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Is The DOJ Using Obsolete Software To Subvert FOIA Requests? (theguardian.com)
"A new lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public," reports The Guardian. Slashdot reader Bruce66423 writes:
An MIT PhD student has filed a suit in Federal court alleging that the use of a 21-year-old, IBM green screen controlled search software to search the Department of Justice databases...constitutes a deliberate failure to provide the data that should be being produced.
Ryan Shapiro's lawsuit alleges "failure by design," saying that the Justice Department records are inadequately indexed -- and that they fail to search the full text of their records when responding to requests "When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds 'sorry, we tried' without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors." The FBI has a $425 million software system to handle FOIA requests, but refuses to use it, saying that would be "needlessly duplicative...and wasteful of Bureau resources."
Ryan Shapiro's lawsuit alleges "failure by design," saying that the Justice Department records are inadequately indexed -- and that they fail to search the full text of their records when responding to requests "When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds 'sorry, we tried' without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors." The FBI has a $425 million software system to handle FOIA requests, but refuses to use it, saying that would be "needlessly duplicative...and wasteful of Bureau resources."
don't look behind that green screen cause it's not even plugged in.
... intentionally...
When the Federal government is invloved, don't blame on intentional malice that which can be explained by consequences of Republican budget cuts.
.
Indeed, I've often seen Republicans complain [loudly] about government problems that are a direct consequence of their budget cuts. It is almost as if the Republicans are intentionally crippling government so that they can then criticize government for being crippled.
Green screen........mellenials.
Your post is a political flame-bait. Why don't you volunteer and pay additional taxes, let's say double of what you are paying now.
Lead by example. And encourage others to pay up.
But you won't. Because, most likely, even if you double your taxes you will not be paying the average.
But most importantly, because you want OTHERS to pay, but you want to keep your own privileges.
... are people really so ignorant that they truly think the government is going to be honest and open about anything they do just because a piece of paper says so? The FoIA is snake oil. You serve exactly two purposes to the government: tax cattle and cannon fodder. I'm sure the cows out munching grass in the field view their human keepers much as so many of you view your political masters.
... intentionally...
When the Federal government is invloved, don't blame on intentional malice that which can be explained by consequences of Republican budget cuts.
It's too bad we don't have another party, a group of people who could come together and vote as a bloc to prevent these sorts of outrages.
...because you want ...
As your message so aptly illustrates, you have no idea what I want. :)
"because you want OTHERS to pay, but you want to keep your own privileges."
But when corporations externalize their costs, socialize their losses, that's fine?
More recently, the FBI’s own investigation into the September 11 attacks found that “[o]n September 11, 2001, the Bureau’s information technology was inadequate to support its counterterrorism mission”, noting further that “[t]he FBI’s legacy investigative information system, the Automated Case Support (ACS), was not very effective in identifying information or supporting investigations”.
kinda bad when even you are on record as saying the system sucks.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Not only have the state of the art in searching normal databases not changed in the last 21 years (specialized cases like web searches excluded), the use of "green screens" rather than a web interface have nothing to do with the quality of searches - the _real_ complaint is that the full capabilities of the existing system isn't used!
The DoJ is one of many departments these days that are run for the benefit of the of the administration, not to serve justice or even the American people.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If it works, then it's fine. If it doesn't work, then it is not fine.
Same for fancy search systems with 3d opengl animated progress bars written in vb.net, or whatever. Though if I have to look at it, I'd prefer it to be fast at searching instead of animated at the "eye candy".
It's not a taxes or no taxes choice. Even Libertarians don't want zero government spending, and I think would probably support spending on things like FOIA request servicing. The people need accurate information about what the government is doing if we're going to properly give consent to be governed.
We know what you need. You typed the evidence yourself.
I don't think they can do that kind of surgery yet.
By requesting a search that should have netted his own earlier FOIA requests, and didn't, Ryan Shapiro was able to demonstrate the inadequacy of the index-term search the FBI is using. Clever.
