If all goes according to plan, this sort of thing won't be happening in Michigan anymore.

It's not at all clear if the police in Michigan are using the full extent of these [cellphone data-slurping] tools, and that's what the ACLU was curious about. So, it filed a Freedom of Information Act request on the matter... and was told that it would cost $544,680 to get that information. That doesn't sound like "freedom" of information, now does it?

A new state FOIA law [pdf link], signed recently by Governor Rick Snyder (and shepherded through the 2-year process by then-State Rep., now Senator Mike Shirkey), puts a limit on how much government agencies can charge to fulfill requests.

Public records will become cheaper and easier to access under changes to Michigan's Freedom of Information Act.

Government agencies will not be allowed to charge more than 10 cents per page for copies of public records; they can face increased fines for delaying responses, and people seeking the records now can sue if they consider the fees to be exorbitant.

This capped per-page amount should prevent entities like the ACLU being charged a half-million dollars for a records request. Not to single out the Michigan police, but it seems to be one government agency that treats FOIA requests like get-rich-quick schemes.

Case in point is the corruption scandal involving Speaker Jase Bolger (R – Marshall) and Rep. Roy Schmidt (R – Grand Rapids).

The police report was some 2,000 pages of text messages, bank statements, and interviews surrounding the Speaker’s election rigging scheme in Grand Rapids, and the Michigan State Police Post in Ionia told anyone who wanted a copy of that report to pony up $1,896.30, including $73.83 in hourly compensation for a detective to pull the records.

This cap would turn $1800 into about $20.00. This isn't going to sit well with government agencies who have used high fees to reduce their transparency. Expect those to address the "problem" by chalking up more hourly fees to make up for the "lost revenue." This, too, is addressed in the law's language, which forbids the charging of "arbitrary or capricious fees." But at the end of it all, there's nothing in the punishments section that will actually deter agencies from doing exactly that.

The law allows requesters who believe they are being overcharged for records to sue and ask a court to lower the fee. If the court concludes the public body arbitrarily and capriciously charged an unreasonable fee, the court must assess $1,000 in punitive damages.

The new law also increases punitive damages from $500 to $2,000 on public bodies that arbitrarily and capriciously break the law by refusing or delaying the release of public records.

It also requires courts to fine public bodies $2,500 to $7,500 for willfully and intentionally failing to follow the law. The fines are paid to the state.

When the state collects a fine from a state agency, it's little more than money being passed back and forth under the disapproving glare of an overseer. In some cases, the money may transfer from a city to the state, but in no case will it ever pass from the person authorizing the forbidden behavior to the taxpayers. This isn't even a hand slap. It barely rises to the level of a disappointed sigh.

On the other hand, it does work out a little better for the citizens making the requests. If the court finds in the requester's favor, they may be awarded damages. On top of that, the law adds an additional requirement tied to agencies' pockets that should expedite request fulfillment.

If a government misses a deadline for responding to a request, it must discount the fees charged by 5% for each day the response is late. The maximum discount is 50%.

It looks pretty good on paper, but the implementation may not be as smooth. Without a doubt, any request that makes its way into the court system can expect several rounds of challenges and appeals. The same goes for any agency's stalling tactics. While this law does apply a much-needed cap, it still leaves room for abuse and its deterrents will do little to stop arbitrary fees and long, expensive court battles -- the latter of which use taxpayer funds to defend the withholding of taxpayer-funded documents from taxpayers.

While banks pioneered the use of sneaky fees back in the 80s, the broadband industry has been taking the practice to an entirely new level. Whether it's "regulatory recovery fees," "Internet cost recovery fees," or "non-telecom services surcharges," gouging customers with nonsensical below-the-line fees has become an art form for the TV and broadband industries as they work to raise rates while leaving the advertised rates the same. In addition to generating major revenue (Comcast makes $300 million per quarter from modem rental fees alone), it allows a cable or ISPs' lobbyists and policy wonks to downplay soaring TV and broadband rates since the real prices (including fees and surcharges) usually aren't even actually being analyzed.

