Defense Department Wants $660 Million To Fulfill FOIA Request

Megalith

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I get pretty upset when an agency expects me to pay hundreds of dollars to redact a couple of documents, but that is nothing compared to this—maybe this guy should have narrowed his request a bit.

Mr. Robert R. Jarrett, Director of Operations, Defense Procurement Acquisition Policy, and a FOIA Initial Denial Authority, stated that it is possible that contracts that acquired the requested items are present in the Electronic Documents Access (EDA) system; however, there are more than 30 million contracts in EDA, consisting of more than 45 million documents. No method exists for a complete text search of EDA, as some documents are scans of paper copies. The estimated time required to perform the necessary redactions of proprietary data, assuming 20 minutes per document, is estimated to be 15 million labor hours at an estimated cost of $660 million.
 
What do you expect? The Feds pay 100k for a toilet seat, 50k for a hammer. A very fuel efficient group.
 
What do you expect? The Feds pay 100k for a toilet seat, 50k for a hammer. A very fuel efficient group.
Well you expect to get information for free from your government, no one is asking them to make photocopies, or redact it, hell your tax dollars pay for the storage of it, just allow it be accessed online. Oh no, it's easier to be able to legally put any arbitrary amount on the cost of said information "I want to really know what happened during the Japanese jails during WW2" "sure sir, there will be a 2 bazillion dollar processing fee first and then we'll get that information right to you!"
 
EDA is a shit system apparently.

Sounds like a great system to me... for the government to use to make money off of and avoid giving out information. Now if we are talking about it being a shit system when it comes to actually being able to access data then yes I would have to agree. :)
 
This is rich coming from a department that is missing 9 TRILLION dollars of tax payer dollars. Up from the missing 2.3 trillion reported missing on 10 Sept 2001.

Figures can be found in the GAO report of 2015
 
oh those trillions went into the saudi "so called" terrorists. And today I scraped up catshit from my kids shoes.
 
Ok, I'll have to rain on the parade a bit--I work directly with people charged with doing some of DOD's FOIA requests. You should be glad that we have a system that diffferentiates between information that can be released and information that you and I wouldn't want to hand to people that would do us harm. The problem is that you have to have people with a lot of experience and a not simple system to get documents reviewed (that are usually classified as a whole, for good reasons) so they can be provided to us citizens that request them. So you have a choice--everyone pay more in taxes so we can hire even more federal workers and military people to review even unreasonable requests, or make requestors share part of the cost. Your choice, but I assure you there are hours and hours of labor spent to get this stuff done, and there isn't yet a way to program a machine to anticipate how an enemy might use information that might need to be redacted. Food for thought.
 
Wow, I'd love to get paid $44/hour to look at documents all day.
 
You guys are not seeing the bigger picture. They created the FOIA to appear to be "transparent". Then they put big a big roadblock in the way so as to make it so impractical that no one can use it.
 
Ok, I'll have to rain on the parade a bit--I work directly with people charged with doing some of DOD's FOIA requests. You should be glad that we have a system that diffferentiates between information that can be released and information that you and I wouldn't want to hand to people that would do us harm. The problem is that you have to have people with a lot of experience and a not simple system to get documents reviewed (that are usually classified as a whole, for good reasons) so they can be provided to us citizens that request them. So you have a choice--everyone pay more in taxes so we can hire even more federal workers and military people to review even unreasonable requests, or make requestors share part of the cost. Your choice, but I assure you there are hours and hours of labor spent to get this stuff done, and there isn't yet a way to program a machine to anticipate how an enemy might use information that might need to be redacted. Food for thought.

Sorry, but that sounds like a bullshit excuse. They should have a system in place that is able to search the documents and pull up exactly what is needed. if they need to review it that is fine. But the system still sounds broken as hell.
 
Ok, I'll have to rain on the parade a bit--I work directly with people charged with doing some of DOD's FOIA requests. You should be glad that we have a system that diffferentiates between information that can be released and information that you and I wouldn't want to hand to people that would do us harm. The problem is that you have to have people with a lot of experience and a not simple system to get documents reviewed (that are usually classified as a whole, for good reasons) so they can be provided to us citizens that request them. So you have a choice--everyone pay more in taxes so we can hire even more federal workers and military people to review even unreasonable requests, or make requestors share part of the cost. Your choice, but I assure you there are hours and hours of labor spent to get this stuff done, and there isn't yet a way to program a machine to anticipate how an enemy might use information that might need to be redacted. Food for thought.

Yea who needs a system and all when we have Hilary Clinton spewing TS SCI and above emails all over the place.

That is why I said this is rich coming from DoD.
 
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