But, but, but, they don't intend to break the law, so it is okay.
for a moment and this exploitation, benefits of being code.' Don't play parties the In additionc, Raadt's stuuborn lagged behind,
When has a government agency EVER been worried about wasting resources?
The FBI's statement regarding the state of ACS in 2001 was self-serving when you consider that in 2000 they contracted with SAIC to build a replacement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File.
In that context you have to interpret it as the FBI saying "look how smart we were: we started to fix the problem before you even noticed there was one" with a dash of "and this could have been avoided if Congress hadnt stalled procurement funding'.
One point that keeps getting lost on the whole Clinton email fiasco is FOIA requests. Shouldn't she be in jail for violating that law? She was running a private server that contained official government records subject to this Act. She controlled the information that could be "lost" or "not found" whenever she wanted. That was legal but this isnt?
Frequent posts from The Guardian and BBC cover important events in the US that local media fail to report. This should make us wonder why American news media aren't on top of these stories.
Of course tight budgets constrain many traditional news outlets and restrict the ability to really investigate anything. The de-funding of Public Broadcasting was a disaster in American history, forcing a dependence on advertising and fund raising.
But those of us who entertain conspiracy theories may suspect that the 'free press' in the US is heavily influenced by various pressures from government and advertisers. For instance, many media are now forbidden at Trump rallies because they have offended The Donald by asking serious questions. Some media are unwelcome at White House briefings. Your local city/state politicians also have preferred, cooperative, outlets for their announcements. Cooperation with big advertisers is also important for American media to survive financially. Evil Monsanto stories go on page 3 or nowhere at all.
Most US publishers share with their readers the political posturing of government officials and the promotional 'news' of advertisers but fail to investigate anything. The remainder of US news is crime, weather, celebrities, a smattering of drama about terrorist activity, and no mention of large parts of the world like Latin America.
So, thanks Guardian and BBC, for a fresh look at the world and my own country.
...omphaloskepsis often...
The allegation is that only searches of an incomplete index are ever performed for FOIA purposes, and such searches are (1) archaic and unusual nowadays, (2) rarely find the requested material. That's more likely misfeasance than innocent.
The DOJ is an agency that ought to find compliance with law of primary interest, and arguments of 'needlessly duplicative' ring false. The plaintiff's test was amusing: he asked DOJ to find his previous FOIA requests, and was told there was no record...
This isn't about the hardware. The most important aspect is that the FOI searches only look at an index hand-built by whatever person entered the record. There appears to be no full text search for these external requests. Internal requests take advantage of modern techniques. Public requests are limited, by design. Kudos for exposing this by well crafted requests. "We tried" is not sufficient.
I've worked with government IT and it's behind the time everywhere. It's not a conspiracy. It's a constantly budget conflict.
When you have budget X and it's near impossible to get funding. This kind of stuff happens on a regular basis. IT winds up just making it work.. good enough for as long as they possibly can. Like a poor person or minimalist trying to get 50 years out of their old pickup.
It's a nice simple argument to make to a judge as well:
"Your Honor, if you approved a subpoena for records and the response was 'We searched and found nothing responsive,' would you accept that response if you knew that the search consisted of nothing but looking at a list of filenames? After all, that's a search - a very poor one, but a search nonetheless."
fencepost
just a little off
This is the same Federal government that uses a mainframe system from the Kennedy administration in the 1960s to manage tax collection. If the USG can't upgrade a system that is responsible for its own core revenue generation, what makes you think they'll prioritize the FOIA system?
But most importantly, because you want OTHERS to pay, but you want to keep your own privileges
Look, I realize you're probably one of those 'all taxes are theft' twerps but let's get something straight: You think your taxes are too high? They are. They are because the percentage of taxes paid by working people vs wealthy individuals and corporations is way out of whack compared to when we had an actual middle class and high standard of living.
That's because conservatives give tax cuts to their rich buddies while giving you a pittance, they defund programs that help actual people, and excessively fund things like weapons systems even the military doesn't want.
They then use the fact that they effectively raised your taxes and cut your services to make you hate 'big government'. Other than pandering to the religious it's all they've got. If people actually got value for their taxes like they do in some other countries then who needs these austerity pushing conservatives whose only products are war and human misery?