In addition to soaring cable modem fees, the last year has seen a spike in two new sneaky fees: a "broadcast TV surcharge" and the addition of new sports programming fees. In both instances, companies are taking the cost of doing business (programming costs) and burying it below the line so they can misleadingly advertise a lower price. It's false advertising, and it's sleazy, yet the industry's latest defense of this practice is -- amazingly enough -- that they're just interested in being transparent for the benefit of the consumer:

"In a statement, Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp said the charge is due to broadcast “retransmission costs,” which have more than doubled in recent years. "Beginning in 2014, we will itemize a portion of broadcast retransmission costs as a separate line item to be more transparent with our customers about the factors that drive price changes," he said. “In 2014, we will not increase the price of Limited Basic or Digital Preferred video service, and adjustments to other video service prices will be lower than they would have been without the Broadcast TV Fee.”

You see, we're not raising prices because we're raising prices in a more sneaky fashion! Now if you would be so kind, could you please applaud us for being transparent? Comcast's defense appears to have now become the industry's standard talking point. Defending its increase in all the same fees, Time Warner Cable tells a similar story to the Los Angeles Times:

"Dennis Johnson, a Time Warner Cable spokesman, defended the higher modem-rental cost by pointing out that the fee for Internet access hasn't gone up — yet. The company's last increases for various Internet service levels was in March. "There is no change in the price of Time Warner Cable Internet plans, although speeds have increased," Johnson said..."Our fees paid to local broadcast channels have soared 60% the past two years alone, and the cost of cable sports networks has increased 91% since 2008," Johnson said. "We think it's important to show customers the impact of these rising costs through a specific item on their bill," he said of the charge for sports channels."

In other words, the use of sneaky fees is a community service. Cable operators offered up a similar justification to Bloomberg in regards to the use of new regional sports fees:

"The rising cost of sports programming isn’t new, but it’s escalating dramatically, and we think that it’s important to show customers the impact of these rising costs through a specific item on their bills,” Amirshahi said in an e-mail. Cablevision, in a statement, said that their rate increases are “only a fraction of the rising costs of sports and other programming."

In addition to the pretense that these companies are helping consumers by bullshitting about their advertised price, they'd also have you ignore the fact that, in many instances, they are the sports broadcaster that's busy raising rates. Most cable operators now own regional sports broadcasters, and they're frequently among the most egregious when it comes to pushing higher and higher rates for the same content. As it stands, the lack of regulatory attention to these practices means we're only going to see the industry get more creative moving forward. So what's next? Passing on installer gasoline costs? An extra surcharge for talking to an actual human being? A "technician calorie expenditure surcharge?" The future of bullshit fees is wide, wide open.

There are certainly some similarities between the airline and broadband industries. Both are pampered, uncompetitive markets suffering from regulatory capture that allows them to literally write the laws that govern their respective business segments. Both insist that constantly skyrocketing prices are justified by an ever-improving "customer experience," while the actual customer experience continues to get worse as companies consolidate and competitors dwindle. Taking their cues from banking "innovations" in the 80s, both industries have also become obsessed with screwing over their customers via the use of increasingly sneaky fees.

This New Yorker article by neutrality godfather Tim Wu makes this rather clear, noting that the airline industry made $31 billion largely from fees in 2013, a number that's sure to have skyrocketed in 2014 as the airlines get increasingly "creative" in below-the-line charges for basic amenities that used to just be part of standard service. Some friends of mine recently rode Allegiant Air, and told me the company charged a $5 fee just to print your boarding pass on top of the usual assortment of annoying fees (it's worth noting their beverages, including water, also aren't complimentary).

While the airlines like to frame this as an increase in consumer choice (hey, you can choose to not enjoy a pillow!), Wu aptly notes how this approach to price discrimination in less competitive markets consistently results in making your customers more miserable:

"But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins. The necessity of degrading basic service provides a partial explanation for the fact that, in the past decade, the major airlines have done what they can to make flying basic economy, particularly on longer flights, an intolerable experience."

