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Comment by kingcharles | Hacker News Reader

I'm a serial litigator of Freedom of Information requests. The reason I have to even litigate is because the public bodies believe every tiny thing they do is not disclosable.

I'm about 6 years into one lawsuit to disclose the contents of a jail Policy and Procedures manual. The AG ruled that it was all subject to disclosure except the bits about locks and keys and where the weapons are stored. The jail is free to ignore the AG ruling and continues to maintain that even the sections on how the jail library books are top secret.

It's absolutely impossible to know if the jail employees are doing their jobs as they are supposed to without the public knowing what those roles are and what the job requirements are. You can't keep these people honest without knowing if they are abusing their positions.

Public disclosure should be the mandatory default for public bodies.

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Out of curiosity, how is it that you came to be part of HN? Always good to have posters here who aren’t engineers or other tech workers.

I'm actually a developer for pretty much the last 40 years :) I ended up in a county jail due to some mental health issues, and my coding slowed down in there so I needed a new hobby. I put all my energy 24/7 into trying to get the detainees all the rights they were entitled to. A lot of that was trying to get information to prove the terrible things that the Sheriff's office was doing.

Public bodies definitely need to be careful about what they write in emails. It's funny to read about how yourself in their internal emails and what they are planning for you.

Thank you for your work

No problem. I wish what I didn't wasn't necessary. I'm helping others to try to make changes to the FOIA laws to fix the slew of problems. It's baby steps. It's like hacking - laws are written, the bugs are found, they are fixed, it's just that it takes decades to make the change, unlike coding where it takes 2 minutes to recompile.

Thank you for your work. How is the jail able to ignore the AG ruling?

The AG's legal team in Illinois can issue binding or non-binding rulings. So, even though they gave a detailed legal breakdown of their ruling and why it applied, and (bless them) having read through the entire 800 page manual, they still only issued a non-binding ruling which the Sheriff's office just laughed at.

For some reason they only issue binding rulings in a tiny fraction of very contentious cases. It sucks. It doesn't make any sense to me. It can take two years to get a non-binding ruling on a case just for the public body to ignore it.

I really think this is one of the single most valuable things someone can do in our society. Thanks

It's one of the best ways to keep a government honest. The people own the government, therefore they should know what the government is doing in their name. I hate governments keeping secrets from me, especially when they are doing it simply in the name of control and power.

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