Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

FOIAGeneral

 FOIAGeneral

A quick overview of doing FOIAs in Chicago

Freddy Martinez

February 15, 2018
Tweet

More Decks by Freddy Martinez

Other Decks in How-to & DIY

Transcript

  1. ✤ Motivation ✤ Rules to the game ✤ Exemptions and

    fighting back ✤ Forming request ✤ Tactics + Tips ✤ What to request ✤ Democratizing FOIA + Future Work
  2. What is a public record? ✤ Any tangible record created

    by government* employees during the transaction of public business (restrictions apply). ✤ Regardless of format ✤ Regardless of medium (email, word docs, text message etc) ✤ Regardless of device
  3. Rules to the Game ✤ Every state, city, agency is

    different, and often agencies don’t know the law. If you do, you have a competitive advantage ✤ Illinois has an attorney fee reimbursement ✤ Pay careful attention to deadlines (5 days, unduly burdensome) ✤ You can specify how you want your records ✤ You can request records any way you want, usually
  4. Forming Your Requests ✤ Agencies do not have an obligation

    to answer your questions Compare: “How many brown people sued you last year?”
 Contrast: “Documents sufficient to show the number of lawsuits …” ✤ Use broad* language (What does “documents” mean?) ✤ Offer to explain or describe what documents you want ✤ Link to news stories, other public documents etc
  5. Be Careful ✤ Broad language: You must balance breadth &

    specificity. ✤ Agencies don’t have to answer ambiguous or unclear requests. ✤ You can always re-submit with different language!
  6. “Sheriff’s Office has conducted a diligent and reasonable search but

    no responsive records exist.” –Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office
  7. Exemptions / Redactions ✤ Law enforcement sensitive ✤ Violate Privacy

    laws (HIPPA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Privacy Act, ECPA, etc) ✤ Trade secrets ✤ No obligation to create a record ✤ “Unduly burdensome” ✤ Constructive denials
  8. Fighting Back ✤ Law enforcement sensitive ✤ Think about the

    types of records you can request ✤ Cross reference public statements, court records, etc ✤ Talk to people at the agencies, take contemporaneous notes
  9. Fighting Back ✤ Trade Secret ✤ You might have to

    sue over this one but does the trade secret out weigh public needs to know ✤ Cross reference patents which are all public ✤ Public interest can override trade secret ✤ This one is common because corporations will often be a proxy for responses
  10. Fighting Back ✤ No obligation to create a record. ✤

    a.k.a the fuck off exemption ✤ Often times the data is all there but they don’t want to sort it (request it all) ✤ Remember: You can specify how you want your records ✤ Ask for electronic searches within named databases ✤ Send a separate FOIA to find out how records are stored.
 Sometimes this info is already available. “Systems of Records”
  11. Fighting Back ✤ “Unduly burdensome” ✤ Send a separate FOIA

    to find out how records are stored ✤ Ask for electronic searches ✤ Automate your requests and ask for the same records every week until you get them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  12. Fighting Back ✤ Constructive Denials: common, hard to challenge ✤

    They didn’t actually say “no.” ✤ “Sure we can search, but it’ll cost you $6,000 and we can’t promise that once we find the records they won’t be withheld under some exemption anyway.” ✤ “No responsive records” (where did they search?) ✤ Challenge the sufficiency of the search, or the potential costs involved.
  13. Fighting Back ✤ Appeal everything! 
 [email protected] 
 Public Access

    Counselor
 Office of the Attorney General
 500 S. 2nd Street
 Springfield, Illinois 62701 ✤ You can always sue and it’s to lawyers ✤ FOIA for processing notes of your FOIAs ✤ Use community resources
  14. How do you know what to request? ✤ “Huh, that’s

    weird” moments… ✤ ALPR’s ✤ BPD
  15. ✤ Use MuckRock & its community ✤ Slack (because of

    course there is a Slack channel) ✤ Internet Archive to host docs ✤ Wayback Machine for research