I met a guy at a party who started a news outfit[1] trying to simplify FOIA. He had stories like this galore- such as meeting gov't employees in person at conferences, saying his name, and seeing their eyes grow big. Apparently frequent requesters become notorious.
Yes, MuckRock is a great service, not least of which for the window it provides all non-customers into how our government FOIA works. By default, if you file a request, that request -- including all of its updates and resulting response -- is publicly viewable:
Before FOIAing an agency, I'll sometimes check MuckRock to get a better understanding of what to expect, including who to direct my letter to and an estimate of how long I might wait...or best of all, examples of precedent to use to bolster my legal standing ("On June 3, 2014, you fulfilled a similar request for James Smith via Muckrock").
Hell, you don't even have to be in the FOIA-writing mindset...just reading that list will give you a veritable shitton of ideas of the kinds of things about government that has piqued the interest of other reporters, private investigators, politicians, and hedge fund analysts. Analyzing the metadata alone would make for a very useful service.
Huge shoutout for Muckrock. I use them extensively, and have worked with Michael (the founder) a bit. Can't say enough nice things.
Please please please check out their site if you're doing FOIAs. There is a cost, but its minimal, and worth it. They'll help you manage the FOIA process, and whatever records are returned become public on Muckrock's site.
Indeed, some state FOIA laws even have provisions for dealing with "frequent requestors." (And to be fair, not all frequent requestors are acting in good faith. There was a push recently to bury the NSA in FOIA requests as a protest against surveillance. Not a great idea.)
That is solved by a weighted queue based on an individual and rate limiting based on budget.
E.g. The Pentagon will answer 100,000 requests per month, each individual will have a spot in the queue, when a request is received the next request from that individual is at (N requests * -1) in weight.
So:
X, Request 1, 0
N, Request 2, 0
Z, Request 3, 0
A, Request 5, 0
Q, Request 7, 0
X, Request 4, -1 [will be weighted 0 for next month]
X, Request 6, -2 [will be weighted -1 for next month]
I think it really shows how powerful the bureaucracy really is that they'd write down an essentially illegal ultimatum, confident that the consequences would be essentially nonexistent.
Freedom of Information Act. It's a US Federal law that allows private citizens to request that the government provide any records that it has in its files. The government likes to keep copies of EVERYTHING, so you can often turn up quite a bit of documentation. The law has very strict requirements on what can be withheld or redacted -- for example, the government can't withhold data just because it's embarrassing to them.
Why doesn't Mr. Leopold realize that our superiors in public service know what's best for the country and act accordingly, and shouldn't have to waste their time responding to plebians? /s
Edit: because it seems to have been lost on many, the "/s" above indicates that the preceding is sarcasm.
I absolutely detest the sarcastic, cynical replies that always appear in the comments of stories like this. It feels good to write them, but reading them just fills me with a deep sense of defeat and sadness and they contribute little or nothing.
Ah, but consider that the fundamental cause of such comments indicates the opposite of defeat!
Where there is cynicism, there is knowledge of reality instead of illusion. Where there is sarcasm, there is an implication that a better reality is possible, and perhaps deserved.
A sarcastic cynical reply to a problem of government is an indicator that someone has identified a problem, and can envision a better world if it were fixed. They are waiting for a call to action, a plan, or an effective way of participating.
Imagine a world in which every action of the government were met with widespread cynicism and sarcasm! It'd be akin to the ultra-pessimistic attitudes of Russians before and during the fall of the USSR-- a public unwilling to give their government anything other than derision is in the active process of reformation.
I think you would have. A sarcastic response is free of any real content, and assumes the reader agrees with your point of view (otherwise, why would they find it funny).
Writing some honest, passionate paragraphs would set out your view in a way that would allow others to understand what you believe, and why.
Sarcastic, which is why I included /s (a de facto emoticon of such) at the end.
Although sarcasm isn't popular with some HN users, I felt that I could either post a longer, heartfelt diatribe about how this is wrong.... or I could convey the same opinion in less space and perhaps with a bit of humor by using sarcasm.
MrZongle2 is being sarcastic. Sadly, I have met the public official that would utter those words and, in fact, had uttered comments asking voters to shut up and just do what said official tells them to do.
FOIA is a right, not a privilege. And even if the only benefit of this FOIA request is figuring out what our government is spending their money on, it isn't a waste.
More like a privilege because my tax dollars pay for the sharpie that they have to use to black out "buttlord" from all of the documents. That really adds up.
Firstly the reference to Putin points to a different article, whose focus was not on getting hold of "inconsequential minutiae" but on how much money the Pentagon is spending on this "inconsequential minutiae". If it is indeed "inconsequential minutiae" then that is absolutely in the public interest.
Also, if these reports really were inconsequential minutiae, then presumably the effort expended for the Pentagon to hand it over would be maybe half an hour for a low level clerk to look up the (unclassified) report, confirm it can be released, and pass it on.
(And if the Pentagon spent money on reports on what Batman really think about Superman, you don't think it would be in the public interest to know how wasteful they are?)
But the issue raised in the article actually linked to here is the much more serious issue that in a lot of cases these government departments do whatever they can to avoid release of documents they are often legally bound to, and/or try to extract concessions out of the people filing the requests that they have no right to, and in the process severely reduce the kind of transparency the FOIA was brought in to provide.
Wow, way to miss the point. The "profiles of foreign leaders", according to the OP, comes from a Pentagon sanctioned study. The Pentagon is funded by American tax dollars. More importantly, these reports are unclassified and so there's no reason they shouldn't be in the public record. Even more importantly, someone at the Pentagon thought such a subject was important enough to waste money studying. Even even more importantly, that means there's a good chance that someone else at the Pentagon or State Dept. will use such information in some oblique way when making a policy decision.
But yes, let's all go back to watching the Lifetime Channel and not think about government details unless it is really sexy sounding and can fit in an Upworthy headline.
[1] https://www.muckrock.com