That's an interesting theory. It has one fatal flaw. every time one of those "tax cuts for the rich" got passed, the percentage of federal revenue paid by the top 1% went up.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The reason so many Repubplicans DESPISE Miitch McConnel, John Boehner and Paul Ryan is that they have FULLY FUNDED the Obama admin budgets for EVERYTTHING including Obamacare and Planned Parenthood!
Last year, these feckless fools surrendered to Obama completely and gave him an agreement to not limit the debt and not cut the budgets for TWO YEARS (i.e. a free pass for the rest of his presidency)
If you think any government agencies are unable to act beacuse of buget cuts, please explain this: The IRS which continually complains it cannot assist taxpayers becuase it lacks the money gives millions of dollars to its own employees as bonuses even though they are tax dodgers!
How about THIS: The GSA which has been awash in scandals about its incompetence for many years thinks nearly all its employees deserve bonuses and has been handing those bonuses out like candy.
This has been going on all over Washington DC for many years, which is a small part of why a small city that was supposed to be just place where representatives of the people periodically met to do limited government duties before returning home has instead become the hub around which most of the wealthies counties in the nation now reside.
The US government took in more tax money under Obama than under any predient in History, including the presidents who had to buy computers for their administrations back when computers were very rare and extremely expensive. When the IRS and the rest of the agencies were setup, cheap desktop computers did not exist. What's the excuse now?
form an enity that was OFFICIALLY known as the “Media Management Midnight Unit” at a West Virginia facility to degauss over 400 backup tapes to destroy all the e-mail records of Lois Lerner and her colleagues related to the suppression of the TEA Party, even as the congress was lawfully demanding those records.
Why should I pay more for something that benefits everyone? If you don't want to pay your fucking taxes then get the hell out and please don't come back.
Hardly the green screen era for NEW software. Maybe the DOJ got their dinoware in 1997 but the sw is not from that year.
this is why I wish Slashdot still had an edit function. Still not the green screen era though
The judicial Watch case that recently caused Clinton's IT guy to plead the 5th, caused Clinton's assistant Cheryl Mills to claim atty-client-privilege (Mills is a lawyer in addition to being Hillary's aide at State Dept) and caused Hillary's sidekick Huma Abadin to have to be deposed under oath is precisely about a FOIA request they filed several years ago which returned a result from the State Department that NO RECORDS COULD BE FOUND.... and then it was discovered that the State Dept had none of Hillary's e-mails and claimed it did not even know about her server and thus never tried to find anything on that server - Oh, and of course Hillary then deleted over 30K files from that server, transferred the rest of the files to a flash drive which was handed to her personal lawyer, before then having her server totally wiped.
Please refrain from further posts on anything not inside a video game, since you clearly pay no attention to the real world.
oh, and of course, Laws are only for little people, let them eat cake.
You don't understand math. That fact means exactly the opposite of what you're purporting it to. They don't always pay no taxes and even if they pay less tax as a percentage (say 10% arbitrarily) they will pay more of the pie because they have twice as much money (taken from the middle class) as before.
Thank you for your shit post.
Open with a red herring about tax donations and bring it home with an ad hominem.
Truly, your contribution belies your character.
US citizens are unable to perform FOIA requests on Hillary's server anyways so what's the point.
She broke many laws when she used a personal server.
First and foremost, pertaining to this thread, FOIA requests are impossible to perform.
It is not allowed int the first place. (ILLEGAL)
It was insecure. (ILLEGAL)
It was hacked.
It contained classified information. (ILLEGAL)
May classified and sensitive emails and information was permanently scrubbed from the drives. (ILLEGAL)
Furthermore the DOJ and FBI are in on the corruption, deciding not to pursue charges. Wait, What??? (ILLEGAL)
In not charging Hillary the DOJ and FBI effectively tossed aside the rule of law; a form of lawlessness. (ILLEGAL)
SHE WAS HIDING SENSITIVE AND CLASSIFIED INFORMATION SHE DID NOT WANT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO SEE AS WELL AS US CITIZENS.