Earlier this year, Mike had already pointed out more than a few similarities between the broadband and airline industries, and how this behavior is closely tied to the net neutrality debate. Wu doesn't even mention broadband, though both industries feature oligopolies that abuse the lack of competition to keep the bar at ankle height to cut costs, then enjoy charging consumers more if they'd like to be less miserable. The overall transaction costs (physical, mental and monetary) of such a model become absurdly high, reducing the utility of the service and incentivizing an approach where consumers have to pay to elevate themselves beyond intentionally poor or constrained service, resulting in the flying experiences most of us know and love today.

The broadband industry isn't much different (something Stacey Higginbotham pointed out recently as well). That consumers are being given amazing new levels of choice and flexibility is AT&T's justification for the company's Sponsored Data effort, which erects entirely arbitrary consumer usage caps, then charges companies an extra fee if they'd like to bypass them. Likewise, T-Mobile argues that exempting only the biggest music services from the company's usage caps delivers great benefits to the consumer (despite tilting the playing field against smaller operators). While the net neutrality conversation (and the feeble rules we've seen so far) focuses on outright blocking of websites or throttling of connections or services (even though even the worst-behaved ISPs now avoid both), the real danger at the moment is the all-too-clever efforts that constrain the user while pretending to offer greater freedom.

Like the airline industry, in regulatory conversation there's a tendency to see these efforts as simple pricing creativity, when the only creative thing about them is in convincing consumers that less is more. Without meaningful network neutrality rules (in the stark absence of real competition), we're creating a slippery slope of intentionally hamstrung services where your only option is to pay a steep premium if you'd like to be treated even remotely like a human being.

For years now, the broadband and TV industry has hammered its customers with all manner of creatively sneaky fees, buried below the line to jack up consumer prices -- while leaving the advertised price alone. It's clearly false advertising, though regulators have seen fit to ignore these practices as business as usual -- even though many of the fee names have become increasingly, aggressively ridiculous. CenturyLink, for example, charges its users a $1 "Internet Cost Recovery Fee" and a $1.55 "Non-Telcom Services Surcharge" -- both fees are little more than pure profit and entirely untethered to logic or any actual service rendered.

Other ISPs happily charge customers a non-government mandated "regulatory recovery fee," purportedly to counter ambiguous government regulation -- despite a decade of being deregulated. The latest obnoxious fee trend is a "broadcast TV fee" that has been showing up on many cable customers' bills over the last year. This too is little more than the cable company breaking out a portion of programming costs and burying it below the line -- again to give the illusion of a lower advertised price.

Despite the fact that Time Warner Cable is putting on a polite face to get its $45 billion fusion with Comcast approved, it's certainly no exception to this aggressive sneaky fee parade. The company was just sued for billing shenanigans and the vast difference between promotional and real world prices. Undaunted, the company informed customers this month that it's socking them with a new $2.75-per-month sports fee, as well as bumping its broadcast TV surcharge from $2.25 to $2.75. Like most cable operators, Time Warner Cable is quick to blame broadcasters for the increases:

"Time Warner Cable said broadcast fees have risen more than 60% in the past two years and that the cost of cable sports channels has increased 91% since 2008. The company said the charges only represent a fraction of what it pays to programmers."

Amusingly unmentioned is that Time Warner Cable itself owns Time Warner Cable Sports Net and SportsNet LA -- two sports channels directly responsible for some of the highest sports programming costs in the nation. Despite blaming programming costs, Time Warner Cable is also quick to bump its monthly modem rental fee from $6 to $8 (though, fortunately users can buy their own modem to avoid this charge). All in all, it's part of the cable and broadband industry's ingenious plan to self-immolate and mindlessly raise rates in the face of competition from disruptive new viewing options.

These costs not only are an assault on customers in uncompetitive TV and broadband markets, but they skew all policy conversations on industry pricing because they're historically not included in price analysis. In other words, all of those studies that already indicate how U.S. consumers pay significantly more for broadband and television aren't even including this layer of creative pricing fat companies pile on top. One can only guess the new heights of obnoxious fee creativity obtainable by a larger, combined Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Ready for the "Shut up, it's because we can" fee?

