That's such an insane response from the government. Why the hell are they printing, cutting and photocopying emails?

[1] was a lot crazier than I was expecting and I read the whole thing. I’m glad you didn’t have to face any serious repercussions.

There's an interesting thing about the Seattle story.

You asked for records on 32 million emails and they responded that they'd have to review the emails to make sure they (Seattle) didn't release anything sensitive.

They then agreed that because you only requested metadata, they wouldn't need to review the emails. (Your article isn't fully clear about whether they made this observation spontaneously or in response to some communication from you.)

And then, they released the emails to you with no review. This caused a scandal and the city's CTO resigned.

The actual sequence of events tends to suggest that when they thought they'd need to run a review, they were right. When they were persuaded that they shouldn't need to (which was true), they messed up the release, broke a bunch of laws, and caused big problems for themselves. The fact that they shouldn't have needed a review didn't stop them from needing it in reality.

This raises the more general question of how to think about responses along the lines of "for a competent agency, this request wouldn't be burdensome, but we aren't a competent agency".

In the past I FOIA requested 100 universities for their grades - https://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/

There are some really hilarious responses when asking for student grade distributions (i.e. records they 100% have):

> Purdue University does not have such a record in existence. One would have to be created in order to fulfill your request. Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act puts no obligation on a public agency to create a record in order to satisfy a records request. Therefore, Purdue has no records to provide.

> The University of Utah received your GRAMA request. In that request you seek grade distributions for all formal courses at the University of Utah for the last five years. You requested this information in a digital CSV format. We can only provide a paper format. The report for the last five years is 9,714 pages. The reasonable copying fee for documents responsive to most GRAMA requests is $.25 per copy. Therefore, your cost for this report will be $2,428.50.

Often you can request it in the format they have available, etc. You can also apply pressure by submitting a different request, i.e. all the invoices or secondary records, then have AI scan them.

Good luck with OMB. I’m glad you have the media calling you a “Good Samaritan”.

Great work, keep at it!