exactly my bag, baby, yeah. Sadly, was disappoint.

Nice. My first thought was that somebody should make such a service. My second thought was that somebody probably already had. Do you get upticks in traffic when things show up in the news?

Definitely. Trick is keeping things running smoothly during news cycles and off, but there's been a lot more interest the past few months around a number of topics.

This is another troubling action meant to chip away at what government transparency we have left. I'm sure that the argument could be made that government agencies are "inundated" with requests that they can't keep up with and all this is too "costly."

This is worrisome! Will the feds start charging fees to view electronic docs like the State of Wyoming? http://www.wyomingnews.com/news/wyoming-court-ok-to-charge-f...

https://faxzero.com/

Would be great if they offered free faxes for FOIA requests :)

(I'm attempting to make something that does something similar, if anyone's interested in helping out in any way.)

I may be interested in helping. What do you need? Email in my profile if it's easier

I'm definitely interested... what do you need?

Cool if I shoot a message to the address in your profile?

I've built a service that helps digitize the manual aspects of FOIA. Happy to chat! michael@muckrock.com.

We're also open source: github.com/MuckRock/muckrock/

Hey there! A big part of my project is to make FOIA a bit more accessible for larger scale requests, where $5 per-request would be a bit out of the question. I realize that FOIA machine can do a lot of that, but there's a pretty large discrepancy between their list of contacts and Muckrock's, so FOIA Machine isn't really a viable option, either. Muckrock's wasn't as full as I was hoping, either (though, still incredibly impressive) so I'm working at expanding the contacts that Muckrock's collected. Some web crawlers were kicked off recently that once polished, should be able to improve on what you guys already have.

Anywho, I'll shoot you an email pretty soon!

(edit: clarity and a bit more info)

I'm the cofounder of Phaxio (a faxing API). We're interested in helping out too!

When and why did you create a faxing API? I know that may seem like a snarky question but I really mean it seriously. I'm someone who hasn't sent a fax in at least 10 years and so I just assumed it was a nearly dead form of communication.

We created Phaxio several years ago because the project we were working on needed a fax API and the options at the time were all terrible.

I don't personally send lots of faxes but businesses send millions of them and it's a crucial part of their workflow.

Cool. Thanks for the reply.

Hey! Your API's been in the back of my head for a while now, so the help would be phenomenal. What's the best way to reach you?

Great! Email's in my profile!

If I don't see a privately operated website providing a workaround within a week, I'll be embarrassed. The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it.

Corporations have been profiting from your contact information for years, now you can donate your contact information for the public good.