Comment by chaps
2 months ago
Hard to say. One of my personal drivers for this lawsuit is a tip I received that said that Chicago has a list of vendors whose tickets are dropped in the back-end. When I requested that info, the city said they had no such list. I trust my source, so having schema information could help figure out the extent and if they were lying.
Considering how much they fought to not release the schema, there's probably a column named "exempt_from_penalty" or something equally obvious.
If they lose in court they have to pay court-determined attorneys' fees. That might be sufficient to get them to appeal automatically.
This is a tension you sometimes see discussed in the context of wrongful imprisonment, where one faction says that if you get tossed in jail for 30 years over something there was never any evidence that you did, the state should have to pay a penalty, and another faction says that if you penalize the state for randomly imprisoning innocent people, those people will never be allowed out of jail.
Earnest question: If you suspect them of lying on the issue, why would you trust them to release the full schema in response to the FOIA request, and not just omit any possibly incriminating columns?
It's always a possibility that some low level official not in on the scam sees the FOIA request before management tells them not to work on it. The more you ask for, the less filtering there is going to be, simply because of how people work.
If you're running the scam, you don't want to tell low level employees about it, because they have no incentive not to blow the whistle.
The other answers here are great, but let’s say you’re right.
If you release a whole DB of data you’re going to have a hard time covering something you removed up in such a way that it’s not noticeable. Gaps in keys, suspiciously missing data for certain queries, etc.
Even if you do that perfectly, there are other data sources to compare to. If the city said it issued 2500 parking tickets and made $7500 in January on some financial report and the DB disagrees you have proof something is going on.
Or you could crowd source people’s parking tickets to compare to the DB to see if everything matches. What happens if one doesn’t? If one’s missing but the person had the proof they paid it?
It could still prove useful.
How is this different from literally any other FOIA transaction, computer-y or otherwise?
What is the theory then for why they do not want to release this schema? Don’t misunderstand me I appreciate how important it is that people push the boundaries of FOIA.
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By that logic there's no point investigating any crime or doing any kind of audit. You increase the costs of covering up, and put them in a dilemma - remember this is exactly what brought down Nixon.
Because this is not how government works. Most of the time it's not a heavily entranched conspiracy. Once the request is approved to go through by the legal department, some technician will happily give you everything you want and it won't be censored or tampered with in process.
Many times the people answering the requests aren't part of the conspiracy to commit random acts of malice. Sometimes they're roped into it under threat of termination.
And often times, the denials eventually lead to significant reorg once judges and Congress can revise laws to fix the ambiguities.
Well that certainly sounds suspicious. But it could also provide more damming evidence of targeting groups, people skimming the till, bribes to make tickets go away, all sort of fun shenanigans.
And boy they’re fighting suspiciously hard.
Good luck.
Bribes are most certainly not logged in the system under the "bribes" column or codified in any way. The data discovered through foi could show some patterns which are suggestive of bribes, but the actual thing is negotiated "off chain".
That’s what I meant. For example, people who have a suspicious number of tickets dismissed. Or perhaps certain employees that dismiss a suspicious number.