Comment by ajkjk
2 months ago
This was fine, legally, but I'd be pretty irritated if someone I knew wasted everyone's time on this. The schema clearly is (marginally) useful for hacking, but who cares; it clearly is a file layout also, but who cares; those matter legally but not morally. Morally, this is just dumb: it's not something they really needed, and they're just irritating people and wasting resources for the fun of it. Shameful.
No. I'm involved in local government, and on the citizens commission where we keep track of our our municipality (adjacent to Chicago) stores and manages information. I'm acutely familiar with how people are spending their time in these organizations, and what is and isn't a big lift for them.
Increasingly, year over year, more and more information that would previously have been stored in filing cabinets or shared drives is moving into turnkey applications that municipalities buy and enroll all their data in. Those applications are opaque. But almost all of them are front-ends to SQL databases.
Being able to recover schemas from publicly operated databases is vital to keeping public records and data public, rather than de-facto hidden from inquiry.
Matt's suit was anything but a waste of people's time. Hopefully, it'll result in a change to our state law.
Just because the article gets into fine details doesn't mean it's silly. They're working with what they have.
But after reading more, I agree. The point of FOIA in the first place was "access by all persons to public records promotes the transparency and accountability of public bodies at all levels of government." Not "pushing FOIA statutes to their limits, sniffing out buried data and bulk-extracting it with clever requests."
If he's just asking for his own parking ticket records, ok. This isn't in the spirit of that. Separately, I agree that the SQL schema is software, a type of file layout, marginal attacker benefit, and other things in that exemption, and I'd say that again as an expert witness.
See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43176625
FOIA requester responded in comments saying they received a tip indicating illegal practices, and noted in his article that he had previously uncovered evidence of over-policing in black neighborhoods.
I think a file layout describes the exact arrangement of bytes in a file. A schema is higher level. It describes what is stored, not how it is stored. A database could be one file, or a file per table, or a file per column. Data could be stored across multiple drives.