Comment by foota
2 months ago
I agree this is something of a technical solution, but the court wasn't interpreting whether you could ask for rows from a database, but whether you could ask for the schema directly. I don't think the court had the option of saying "you can't ask for the schema, but asking for a sample row is ok".
The short answer is yes, you can do this. I've seen this work for emails, where the request is basically, "Give me the most recent email of blah@gov.com".
And yeah, the plan was to eventually submit a batch of requests using the table names, similar to `SELECT * FROM {table_name_from_schema_request} LIMIT 1`, but one FOIA request per-table.
I have once wrote a script that translated sql requests into proper Ukrainian legalize invoking the equivalent of FOI to quite citizenship statistics from the agency. It worked, but they were not very happy when I had to get to them on the phone.
Seems like you could asked for a verbally masked description? Like an enigma coda specific to the FOIA.
"Describe to me the columns, in simple non-programmatic english, and what the purpose of the table is for, for each table related to parking tickets"
Essentially a human to schema DSL That is only technically decipherable by the admin of the database. Then you're not having actual code and only the admin could decipher.
But yah, as you said, if the humans don't want to disclose their foibles, how the request is filled is technically meaningless.
I wish it were that easy easy. I'll go more into this specific question in my post, but the short answer is that FOIA does not statutorily require the creation of new records in response to a request. The gov agency creating a description of the data in response to the FOIA request would be creating new records. It's silly.
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They don't do describe, as it creates the new document, which is a blind spot of FOI
No offense, but how can you be 1) insisting it's safe to give up the information to you and 2) openly planning to use the information obtained for further exploitation, at the same time? You can't have the cake and eat it too, unless the information available in 2) technically do not depend on 1) but doing it this way would only save them massive time or something.