We recently wrote about a lawsuit filed in New York against Time Warner Cable for "deceptive acts and practices" regarding hidden charges and fees, and a failure to deliver a promised rate for broadband access. Tons of people have been pointing out that they've seen the same thing -- and now, down in Maryland, Verizon has agreed to pay $1.375 million to Verizon FiOS customers who found they were hit with a variety of hidden and unexpected fees with their broadband connections:

The telecommunications company agreed to pay about $1.375 million to Maryland customers who the state's Consumer Protection Division says were improperly charged termination fees or had to pay for "inadequately disclosed" equipment costs in order to use the service, according to the attorney general's office.

The firm also agreed to pay a $250,000 penalty to the state, and $75,000 in costs

Of course, in agreeing to settle, Verizon also "denied that it violated any Maryland laws" but promises to more accurately represent fees in the future.

The settlement follows a wide-ranging investigation of Verizon, including its alleged failure to deliver promised promotional items to new FiOS customers, such as free televisions and gift cards; its offer of bundled prices that did not include the cost to lease equipment necessary to receive the services; its alleged practice of assessing early termination fees when customers cancelled after they did not receive what they had been promised; and other issues, including billing complaints, contract disputes and poor customer service. Although Verizon denied that it violated any Maryland laws, it agreed to a settlement that addresses the Division's concerns.

This is not the first time Verizon has had to pay up in this manner. Obviously, the amount paid up here is barely even pocket change for Verizon, which is why these kinds of activities continue. When you have monopolistic or near monopolistic control over your market, you can get away with all sorts of questionable fees and charges on users.

When the cable industry started laying coaxial cable and TV deployments were just beginning, local franchise agreements often required that the cable operators evenly build out networks so that as many people as possible could get service. Those requirements are one of the only reasons millions of people outside of the biggest metropolitan areas even have the cable and DSL duopoly or monopoly they so enjoy today.

When the phone companies entered the TV business back around 2006, AT&T and Verizon lobbyists went state-by-state convincing state lawmakers to pass franchise "reform." While some reform was absolutely needed (thanks largely to a smattering of greedy local governments abusing their authority in order to get paid), the telcos' version of reform involved not only gutting most even build out requirements -- but in places like Wisconsin gutting all consumer protections (and even in some cases eminent domain rights) entirely. Obviously making state regulators toothless benefited cable companies too.

Fast forward a few years and there's obviously more than a few TV and broadband landline connection gaps, despite tens of billions in entirely-unaccountable subsidies thrown at cable and phone companies to ensure these gaps didn't exist. Combined with the rise of Google Fiber and the somewhat theatrical industry fiber to the press release response, suddenly cherry picking your broadband deployments has become fashionable, creating a huge new chasm between broadband haves and broadband have-nots, especially when it comes to faster services (three quarters of the country has no competitive choice at speeds faster than 25 Mbps).

While both politicians and industry pay a lot of lip service to shoring up these gaps, the reality is that nobody really wants to fix them, and nobody wants to audit the carriers' deep history of subsidies. When many broadband have-nots then decide that they'd like to join the modern era and get wired, they often wind up being told they have to foot the often over-inflated bill. As Ars Technica recently explored, that bill can be almost comical -- such as $20,000 to run coax a third of a mile:

"Time Warner Cable’s (TWC) lines are a third of a mile from Walser’s house, and the company has received more than $10 million in state funding to bring broadband to underserved portions of New York over the past two years. But the company (which will be purchased by Comcast if the government approves the merger) told Walser they won’t do the construction unless he pays more than $20,000. That’s just to reimburse TWC for its troubles—the monthly access bill would be on top of that."

Because Time Warner Cable has no competition at those locations, the company will simply abuse their monopoly position and charge an obscene monthly rate for service on top of that. Considering the billions that telecom companies received to shore up service over the last twenty years (and again, nobody in the history of telecom regulation has ever bothered to do an audit), that's painfully obscene -- and it's a story I've personally seen repeated thousands of times over. Worse perhaps, Time Warner Cable, like so many of these companies, has worked tirelessly to pass state level laws that restrict these communities from building their own broadband -- even in locations they refuse to connect.

