Florida State Attorney's Office Demands $180,000 To Release Records Pertaining To A Questionable Suicide

from the 180,000-reasons-she'll-never-see-these-records dept

With the advent of freedom of information laws came a series of guidelines meant to encourage government agencies to follow not just the letter, but the spirit of the law. There's always been a gap between the public and their public servants, and these open records laws have attempted to bridge that by giving people the power to demand transparency from government agencies. In theory, it's great. In practice, it's redactions, refusals and lawsuits.

One of the key aspects of these statutes is the limitation of fees charged by responding agencies. This is in place to prohibit agencies from discouraging requests by pricing the public out of the market. That fees should be charged at all is debatable, considering everything from the creation of the documents to the retrieval of requested information is already paid for with tax dollars. Nonetheless, agencies are warned against charging excessive fees to avoid creating a chilling effect that would inhibit further transparency.

Here's a plainly-worded version of this integral part of Florida's public records laws:

The Florida Statutes provide a schedule for copying fees. If no fee is set forth in the statutes, section 119.07(4)(a)1 of the Florida Statutes permits agencies to charge up to 15 cents per one-sided copy for paper copies that are 14 inches by 8 ½ inches or less and an additional 5 cents for two-sided copies. Agencies can also charge one dollar for certified copies of a public record. For other copies, the charge is limited to the cost of the material and supplies used.

A few exceptions exist where agencies may charge more than 15 cents. Among these are all court records, county maps, aerial photographs, and crash and homicide reports. An agency may not charge a sales tax when providing copies of public records.

Sometimes, the nature or the volume of the public records requested will require extensive use of the agency’s information technology resources or of the clerical or supervisory personnel assigned to make copies or safeguard records. In these instances, the law allows agencies to charge a service fee for the inspection and copying of public records. All service charges for inspecting public records must be REASONABLE.

Again, fantastic in theory but not so much in practice. (h/t to Techdirt reader Will)

[Angel] King has fought for nearly five years to learn more about her daughter's supposed suicide in Jacksonville Beach, which she strongly believes was not a suicide at all. She's repeatedly pressed Jacksonville Beach cops, prosecutors and medical examiners for more details about what she considers the suspicious circumstances surrounding her 24-year-old daughter's death.

Last week, she finally got what she's been waiting for from the State Attorney's Office after repeated requests — an email saying her records were available, and she can have them.

One little catch: The records would cost her $178,949.48.

It appears the State Attorney's Office has a very liberal translation of the word "reasonable." There's nothing reasonable about demanding $180,000 for the release of records related to a single investigation. There's no telling how many responsive documents the attorney's office is sitting on (which it won't even begin compiling until King submits an $89,475 down payment), but it's presumably smaller than the 840 pages turned over by the DHS to Scott Ainslie of MuckRock, which charged him $0 as the cost was "below the $14 minimum."

This doesn't sound like an agency trying to recover costs. It sounds like an agency that doesn't want to make certain documents public. King has several questions about the circumstances surrounding her daughter's death, but no one wants to answer them.

The eventual ruling of suicide was based on initial reports from a botched investigation by Jacksonville Beach Police Department officers, King and private investigators who have looked into the case allege.

Boykin somehow used the gun to shoot herself in the chest, though the maneuver would have required her to hold the pistol in a manner in which she had to use her thumb to pull the trigger, according to outside forensics experts King has consulted. And Boykin's body had obviously been moved from where she died, based on the location of blood splatters, they said. King says she has found no records to indicate that detectives informed the medical examiner of that detail until well after the case was closed.

If this were simply an exception, it wouldn't be as concerning. But other government agencies in Florida are charging excessive fees for the retrieval of public records.

Barbara Petersen of the Florida First Amendment Foundation sought one week's worth of email from the governor's Communication Director. The governor's office charged her $780 and took months to respond. Other agencies Petersen contacted charged as little as $10 for two weeks of email, while also responding more quickly. The governor's office claimed the increased cost was due to many of the governor's staff using personal email to conduct state business (another cause for alarm), resulting in a $70/hr. charge being applied to search non-government accounts.

More recently, a judge determined that a county clerk overcharged a reporter when he asked for $556 to produce 556 pages of electronic documents. The final cost to the reporter after the court case? $2 for a CD containing the requested information.

