
Justice department 'uses aged computer system to frustrate Foia requests' - rmason
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/16/justice-department-freedom-of-information-computer-system?CMP=share_btn_tw
======
StanislavPetrov
The unfortunate fact is that government officials, whether at the DOJ, the
FBI, or any other agency have absolutely no incentive to follow either the
letter or the spirit of the law. There are never any consequences for the
individual government employees who break the law, so there is no reason for
them to follow it. What's worse is that the only government officials who are
ever held accountable for violations of law or policy are whistleblowers who
shine light on wrongdoing.

When the law ceases to be a social contract under which we all agree to
operate and be equally judged it loses its moral authority. Without moral
authority law carries no more weight then the threats of violence wielded by
those with the most power and society falls apart.

~~~
asdfologist
False. Please stop spreading falsehoods without doing some basic research. It
took me < 10 seconds of Googling to find many counterexamples to your claim.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_state_and_loc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_state_and_local_politicians_convicted_of_crimes)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_polit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes)

~~~
colordrops
Logical fallacy. Just because there are counterexamples doesn't mean a claim
is false. If I say "humans eat meat", the claim is not false because I found a
vegetarian.

~~~
asdfologist
Err, you're the one making the logical fallacy. The parent said "There are
never any consequences for the individual government employees who break the
law" and the counterexamples disprove that. "X never happens" is false if I
find examples of X happening, by definition of "never". QED.

~~~
colordrops
That's just word play and purposefully misunderstanding the parent's likely
meaning. It would make no sense for the meaning to be exacting like a
mathematical proposition, in that there are literally NEVER any consequences.
When speaking of an entity as large as heterogeneous as the government, you
can't make such specific claims, so the obvious meaning was "for the most
part" or "in general".

------
Asparagirl
Oh man, is this relevant to my interests. An organization I founded is
currently in a state-level Freedom of Information law fight -- using the
Missouri Sunshine Law -- against the Missouri Department of Health and Senior
Services, asking for two database dumps as CSV files. The databases have
millions of records covering decades of data, but only about four columns, so
this should take a couple of hours to export, tops. Of course, we're willing
to pay for the USB flash drive to put the files on, and cover any unusual
labor costs to do the export.

The good news is that the Department has agreed that we should have the legal
right to this data.

The bad news is that the Missouri Dept of Health is claiming with a straight
face that they can only retrieve _one day 's worth of data at a time_ from
their mainframe, and must re-run the work job for each and every subsequent
day's data. They claim that it is impossible for their software to select for
a _date range_.

And therefore, they have quoted my organization a price of about one million
dollars and 2.6 years to select and deliver our data.

Shot:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/ReclaimTheRecs/status/74644736092...](https://mobile.twitter.com/ReclaimTheRecs/status/746447360926986240)

Chaser:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/ReclaimTheRecs/status/75116107051...](https://mobile.twitter.com/ReclaimTheRecs/status/751161070513889280)

(Don't worry, we have a good Sunshine Law lawyer and he is as outraged/amused
at this bullshit as we are.)

~~~
HappyFunGuy
Have them offline and copy the raw drive/tape to trusted 3rd party (as they
must do regularly for backups anwyway) and have that 3rd party query the data.
Or if the data is old enough, have them just copy the backup to the 3rd party.

This should eliminate any query expense they would have had (as it's been
replaced by raw data copy expense.)

And the 3rd party is to protect the data you're not supposed to get.

------
rrmm
To be fair, the government's computer systems really are just that crappy.
Technical debt and obsolete systems that still kind-of-sorta work are always
the last things to be addressed in budgets.

There is also no incentive for the government to do anything other than 'try'
in the most perfunctory manner possible. One solution would be to make a
separate entity responsible whose performance is judged based on what they can
actually dig up (of course someone has to get the funds and resources for
these people to work).

There is no incentive to build systems that are optimized for FOIA requests
(ie enough hardware to search the data, or data indexed in ways that make it
easily possible). I doubt servicing FOIA requests is super high up on the spec
list when a system is designed.

There are also legitimate issues concerning cost recovery: think of it in
terms of paying for someone to spin up new instances to hit multi-TB databases
for a couple of days, then paying someone else to see if the results are
responsive, if they're actually releasable in terms of security, privacy, etc.
And then you have to deal with the less legitimate requests that come along. I
think serving FOIA requests is a core part of the government (both ideally and
by law) and resources should be spent accordingly.

Finally, there are government officials, especially at the state and local
level, who use the above excuses to make it hard for people to find out what
they're up to. The worst effect of the issues listed above is providing these
people with cover and plausible excuses which are used to stonewall legitimate
investigation by the people they serve.

~~~
pnathan
This is, I think, the best way to frame it: the systems are actually _that_
bad, and bad actors can misuse the bad systems.

That said, I'd be very curious to hear about people in govtech about how this
plays out in your municipality.

------
cloudjacker
I like how the replacement system costed $425,000,000

The tech company told them on site deploys would be $424,550,000 more
expensive

~~~
mungoid
Yeah I find it hilarious as a contract developer how just because it's
government software that means you can charge like 200 times more for
essentially the same software any other client could get for like 1 million at
most.

I've been doing contract development for a little over 10 years now and even
the most complex projects were never even remotely that expensive. And Im sure
I've probably written at least 85% of the same functionality of whatever that
software does. Hell, I'm sure there is probably open source software that does
similar

~~~
frankydp
Prices of that nature usually include 10-20 year service contracts and onsite
maintainers, to include hardware. Not that the prices are not still inflated,
but the reality of running a contractually 99.99% uptime, multi decade, and
completely backwards compatible platform is not trivial, or anything south of
multi millions of dollars at the federal scale especially.

------
MilnerRoute
At Slashdot someone pointed out that the student requested a search that
should've pulled up his own earlier FOIA requests -- and didn't -- thus
proving their system was inadequate.

[https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/07/17/0224251/is-the-
doj-u...](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/07/17/0224251/is-the-doj-using-
obsolete-software-to-subvert-foia-requests)

~~~
wwalser
This was also mentioned in the linked article.

------
HappyFunGuy
They're using "aged people" to frustrate as well. If there was some more
meritocracy, or better pay, we might be able to get some new, technically
useful, blood in there. Personal accountability wouldn't hurt either. It works
for more than business and families.

~~~
tanderson92
You are implying that meritocracy or better pay would go towards better
results for the FOIA requester.

An equally likely interpretation is that the meritocracy is delivering the
desired results _from the government 's perspective of interests_.

~~~
DominikR
I'd say that most energetic people with skills would never waste their time
with such nonsense. They can make real money in the private sector.

~~~
jlgaddis
Not everyone is solely motivated by money.

~~~
douche
The rest of us like having a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and our
student loan payments made on time.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
It is possible to have both.

~~~
DominikR
It is, but spending your energy on researching and implementing the most
effective way to annoy and obstruct people that are trying to exercise their
rights?

Generally people that could work wherever they want and choose to not chase
after money will probably go for something that has a high moral value (or is
a noble cause) to them, like helping the poor. But not something like this.

I'd imagine that the only thing they might get out if this is political power
which should translate into money.

------
aestetix
I think this is less about a deliberate attempt to frustrate FOIA, and more
about lazy government workers who see no reason to fix something that isn't
broken (in their opinion).

~~~
pc86
It is departmental policy to do the most limited search possible in an attempt
to return as few results as possible. That is the very definition of a
deliberate attempt to frustrate both the letter and the spirit of FOIA.

