Comment by chaps
2 months ago
Yep, that was done in the FOIA request related to this lawsuit:
select utc.column_name as colname, uo.object_name as tablename, utc.data_type as type
from user_objects uo
join user_tab_columns utc on uo.object_name = utc.table_name
where uo.object_type = 'TABLE'
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/chicago-169/canvas-database-sch...
Yeah, it's obvious the double standard here, then. Curious indeed why they are so adamant to keep the schema/data secret.
Because they know that eventually the data contained in that table is going to be used to support some sort of lawsuit that their parking enforcement activity is biased, and is targeting people of color.
It's already ridiculous that they spent several years blocking this request while it went through court. If the plaintiffs spoke to pretty much anyone involved in maintaining the system, or with any of their internal infosec people, they would know that there's no real security risk to releasing this information.
They've already spent orders of magnitude more time and money litigating the issue than it would take to just release the information in the first place, so this is clearly not a cost or resourcing issue.
They don't want to release it because they'd prefer it's secret, because secrecy makes it harder for the public to hold them accountable. That's all.
There is an explanation for the fight that doesn't involve something nefarious with CANVAS (though I think CANVAS is dodgy from talking with Matt).
The precedent set here will let data journalists (like Matt) setup effectively automated FOIA workflows on _any_ database they can get the name of for a FOIA request. So even if _this_ db isn't dodgy it enables any of them that are to be found quickly.
Or even less cynically, its just going to cost a ton of resources to respond to all those automated FOIA requests.
I said in another comment but I suspect the column names themselves are incriminating (basically saying this person doesn't get a ticket because they are in a special club, that's probably not technically legal)
is_cop bool not null default false
Public bodies tend to just want to resist FOIAs for the sake of resisting them. I've never really been able to fully understand the motivations, even after a decade of FOIA litigation.
I think it is likely to ne about budgets. That is, sure, FOIA and similar state laws usually allow the agency to collect something related to actual costs, but that's mostly meaningless since even if actually covers staff time it doesn't retroactively give them staff to cover it in the impacts areas, and often the FOIA volume doesn't effectively feedback into legislative budget processes for future staffing either, while their litigation needs are more likely to feed back into the legal staffing levels, so approving FOIA requests drains working resources in the area covering them in a way that fighting them does not in the immediate term, while fighting them also has the longer term benefit (from an agency perspective) of discouraging future requests.
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