The Citizens Awareness Foundation of Florida asked for similar documents from every school district in the state (a list of law enforcement agencies that provide school resource officers and details of any settlement agreements the schools had entered into) and were given a wide variety of responses. Some turned over the documents at no cost, but others quoted prices of $700-$8,000 to fulfill the request, with the fees being demanded up front before compiling of responsive documents would begin.

Now, some of the above may not be malicious attempts to keep requesters separated from the information they're seeking. Some of these cases may just be misreading of the statutes or government employees acting on a minimum of training. But others are clearly designed to discourage the request of public records.

In King's case, the $180,000 asked only makes sense if a) there's a ton of internal communication (which would suggest a very questionable investigation) or b) the DA's office would rather not have responsive documents made public (which suggests the very same thing).

The office has tried to justify the estimate:

[A]ssistant state attorney Brittany O'Neil, of the office's public records division, said the estimate was based on numerous factors, including attorneys' hours for reviewing documents, clerical work to collect it, redactions to some of the documents, making copies and numerous other tasks that would be needed to meet her request.

"Numerous other tasks" is certainly vague enough. The "attorneys' hours" sounds expensive, but doesn't necessarily have to be. The same letter that explains the reasonable fees provision says the following:

A higher rate may be charged for requests that involve complex documents containing various exempt or confidential information. Usually this will involve documents that have to be reviewed by an attorney or paralegal with the knowledge necessary to make decisions with respect to potential exemptions. For example, a circuit court judge approved a rate of thirty-five dollars per hour in a case where the agency attorney had reviewed exempt material in a voluminous criminal case file.

Even 1,000 hours of agency attorney time would only add up to $35,000. It doesn't appear as though judges are willing to approve excessive hourly costs. In fact, most hourly rates are supposed to be calculated at a state employee base rate, rather than the actual hourly wage of the employee doing the work.

King has spent $2,000 so far obtaining records from the state attorney's office, and a spokesperson said they've been "responsive" to everything she's requested. King's latest is a "blanket request," seeking everything the office has on her daughter's death.

"She has put in several requests and this is the latest request," Barnard says. "She has had complete access to what she wanted. We have responded to every request — whether we could fulfill it, or if we didn't have the records, or when we needed more information from her about what records she was requesting."

This defense of its actions is actually an admission that the office is still sitting on a ton of responsive documents. If it wasn't, the response would have indicated there was nothing further to be released that hadn't already been requested. And the presence of tons of documents for a supposed open-and-shut "suicide" doesn't exactly instill confidence that the office's decision to close the case was correct.

Filed Under: costs, florida, freedom of information

Public Service Commission Orders Verizon To Cough Up Cost Data On Its New York Copper Lines

from the not-so-much-about-how-expensive-copper-is,-but-how-cheap-wireless-is dept

At the tail end of October, we brought you the story of Verizon's attempt to subvert New York's Freedom of Information Law by releasing hundreds of fully-redacted pages. Information on costs related to the buildout, repair and support of copper lines versus the inferior (and capped) replacement (Voice Link) Verizon was pushing was being sought by consumers who felt (understandably) that the company was overstating its claims in order to abandon copper line customers.

Verizon delivered page after fully-redacted page of "info" on costs, stating that revealing these "trade secrets" would give its competition an unfair advantage. While there is undoubtedly some truth to that claim, the fact is that the company had plenty of other reasons to keep the numbers hidden -- especially if it had been overstating the amount of money it would have to spend to restore copper service to areas knocked out by Hurricane Sandy.

Somewhat surprisingly, the New York Public Service Commission has sided with those seeking the information.

Last Wednesday, the New York Public Service Commission ordered Verizon to provide the public with un-redacted cost information about providing phone service on Fire Island, New York. The directive denied Verizon’s request to be exempt from disclosing cost documents…

Consumer advocates complained Verizon was simply hiding the fact they were looking to get rid of those users anyway in order to focus on more profitable wireless service, and that Sandy itself was a red herring. Verizon ultimately dropped the request amid protests and said FiOS would be run to Fire Island after all.

The commission addressed Verizon's "trade secret" claims with this statement.

“The information claimed by Verizon to be trade secrets or confidential commercial information does not warrant an exception from disclosure and its request for continued protection from disclosure is denied,” it said in Monday’s ruling.

State officials wrote there “is no present or imminent contract award that could be impaired by the disclosure” and that the state Freedom of Information Law is based on a “premise that the public is vested with an inherent right to know and official secrecy is anathematic to our form of government.”

