Comment by akudha
1 month ago
Why aren't all non-classified, non-sensitive public data actually public by default? The time, effort and money they spent fighting the FOIA lawsuit - wouldn't it just be easier and cheaper to just honor the request?
1 month ago
Why aren't all non-classified, non-sensitive public data actually public by default? The time, effort and money they spent fighting the FOIA lawsuit - wouldn't it just be easier and cheaper to just honor the request?
Providing public APIs to such information sounds great and I think it should be done but is also probably realistically expensive and peone to security problems. The government seems to have a very difficult time in general running all sorts of web services, it's a nightmare in some jurisdictions to even pay the government money for e.g. tickets... I had a hell of a time paying a ticket in San Diego and had to visit the the courthouse multiple times and file a paper form because my paymentment became "late" when it never showed up in their online database weeks later. I was TRYING to pay them and even going to suffer through the "convenience" fees because they outsourced the website to some crappy company and they still couldn't get it right.
Expensive compared to what? Paying a bunch of lawyers and dragging a lawsuit for five years? Don’t lawyers, judges, court personnel’s time cost money?
They even refused to provide the database schema - how is providing just the schema expensive? Or hard to do?
As I understand it, the trial was about whether or not providing the database schema is a security risk.
> Your request seeks a copy of tables or columns within each table of CANVAS. The dissemination of these pieces of network information could jeopardize the security of the systems of the City of Chicago.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175628
Nobody said anything about providing a public API.
Just provide a DB dump to this one guy.
The first reasonable concern that springs to mind is that correlating a few fields that are individually non-identifying in a dataset can lead to deanonymizing people; in principle, the FOIA process gives the organization being requested time to think about what needs to be masked to protect privacy.
> in principle, the FOIA process gives the organization being requested time to think about what needs to be masked to protect privacy.
Although of course that's a lot more in principle than in practice! Like rolling your own crypto, I think experience shows that, against determined de-anonymizers, there is basically nothing you can do to preserve anonymity except to severely limit the information, and the only way definite feedback you get is if you don't succeed and someone discloses the de-anonymized information that they were able to reconstruct.
If government has access to all those fields the data isn't private.
Your argument makes me think we really SHOULD make all government data public. Then people would have an incentive to not let governments have so much of their private data.
I'm essentially comfortable with the government knowing what banks I've banked at, what homes I've lived in, and where and when I've been arrested. I'm much less comfortable with those being in a public database anyone can query.
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Determining whether or not something is sensitive is not necessarily a trivial activity, especially if you’re asking it to be done for everything that every employee creates everyday.
Thats why you do design o DB and decide if this data is really needed to be stored, for how long, now sensitive it is etc. You don't just add data to DB as you go (well ideally).
If only it were that easy. Only a small amount of government data is in a database, if even electronic at all. A lot of it is on paper, in Microsoft word, in emails, in a voicemail, etc.
Nobody is going to write a DB schema or call a DBA before taking notes in a notebook… but that’s government data too.
Example: https://home.nps.gov/katm/blogs/images/IMG_3229.jpg
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Because it would significantly de-legitimize the government (particularly state and local) if any and every youtube talking head and blogger could pour over it and find the objectionable things that is supported by few and only tolerated by many because of poor awareness. And that's before you get into the spurious correlations and conspiracy stuff.
It's exhausting the number of conversations online that assume that everything in the government is nefarious, inefficient, and focused on steeling ur freedums. I have worked in private industry, I've worked in government, and I've worked in the murky world in between. By and large government employees and thoughtful, genuinely want to make things work, and are faithful stewards of the public good. They usually make less money than they could get in private industry, the job security is absolutely no longer there, and the benefits are getting worse and worse each year.
They're just people doing their best. Try to be a little less breathless with your rhetoric.
I tend to assume government employees are a cross section of the population. I don't care about the people, I care about the system.
If you apply the assumption that government employees are better or more well intentioned than the population in general then it makes the government's actions look even worse.
Or it would make us look for ways to have government do fewer things.
About as believable as DOGE "saving" the government $105 billion.
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