from Hacker News

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

by chaps on 3/3/25, 1:30 AM with 37 comments

• by jessriedel on 3/3/25, 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.

• by akudha on 3/3/25, 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?

• by dang on 3/3/25, 3:36 AM

  Recent and related:

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

• by joshka on 3/3/25, 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/

• by qingcharles on 3/3/25, 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)

• by exabrial on 3/3/25, 3:39 PM

  So dumb that the default behavior of the governments (State and Fed) is to withhold information. This isn't classified information and shouldn't be treated as such.

  100% onboard with shrinking the government.

• by emorning3 on 3/3/25, 3:47 PM

  This government doesn't honor its commitments to friend, foes, or citizens

• by joering2 on 3/3/25, 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? :)