Verizon plans to appeal the decision, which means the cost data will still be locked up while that process is underway. This decision, while a win for those seeking to verify Verizon's "it costs too much" claims, could possibly be exploited by companies who may being seeking competitors' proprietary data via proxy FOI requests. The Commission will need to be wary of the unintended consequences it just set in motion.

As for Verizon's New York customers, they're still not entirely happy with Verizon's earlier capitulation, which saw the provider decide to run FIOS to Fire Island rather than force customers into a shoddy wireless service with voice and data caps. Even with FIOS, Verizon is still failing to provide reliable phone service, something they say the law requires it to provide. Unlike copper lines, FIOS may not work during power outages.

Verizon (along with AT&T) has made little secret of its desire to ditch copper lines and move its customers towards higher margin wireless services. If Verizon is ultimately forced to turn over cost data to the public, it could make for some very interesting reading.

Filed Under: copper, costs, fiber, new york, public services, telephony
Companies: verizon

How Far Does The National Snooping Dollar Stretch?

from the of-course,-there's-no-accounting-for-classified-funds dept

The surveillance dragnet in the US is undeniably large. As such, lots of money (your money) goes into financing the collection of "relevant" data (your data). We've already seen the generous $100 million surveillance "grant" handed out to telcos in exchange for their "voluntary" cooperation.

The AP has tracked down some of the fees charged by various services for providing the government with data and access. At this point, most of what's being requested probably falls under the heading of "unprecedented," hence the lack of any uniformity in the pricing structure. But even older methods of snooping are subject to some price fluctuations.

AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

These fees are rather low when it comes to government expenditures, but this solely covers the less popular method of obtaining information -- old school, targeted wiretaps. Email records are also obtained very cheaply ($25 or less). Part of this surprisingly low cost is automation. In many cases, what the government is requesting is already automatically generated. Another factor is mitigation of the costs of compliance to the company itself.

Online companies in particular tend to undercharge because they don't have established accounting systems, and hiring staff to track costs is more expensive than not charging the government at all, he said.

Possibly the greatest factor in keeping the prices low is the oft-maligned court of public opinion. Most of the involved companies would rather not appear to be profiting from selling customer data to the government. That's probably a smart idea, but civil liberties defenders agree that these companies should be charging something, rather than handing out info for free.

"What we don't want is surveillance to become a profit center," said Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU's principal technologist. But "it's always better to charge $1. It creates friction, and it creates transparency" because it generates a paper trail that can be tracked.

The individual prices may seem nickel-and-dime, but the government generates enough business for this to turn into real money. AT&T claims to have 100 staffers working around the clock to satisfy government data requests. Verizon claims to have 70. $100 million has already been sent their way, and both companies are extremely unlikely to simply eat these expenses.

Even regular wiretaps can generate significant costs.

The average wiretap is estimated to cost $50,000, a figure that includes reimbursements as well as other operational costs. One narcotics case in New York in 2011 cost the government $2.9 million alone.

The costs associated with the FBI's and NSA's large scale surveillance efforts is likely to remain hidden. The FBI claims it's not possible to estimate its outlays as the payments run through a "variety of programs, field offices and case funds."

Anything about the size of NSA's payments to cooperating companies is genuinely impossible to nail down. (At least without a leak...) Its annual budget is classified. All that's known for certain is 15 intelligence agencies share a $75 billion annual budget and estimates place the NSA's share at $10-15 billion.

There's little chance the details of this budget will ever be publicized, which means the public is again asked to trust the "oversight" of those who have access. It's safe to say a large shadow industry has developed over the past 15 years, one that goes beyond simple transactions between intelligence agencies and involved services.

There's also a large number of private security firms being employed by these agencies, many of which have ensured future profitability by setting up shop as close to the Beltway as possible. That's the larger concern: a set of corporations almost totally funded with public money assisting in the capture, analysis and storage of the public's data.