In other words, taxpayers got to pay billions in subsidies, then get to pay an arm and a leg a second time just to be held hostage by a company that repeatedly makes it very clear it hates their guts. When they decide to do something about it themselves, they run into state laws prohibiting their right to improve their own area's infrastructure. Yet we're told time and time again by the broadband industry that it's not only immensely competitive, but is a shining beacon to the rest of the world for technology innovation, creativity and government policy.

This may be about 60% stunt and 40% forceful nudge, but I'm still behind it 100%. For far too long, public officials have treated Freedom of Information laws as an annoyance... at best. In many cases, information designated as eligible for freedom has to be pried out of officials' hands using lawsuits, needlessly-protracted appeals processes or crowd-sourced tenacity.

Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley said he will issue an arrest affidavit today against Rodney Forte, the executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Alliance in Little Rock, for a violation of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.

First off, you can be arrested for violating this act. In Arkansas, any violation of its FOIA law can result in this penalty.

Any person who negligently violates any of the provisions of this chapter shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be punished by a fine of not more than two hundred dollars ($200) or thirty (30) days in jail, or both, or a sentence of appropriate public service or education, or both.

It's nice to see someone following the letter of the law. Not following the letter of the law (and steamrolling its spirit) is what put Forte in the prosecutor's sights. Forte had decided to greet a FOIA request he didn't want to fulfill with the time-honored anti-FOIA tactic of pricing his agency out of the market.

The action comes after the Metropolitan Housing Alliance sent an invoice to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette late Tuesday,charging more than $16,000 to hire outside workers to help the agency comply with a records-release request -- a practice the Little Rock city attorney and other Arkansas Freedom of Information Act experts say is illegal.

It may be illegal, but plenty of agencies do it without suffering anything more than a loss in the court of public opinion. Sure, they may eventually face lawsuits, but that's really just public money being spent in defense of a publicly-funded agency's desire to keep the public separated from public documents. It's about as painful to the offending agency as being punched in someone else's wallet.

This particular form of enforcement is rarely (if ever) deployed, although Arkansas seems to be more aggressive than most states when it comes to punishing violators. In Jegley's 23 years as a county prosecutor, he's never seen this happen. Usually some sort of compromise between requester and requestee is reached before it gets to this point. But that hasn't happened in this dispute, which has been ongoing for several months now -- even involving Little Rock's mayor's intervention on behalf of the requesting party, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola contacted Forte on Wednesday in an attempt to intervene in the latest dispute over records. Stodola is a former Little Rock city attorney and Pulaski County prosecutor.

"I am not familiar with any request for payment for such a large nature as this and based on my interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act, the computer systems that the agency has are required to make this information readily available," Stodola said.

"These kinds of document requests are routine, and when I was prosecutor, virtually all of this kind of information [at most agencies] is kept in an electronic format that can be downloaded quite easily."

Forte claims proprietary software is involved and all documents would need to be printed and scanned before they could be released, but has failed to detail what software the agency is using or released any other technical details. He has also hasn't discussed his agency's failure to comply with another section of the state's FOIA law.

Arkansas Code Annotated 25-19-105 (g) states that any software acquired by an agency "shall be in full compliance with the requirements" of the Freedom of Information Act and "shall not impede public access to records in electronic form."

So, Jegley has answered Forte's obfuscatory power play with one of his own. At this point, Forte's arrest is in the hands of a judge. Jegley still needs to turn his affidavit into a warrant, at which point it may expand to include others involved in the Metropolitan Housing Authority's $16,000 fiasco.

Hopefully, this move will force the documents out of the agency's hands. Clearly, there's something in there it wants hidden -- something likely related to agency's addition of a $92,000/yr deputy executive director during a period when it was shedding nearly a third of its staff and reducing pay to non-salaried employees.

Even if this goes nowhere, it's still incredibly refreshing to see public servants acting to hold other public servants accountable. Other states should take a good look at Arkansas' FOIA law and think about giving their own a few teeth by making violations an arrestable offense.

Say what you want, but one thing has become abundantly clear since the whole Ferguson debacle began: the people running and policing that city aren't interested in your concerns. Throughout this entire process, the city and its police force have obfuscated the facts and people involved in the shooting of a civilian, they have cynically released information and videos when it suits them, and they've treated journalists covering the story with the kind of contempt they normally reserve for their own constituents. And now, utilizing a method previously beta-tested by both local and federal law enforcement agencies, they've decided the best way to respond to the ongoing outcry is to try to charge insane amounts for FOIA requests.

