Comment by chaps
2 months ago
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.
Yeah I can see that, seems like masking isn't creating a new record, but obviously that's not how it's interpreted, because you're using the human filling out the form to interpret then return the data. FOIA typically allow for redactions and that seemingly creates new records because they have to redact things and knowing what to redact is providing masked information and that's a new record.
As such, they could claim all FOIAs that require redactions shouldn't be fulfilled because a redacted record is a new record.