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Comment by loufe | Hacker News Reader

It can be both, one situation to the next.

I'd say "failing to train or staff anyone to handle an important legal duty" still falls under malice, perhaps just slightly higher up the chain of command.

How about "failing to be rich enough to hire enough staff for all the FOIA requests that are made"?

"Rich enough"?

You can only make a FOIA request to the US government.

I should think it obvious that yes, every department should in fact be staffed to a level that allows them to comply with this (and all other) legal obligations. Doing otherwise is obviously malicious.

This law was passed last century, back in 1966. It's not like this is some surprising new obligation that they failed to staff against.

The federal Freedom of Information Act is limited in that way, but people very frequently use this term as a catchall for similar state laws. The source article is about a request made to a local police agency, not funded by the state, under Oregon open records laws; the parent comment is talking about a local school district that almost certainly fills the same dynamic and certainly wouldn’t be federal.

You are aware that, in the article, the Oregon Police are the ones charging a news outlet money, right?

Like, technically these requests cost nothing, because they pass the costs on - and because in this case, they've presented an absurd cost to avoid having to do anything at all

As is discussed in detail downthread, the presented cost is much less obviously absurd than the article makes it sound. Responding to the queries would require manual review and redaction of a gigantic number of documents, because the request was very broad in ways that make it nontrivial to automate. It might be better for the Eugene police to invest in some kind of record modernization that would let them handle such requests more efficiently, but I imagine the local townsfolk aren’t any more enthused than this local news outlet was by the prospect of paying for that.

I feel like local agencies, if they come up with something like this above a certain reasonable threshold should have to explain in exact detail on public record the procedure that’s taking so long or what is so expensive. After all, if it’s legitimate, they should have no problem doing that, right? If it’s hard, open your books and show us why

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