Why would they want to make this easier?
Incidentally this is why I'm a huge believer in open management models. They work great in FOSS. Being scrutinized by outsiders forces you to think more carefully about what you do. Within a company, employees are generally disincentivized from giving negative feedback and often don't have the full picture to judge with anyway. Outsiders don't have that problem.
It's kind of like saying "why should the parties in power fix the electoral system if they benefit from it".
But yes, they typically respond via mail, although over the past five years usually with CDs if it's more than a few pages.
The FBI doesn't know who is dead?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Death_Index
Disclaimer: One of my projects TODO is to crowdsource the funding of obtaining the SSDI quarterly from the SSA (its expensive [2]), and then provide it as an open API.
[2] https://www.ssdmf.com/FolderID/1/SessionID/%7B67E8C06C-025F-...
I recently sent in a request for Paul Newman and got nothing back (which was both very disappointing and surprising, given Nixon's well-known hatred of Newman, and Newman being an all-around big name and businessman)...the only hold up was that they required a snail mail address to send things to. I thought they had dropped my request but realized they had sent the "no records found" letter to my mailbox well before the required deadline.
The FOIA law requires agencies to ordinarily respond with twenty business days, thirty business days in "unusual circumstances" and longer than that only in "exceptional circumstances".
However, as bad as the FBI's disrespect for the law is, it doesn't hold a candle to the State Department which has been sitting on a FOIA request of mine since July of 2013. Their attitude seems to be that they don't have to comply with duly enacted laws until and unless compelled to do so by a federal judge.
We should depend on levers and mechanisms.
Please try again within those hours."
sigh
Now, of course, no one is going to jeopardize sales and do that... but I'm glad some of the gov't tries to keep it's business hours based on human labor concepts. A kind of skeuochron.
These organizations are all clamoring to get this sort of thing in place, it's a serious game changer, but it's frankly hard as hell.
I hear a lot of people suggesting these guys are dragging their feet on FOIA requests because they don't want to release their documents. So wrong. Anyone who has worked with large government or private sector document management knows the problems here.
No one (except really young organizations) has the centralized infrastructure in place to make this easy. They're looking at huge amounts of legacy systems, decades worth of warehouses filled with paper records, millions of new e-mails created daily. None of these systems are effectively integrated.
The company I work for has one of only a handful of FOIA systems being shopped to the government right now, and after seeing the hurdles going on here I can tell you first hand that these backlogs aren't because people are dragging their feet. We've been doing ECM stuff for 30 years now, and whenever we come into an organization like this it takes us ages just to help them sort out how to connect this stuff together.
But it's totally worth it. Every organization so far that has managed the move to an electronic FOIA system, despite the slight uptick in requests, has taken a huge bite out of their FOIA backlog just because electronic centralized systems make the FOIA response process so much easier.
Again, congrats to the guys over there. I'm sure this was incredibly hard to put in place.
Here is a 2013 article on someone cleverly abusing this tactic [1]. With the new system in place they'll be able to spot and prevent these tactics more easily.
[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/foia-ryan-shapiro-fb...
Emailing also doesn't require uploading a scan of your driver's license or limit you to one request a day, which the new system does.
Kickstarted and now doing amazing things.