Officials in Ferguson, Missouri, are charging nearly 10 times the cost of some of their own employees' salaries before they will agree to turn over files under public records laws about the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The city has demanded high fees to produce copies of records that, under Missouri law, it could give away free if it determined the material was in the public's interest to see. Instead, in some cases, the city has demanded high fees with little explanation or cost breakdown.

In one case, it billed The Associated Press $135 an hour — for nearly a day's work — merely to retrieve a handful of email accounts since the shooting. That fee compares with an entry-level, hourly salary of $13.90 in the city clerk's office, and it didn't include costs to review the emails or release them.

Allow that to sink in for a moment and marinade in your brain juices: information that could be given for free if it was of public interest is instead being billed at ridiculously high rates. Does anyone seriously want to argue that more transparency out of the Ferguson government isn't in the public's interest? Of course not. This is all about intimidating journalists and trying to put roadblocks in front of likely damning information. Ferguson has a public relations problem in the truest form and their strategy appears to be to freeze out journalists trying to provide information to the public. That won't win them any friends.

And don't think that this strategy is used rarely.

The Washington Post was told it would need to pay $200 at minimum for its requests, including city officials' emails since Aug. 9 discussing Brown's shooting, citizen complaints against Ferguson officers and Wilson's personnel file. The website Buzzfeed requested in part emails and memos among city officials about Ferguson's traffic-citation policies and changes to local elections, but was told it would cost unspecified thousands of dollars to fulfill.

Inquiries about Ferguson's public records requests were referred to the city's attorney, Stephanie Karr, who declined to respond to repeated interview requests from the AP since earlier this month. Through a spokesman late Monday, Karr said Missouri law can require fees but she didn't address why charges specific to the AP's request were nearly tenfold the lowest salary in the city clerk's office. Karr said searching emails for key words constitutes "extra computer programming" that can bring added costs.

Searching emails by keyword now equals "programming?" Brilliant! Although I suppose it's not as egregious as suggesting shooting unarmed civilians equals "policing."

The latest Ed Snowden leak from the Guardian shows that after the FISA court had ruled that aspects of the NSA's data collection program were unconstitutional, the NSA had to work with tech companies to change their technology to avoid capturing some of the information they weren't allowed to capture, and, as a result the NSA paid millions to those tech companies via its Special Source Operations. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a huge bombshell in terms of revelations. It's long been known that the government pays companies for law enforcement assistance/surveillance (e.g. wiretaps) -- and as long as that surveillance is legal, that makes sense and is reasonable. The fact that this cost millions of dollars, however, suggests that it's a pretty big program.

Either way, while many of the Snowden leaks have been a pretty big deal, this one seems like nothing new. It's never been a secret that tech companies were required to reveal certain information under court orders, or that the government pays the companies for the cost. The only thing here is that the companies had to change their systems to make sure that the NSA's collection effort was "in line" with what the FISA Court deemed to be Constitutional. If anything, that makes a lot of sense, as we should want the government to have to cover the costs of making sure that their surveillance efforts are Constitutional. Many of the leaks so far have been a big deal, but this one doesn't seem all that interesting.

While the "big" Prenda appeal is in the central district of California, back in May, we noted that a ruling in the northern district had also said Prenda needed to pay legal fees to Nick Ranallo, in the amount of $9,425. Paul Duffy quickly appealed, but never paid the $455 fee for an appeal. He was warned a few weeks back that he needed to pay up, and still didn't, so the court has now dumped the appeal and locked in the $9,425 fee that Prenda is required to pay. Of course, if they're not even going to pay the $455 for the appeal, I'd imagine that it's going to be nearly impossible to get the $9,425. As we already know, Duffy has claimed that Prenda is winding down its operations... even as a nearly identical operation, with the same basic participants, but called the Anti-Piracy Law Group, sprung up in its place. How long until someone connects those two, and says that the attorneys fees owed can come from the latter as well?