Not sure exactly what the fix is, but one idea is to have a state-wide ombudsman-like office for facilitating FOIA requests. Currently each agency usually has its own small FOIA office, which naturally protects its own turf. A centralized office could 1. …be independent of the agencies from which info is being requested, avoiding conflicts of interest in denying/delaying requests 2. …have commitments to confidentiality so agencies couldn’t justify withholding contextual info (“what’s a better way to ask this question?”) from the ombudsman 3. …afford building up more technical and legal expertise than any single agency-specific office.
There does need to be a better incentive for public bodies to do the right thing, though. I get a ton of weak, half-baked responses, and a ton of push-back. A lot of it feels like laziness. There is no decent punishment in Illinois for workers or bodies that don't make a reasonable effort to respond.
This is basically how FOIA responses go:
“Punish people for not being helpful enough” is a bad way to get them to be helpful.
That's the reality every vendor rep's job exists in and most of them are quite helpful.
They even refused to provide the database schema - how is providing just the schema expensive? Or hard to do?
> Your request seeks a copy of tables or columns within each table of CANVAS. The dissemination of these pieces of network information could jeopardize the security of the systems of the City of Chicago.
Just provide a DB dump to this one guy.
Although of course that's a lot more in principle than in practice! Like rolling your own crypto, I think experience shows that, against determined de-anonymizers, there is basically nothing you can do to preserve anonymity except to severely limit the information, and the only way definite feedback you get is if you don't succeed and someone discloses the de-anonymized information that they were able to reconstruct.
Your argument makes me think we really SHOULD make all government data public. Then people would have an incentive to not let governments have so much of their private data.
Also, I hope you don't mean the federal government should know if you've been arrested. I don't think that should be available to them at all.
Nobody is going to write a DB schema or call a DBA before taking notes in a notebook… but that’s government data too.
Example: https://home.nps.gov/katm/blogs/images/IMG_3229.jpg
They're just people doing their best. Try to be a little less breathless with your rhetoric.
If you apply the assumption that government employees are better or more well intentioned than the population in general then it makes the government's actions look even worse.
I Went to SQL Injection Court - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175628 - Feb 2025 (433 comments)
Edit: seems like that was the part of the origin story of this according to https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2025/02/09/fixing-illinois-foia/
A lot of FOIA requests die because they receive push-back and the requestor lacks the resources to litigate it. You can do it yourself. FOIA litigation is usually not like OP's struggle over data types -- it's usually just to get the court to smack the public body and tell them they are being lazy or overly strict and the court procedures are much simpler. (often the public body will fold as soon as you file)
Also, I wonder if @chaps can give his reasoning on going directly for litigation? In Illinois there is an alternate avenue where you can ask the AG to intervene. (I hate this route myself because it has become slow and toothless)
There is some discussion here, which you may already have seen:
100% onboard with shrinking the government.
did they really say "publically" in their response? :)
