Court Says Metadata Should Be Released Under Freedom Of Information Act Request
from the commence-metadata-scrubbing dept
Copycense points us to the fascinating news that a federal judge has ordered Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reveal the metadata on a document as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. ICE had responded to the FOIA request (apparently "after significant delay,") but provided the content requested in an unsearchable PDF. The original requestor for the content, the National Day Laborer Organization, complained that this was unfair, and the information had to be supplied with metadata -- and the court agreed. The court also agreed that making the PDF unsearchable was not justified:"Metadata maintained by the agency as a part of an electronic record is presumptively producible under FOIA, unless the agency demonstrates that such metadata is not 'readily producible.'"Sounds like some government employees are going to need to spend the next few weeks scrubbing metadata from documents. Wouldn't want people to find out who really wrote various laws by looking at the metadata on Word docs, would we?
As for the unsearchable format, the judge slammed ICE for clearly going out of its way to make the document "more difficult or burdensome for the requesting party to use," in violation of standard discover rules. Nice to see that ICE has the time to purposely obfuscate records requested in a FOIA. Transparency in action...
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Filed Under: freedom of information, metadata
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It sets a very ugly precedent.
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My first thought is that they simply scanned the documents as images and then compiled those images into a PDF. I see this done all the time. It's faster than using OCR and then cleaning up the hundreds of mistakes that the software makes, however, images aren't searchable.
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It is a huge negative to the entire process.
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Besides they can always comment anonymously using internal pseudonyms or other internal references.
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I would love all laws to come with meta data. This pork is identified with this congressman.
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What is a huge negative to the process? Making the process itself transparent? Are they really throwing out comments in these documents that are not appropriate for public consumption?
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Maybe Not Intentional
My point is, it might be (or, since it's the Federal Government, it probably is) just plain incompetence on someone's part.
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DMS
Some of the document management software we use will not produce searchable PDFs. The images are stored as single page TIFF with an accompanying XML or TXT file - not much use to anyone in that format! To make the PDFs searchable, they have to be run through a separate OCR process after exporting.
This software is also capable of redacting the image files before exporting them.
Its pretty easy to see why non-searchable PDFs may have been given.
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Re: DMS
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If a PDF is printed to paper, conversion via OCR is a nightmare.
I presume the FOIA requestor will hereafter make sure to request electronic copies of the originals so that metadata is preserved, but making them searchable is problematic as noted above. This would have at least one benefit. Printouts cannot be tossed over the transom as a compendium of several thousand pages that do not clearly demarcate where one file ends and another begins.
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Requiring full disclosure on every step and every part of the document, no matter what the end result is very likely to stop people from making suggestions, or at least stop them from using official channels to do so.
It's the same logic as Piracy. Block protocol X, and they try a new one with more covering and more privacy. If you buy that logic, you know exactly what the government people are going to do in the future: Use undocumented ways of discussing and working on product so their intermediate workflow stuff cannot be easily obtained.
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That's what lawyers do.
If you don't like it, stop using software that hides a bunch of metadata.
For some reason, software engineers have this desire to store a bunch of metadata inside working files, and it rarely provides serves a purpose or benefit to the enduser.
MS Office is one of the worst, but it's a widespread issue.
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