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Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas by chaps

Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas by chaps

Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas by chaps

7 Comments

  • Post Author
    akudha
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:02 am

    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?

  • Post Author
    jessriedel
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:14 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    dang
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:36 am

    Recent and related:

    I Went to SQL Injection Courthttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175628 – Feb 2025 (433 comments)

  • Post Author
    qingcharles
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 8:35 am

    I reiterate my point from the comments of the companion post. OP lost even while being represented by some of the best civil rights lawyers in the country.

    A lot of FOIA requests die because they receive push-back and the requestor lacks the resources to litigate it. You can do it yourself. FOIA litigation is usually not like OP's struggle over data types — it's usually just to get the court to smack the public body and tell them they are being lazy or overly strict and the court procedures are much simpler. (often the public body will fold as soon as you file)

    Also, I wonder if @chaps can give his reasoning on going directly for litigation? In Illinois there is an alternate avenue where you can ask the AG to intervene. (I hate this route myself because it has become slow and toothless)

  • Post Author
    joshka
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 10:40 am

    I wonder if starting with intentionally getting a parking fine in Chicago, followed by then submitting an FOIA about that fine and all related documents / data would have worked.

    Edit: seems like that was the part of the origin story of this according to https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2025/02/09/fixing-illinois-foia/

  • Post Author
    joering2
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 2:07 pm

    > Please note that in late 2013, the City of Chicago launched a publically available Data

    did they really say "publically" in their response? :)

  • Post Author
    exabrial
    Posted March 3, 2025 at 3:39 pm

    So dumb that the default behavior of the governments (State and Fed) is to withhold information.

    100% onboard with shrinking the government.

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