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Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. I submit a lot of FOIA requests and one of the biggest limiting factors in access to the records I need comes from people new to the job who haven't been given full training on how to get records. It very much feels like as a FOIA requester, we're training them ourselves.

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This is the experience for many in the Navy trying to navigate broken personnel pay processes. Due to cost cuts and failed IT efforts, a lot of the staff at personnel offices that have to process things like pay transactions and travel reimbursements are entry level, and the organization suffers from high turnover to boot.

This means that Sailors with enough experience in the Navy are usually better off bringing copies of pertinent references and Navy instructions, especially if they have any kind of unusual case, so that they can hand-walk the clerk through the process that needs to be followed.

The same is common in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). Doctors frequently complain about incorrect pay. Some I’ve spoken to claim their pay is wrong most months! (Usually due to picking up extra shifts, especially overnights.)

I suspect it’s a big contributor to the low morale in the NHS. Hard to feel valued when a regular conversation is “They don’t even pay me correctly.”

Experienced customers training new-to-the-process participants is a surprisingly common aspect of bureaucratic processes. The peer participants or management are the other possible sources of training, but those stakeholders are not as incentivized to train the new member.

FOIA was a fascinating experiment from the start. Expecting agencies and individuals to go out of their way to pull dusty old records so they can self-incriminate? Honestly, it's a wonder it works at all.

I mean, it's not like it's without its issues. I currently have something like five ongoing FOIA lawsuits, every one coming from a place of frustrated nonsense.

It doesn't work too well at the federal level because it's turned into a weak system filled with layers of legal nonsense for literal years, but some states (like Illinois) are pretty good about making it easy to litigate, and laws that are... surprisingly favorable for requesters. I got to witness a lawyer, who litigated FOIA at the the federal level, read the statute of Illinois FOIA for the first time, and he was jaw-droppingly gobsmacked by how much the law favors requesters.

Are you a journalist? I’m curious what you submit them for.

journalist and journalist accessories

Any details you can share?

This is interesting, from your submissions:

"Patent-Pending Deflection Equals Reduced Request Volume"

https://web.archive.org/web/20200401223149/https://govqa.com...

(Archive link as original content is no longer at the URL.)

Sure -- here are some things I've done with public records:

https://southsideweekly.com/cpd-routinely-denies-foia-reques...

https://mchap.io/using-foia-data-and-unix-to-halve-major-sou...

https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...

https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chicago-police-arrested-more...

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/news/shotspotters-de...

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/news/false-alarms/

https://thetriibe.com/2020/12/hundreds-of-chicago-police-mad...

It's hard to talk about the FOIA litigation online, but [1] is some litigation I've been plaintiff for, for the database schema of Chicago's parking ticket database. The idea is to figure out what can be requested prior to submitting requests, but the city argues that its release would compromise network security. Even though we won the appellate case, it got raised and accepted by the IL Supreme court, so it'll be another long while until we know how it pans out.

[1] https://ilcourtsaudio.blob.core.windows.net/antilles-resourc...

Thanks!

(Almost missed this. Happen to be diving through my comment history...)

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