
The Strangest FOIA Redactions - pmoriarty
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/10/redacted.html
======
Turukawa
I've filed over 1,600 FOI requests for commercial ratepayer data in the UK
over the last 4 years, and I've seen some truly pathetic reasons for rejection
of my requests. The worst are the ones claiming that such data would cause
terrorism.

------
btrettel
I filed a FOI request to the UK Ministry of Defence for a classified report in
my field. About a month later they gave me a copy. The only redactions were
names of various researchers, including the names of the authors of the report
that I requested. The odd part was that I already knew the authors' names and
gave them in the request in the first place. Must have been some policy that
is followed regardless of whether it makes sense.

~~~
jrootabega
What if you knew the names of some of them but took a guess at the rest?
Including the names would confirm your guess.

~~~
taneq
Good point, the same way if someone phones you out of the blue and asks you to
confirm your name and date of birth (or other personally identifiable
information), you don't tell them anything.

------
heelix
I was amazed at how quickly they processed my FOIA requests. Asked customs for
my travel so I could match up some dates on my heavily stamped passport.
Within a month or so, they sent me a decade of travel all cleanly printed out.
I'd already sent out the guestimate which is what inspired the request - but
it was nice to sync up what I thought it was to what they thought it was.

~~~
j16sdiz
Not surprising. Searching travel record is what they do in daily operation
(applying visa, border control, etc..).

------
lykr0n
The person who can make an amazing, open source search engine (like the Google
Appliance) that can take in Exchange Servers, File Shares, and any other data
source and turn around and be able to do full text search on the data would
become very rich- or very well liked.

Some of the examples here show that even in the government, information is not
really centrally cataloged or searchable. One hand doesn't know about the
other. Maybe some of it is malice, but I have to think part of it is just not
having the ability to search Email, File Shares, Sharepoint, et cetera quickly
and easily.

~~~
sansnomme
Elasticsearch?

~~~
lykr0n
You need to add data to Elasticsearch for it to be useful. I wrote a search
engine for Confluence using Elasticsearch- which is amazing, but you need to
add components to get it functional.

I'm thinking a "index this site" or "Index this fileshare" and go.

~~~
sansnomme
Think you can write a blog post on general purpose indexing with
Elasticsearch?

(Also, thoughts on Mayan EDMS?)

------
bpchaps
Neat - one of my requests is listed!

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/foilies-2019#seattle](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/foilies-2019#seattle)