Filed Under: costs, nsa surveillance, suveillance

Yes, It Would Be Prohibitively Costly For Google To Offer Google Fiber Everywhere, But It Shouldn't Have To

from the think-outside-the-box dept

A bunch of folks have been sending over Business Insider's coverage of a Goldman Sachs Report concerning Google Fiber, and how much it would cost to roll it out nationwide. The estimate from BI, which is what lots of people are quoting, is that it would cost $140 billion. From the quote presented in the article, it's not clear if the Goldman Sachs report actually uses that number of not. The only number actually quoted is that it would cost about $70 billion to cover less than half, so I don't know if the BI reporter is just extrapolating in a manner that seems ridiculous (if covering half the country is $70 billion, that does not mean covering the other half is also $70 billion -- it doesn't work that way):

Building out the infrastructure will be expensive. In his September 17 report Still Bullish on Cable, although not blind to the risks, Goldman Sachs Telco analyst Jason Armstrong noted that if Google devoted 25% of its $4.5bn annual capex to this project, it could equip 830K homes per year, or 0.7% of US households. As such, even a 50mn household build out, which would represent less than half of all US homes, could cost as much as $70bn. We note that Jason Armstrong estimates Verizon has spent roughly $15bn to date building out its FiOS fiber network covering an area of approximately 17mn homes.

Of course, even if we accept this number to be true -- even though that seems unlikely to be the case -- it seems to miss the point. Google has been pretty clear all along that the goal of the Google Fiber project was not to turn Google into a national broadband competitor, but to drive others to really up their game by showing what's possible: super cheap, super fast broadband with friendly customer service.

And, while Google shied away from its initial promise to have its network open for other services to compete, it still seems like that might be a better way to offer such a broadband. That is, rather than dumping the expense entirely on one company, imagine if it were split up among a bunch of companies (or even individuals), with a promise of openness and competition at the service level, rather than at the infrastructure level. In effect, this is what is happening down in Australia, via government fiat, in which it's building out a national fiber network, with plans to have it open for competition at the service level. That way, the costs of the infrastructure are spread out, but it opens up massive new opportunities for service providers if they provide good service.

The problem -- and the reason such a thing is unlikely to move forward -- is, once again, this insistence by companies that there's more value in owning the pipe entirely, and keeping it locked up and scarce, even if it means less overall efficiency and less overall opportunity. A long term view would recognize that investing in the best network possible, but sharing those costs, and then letting the real competition happen at the service level, would benefit everyone. Instead, we end up with fighting over slow, limited and fragmented networks. It's too bad.

Filed Under: broadband, costs, fiber, google fiber, infrastructure
Companies: google

New Patent Reform Bill Defines Software Patents; Targets Trolls

from the well-that's-interesting... dept

We've discussed the "America Invents Act," a patent reform bill that passed last year after years of Congressional fighting. As we (and plenty of others) noted at the time, for all the hyperbole around the bill, it completely ignored nearly every problem with the patent system today, and seemed almost entirely useless. Our worry, then, was that this would kill off any appetite for Congress to take on the real problems of patents today. So it's good to see that a new patent bill has been introduced -- by Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz, with a very, very minor change to patent law: it would allow those sued for hardware or software patents the ability to recover litigation costs if it's determined that the suing patent holder "did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding."

In other words, this is a bill targeted very directly at the pure trolls: the patent holders who sue companies with no real intention of taking a case to court, but rather just to get them to pay a settlement fee to avoid the (expensive) court costs in defending a patent infringement claim (which is quite frequently much more expensive than the settlement options):

Notwithstanding section 285, in an action disputing the validity or alleging the infringement of a computer hardware or software patent, upon making a determination that the party alleging the infringement of the patent did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding, the court may award the recovery of full costs to the prevailing party, including reasonable attorney's fees, other than the United States.

But what's much more interesting about this is that it seeks to carve out a specific definition for software patents. I know that in software circles there's been plenty of talk over the years about the problems of software patents, and many don't believe that software should be patentable at all. However, as defenders of the patent system like to point out, there's no such "thing" as a "software patent" defined in the law, so it would be difficult to say software isn't subject to patents. Well... this bill defines software patents:

SOFTWARE PATENT.--The term 'software patent' means a patent that covers--

"(A) any process that could be implemented in a computer regardless of whether a computer is specifically mentioned in the patent; or
"(B) any computer system that is programmed to perform a process described in subparagraph (A).".

Given the massive fight in previous years over patent reform, I fully expect to see patent system supporters throw a massive hissy fit over this very, very minor change to patent law, but it's so minor that I'm at a loss as to how they'll have any compelling argument. The only reason I can think to be against the changes here is if you're in the business of abusing the patent system to shake down innovators. I actually think that supporters of the patent system, such as pharma companies, should support this kind of change too. If the patent system can successfully slice off the problems associated with software patents, it means that there will be less pressure for massive patent system changes.

Of course, if you want real patent reform that takes on the larger issues that impact all sorts of areas (beyond just software), we've made clear our suggestions -- though there doesn't seem to be any appetite in Congress to make such major changes in the near future.

