I have some sympathy for the bill. My spouse worked for a state agency that handled construction contracts. Whenever they awarded a contact to a company, they were promptly FOILed by competing companies trying to get as much information as they could to hopefully land the next contract. Removing private and proprietary information from all the requested documents - which usually included some long email chains - ate up lots of staff time. I'm not sure this benefited the public. Charging for staff hours makes a great deal of sense in these cases.
"Redaction isn’t terribly difficult to do correctly."
It can be. Multiple layers of vague regulations, multiple interpretations, and lots of shades of grey. Some FOIL requests can be huge, so you're reading through hundreds or thousands of pages searching for sensitive information. And since FOIL requests have a time limit, you're usually in a hurry.
So mistakes get made. And people who have never dealt with redaction before get pulled into the job. Records Access Officer tends to be one of those hats that gets stuck on someone too junior to object, and they're frequently too inexperienced to know the job. Adobe Pro makes the actual redacting easy, but you need to pay for the license.
Oftentimes it takes a special widget or technique to get the records into a PDF. Paper documents are obvious - although they can create their own problems - but what do you do w/ a database? I know someone who bluescreened three computers in a day converting long email chains (w/ attached documents) into PDF.
Blech, sorry for the speil. Short version: yeah, actually it can get tricky and I feel a lot of sympathy for people who rarely do it having their efforts put in the spotlight.
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I have some sympathy for the bill. My spouse worked for a state agency that handled construction contracts. Whenever they awarded a contact to a company, they were promptly FOILed by competing companies trying to get as much information as they could to hopefully land the next contract. Removing private and proprietary information from all the requested documents - which usually included some long email chains - ate up lots of staff time. I'm not sure this benefited the public. Charging for staff hours makes a great deal of sense in these cases.
[Subject Redacted]
"Redaction isn’t terribly difficult to do correctly." It can be. Multiple layers of vague regulations, multiple interpretations, and lots of shades of grey. Some FOIL requests can be huge, so you're reading through hundreds or thousands of pages searching for sensitive information. And since FOIL requests have a time limit, you're usually in a hurry. So mistakes get made. And people who have never dealt with redaction before get pulled into the job. Records Access Officer tends to be one of those hats that gets stuck on someone too junior to object, and they're frequently too inexperienced to know the job. Adobe Pro makes the actual redacting easy, but you need to pay for the license. Oftentimes it takes a special widget or technique to get the records into a PDF. Paper documents are obvious - although they can create their own problems - but what do you do w/ a database? I know someone who bluescreened three computers in a day converting long email chains (w/ attached documents) into PDF. Blech, sorry for the speil. Short version: yeah, actually it can get tricky and I feel a lot of sympathy for people who rarely do it having their efforts put in the spotlight.