Comment by jessriedel
1 month ago
This sort of experience shows how broken the FOIA law is. If it’s in the public interest to make data available, it’s in the public interest to make it available to a person with imperfect understanding of the extreme details of government’s crappy IT systems.
Not sure exactly what the fix is, but one idea is to have a state-wide ombudsman-like office for facilitating FOIA requests. Currently each agency usually has its own small FOIA office, which naturally protects its own turf. A centralized office could 1. …be independent of the agencies from which info is being requested, avoiding conflicts of interest in denying/delaying requests 2. …have commitments to confidentiality so agencies couldn’t justify withholding contextual info (“what’s a better way to ask this question?”) from the ombudsman 3. …afford building up more technical and legal expertise than any single agency-specific office.
I don't think FOIA is broken, it just needs some tweaks. One of the tweaks OP is involved with is changing the FOIA law to allow for the type of request he made. This is the only way to fix the poorly-decided Ill. S. Ct. case now.
There does need to be a better incentive for public bodies to do the right thing, though. I get a ton of weak, half-baked responses, and a ton of push-back. A lot of it feels like laziness. There is no decent punishment in Illinois for workers or bodies that don't make a reasonable effort to respond.
This is basically how FOIA responses go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxWQo_vZgR8
Tweaks like you describe are exactly what I think are doomed. The problem isn’t some small wording in the law that we just need to adjust. The problem is that (1) info request of complicated systems by their nature require good-faith coordination by both inquirer and respondent but (2) the agency responding to the FAOI request is incentivized to obstruct. This is why legal discovery is such a nightmare and so inefficient.
“Punish people for not being helpful enough” is a bad way to get them to be helpful.
>“Punish people for not being helpful enough” is a bad way to get them to be helpful.
That's the reality every vendor rep's job exists in and most of them are quite helpful.
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