Filed Under: attorneys' fees, costs, litigation, patent reform, patent trolls, patents, software, software patents

Time Warner Cable Is Ready For A 'Conversation' About Rising Costs, But Not The One You Want To Have

from the choose-your-friends dept

It's no secret that lots of internet users hate the idea of metered broadband. It adds serious mental transaction costs in using the internet ("will watching this movie actually cost me lots of money in overage fees?") and generally limits innovation by limiting what you can do online. On top of that, there's little evidence that such metered bandwidth is necessary (contrary to the claims of marketing people, when you talk to the tech people, they don't see any real congestion problems). However, the broadband providers absolutely love the caps because they basically allow them to make more money without having to actually invest in expanding their infrastructure.

So it's interesting to see that Time Warner Cable has set up a site, called Time Warner Cable Conversations, which they claim is a conversation with consumers about how to "fight rising costs." Except... they really only want the conversation to be about rising costs caused by what the TV networks charge to carry the channels. If you want to talk about fighting rising costs by arguing against broadband metering, well, too bad. The whole site is moderated and limited and it appears that only conversations about TV networks and such are allowed. That's not much of a "conversation" now, is it?

Filed Under: cable, caps, costs, meters, tv
Companies: time warner cable

Don't Think The 'Costs' To US Businesses From Bogus Claims Is Real? Read This

from the and-this-is-under-the-dmca dept

We've discussed at length how SOPA and PIPA put additional compliance costs and liability on US companies -- something supporters of the bills still insist is untrue. However, MetaFilter founder, Matt Haughey, has explained his reasons for supporting the boycott/blackout by telling a specific story of some of the mess he needed to go through to deal with a totally bogus DMCA claim. In my recent debate with Steve Tepp from the US Chamber of Commerce over this issue, Tepp insisted that because there are no monetary damages possible for intermediaries, there is no real "liability" for those companies. Tell that to Haughey, who relates his experience:

I've never written about my problems behind the scenes with the DMCA, a similar piece of law written to stamp out piracy but in the decade since it passed has morphed into a blunt instrument to silence websites for a variety of reasons. I was stuck in a Brazil/Catch-22 situation a little over a year ago due to a five year old song in MetaFilter Music that shared a filename with a leaked (November 2010) unreleased Michael Jackson song. Sony music group employed a dumb simple bot called "Web Sheriff" that crawled the web looking for filename matches and when found, alerted IP range owners of infringing works being offered by their customers. I got slapped with a 30 day ultimatum to immediately take down the uploaded song on MeFi Music or find my hosting account closed and banned, and all of MetaFilter erased in the process. The claims were ludicrous and I informed my host of the impossible nature of the claim but was told per DMCA guidelines I had to either file a counterclaim notice with Sony/Web Sheriff or ask them to issue a formal retraction.

I didn't want to waste money on lawyer time by filing a counterclaim and prolonging the fight so instead I had to contact Web Sheriff directly to request a retraction. This took many back-and-forth emails, and thanks to Web Sheriff being in London, added days to the process of exchanging emails. Eventually I got a human at the company to look at the dates on my files and agree it was not a Michael Jackson song. The formal retraction took nearly two weeks to secure and convince lawyers for my host that it was adequate for removing the DMCA claim. That's two weeks into a 30 day window before I lost my rack of servers and hosting account completely. I'll never forget last year when I went through this because it was two of the stupidest weeks of my life, all because of some problematic laws granted new powers to copyright holders and I had to engage in a prolonged legal fight thanks to a mistake made by a bot.

Don't think that kind of thing takes money, time and connections to handle reasonably well? The compliance costs are very, very real -- and that's just a single bogus DMCA notice. Imagine what happens when there are many -- and companies are dragged into various court battles. To say there's no compliance cost or liability under these bills is pure folly.

Filed Under: blackouts, costs, dmca, matt haughey, pipa, protect ip, protests, sopa
Companies: metafilter

CBO Says PROTECT IP Will Cost Taxpayers Over $10 Million Per Year To Censor The Internet

from the why-are-we-doing-this-again? dept

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), who tries to estimate the cost to taxpayers of all new laws proposed by Congress has put out its report on the PROTECT IP Act, noting that it will cost taxpayers $47 million (pdf) from 2012 to 2016. Specifically, the CBO notes that the Justice Department would have to go out and hire 48 new people (22 special agents and 26 support staff) to act as Hollywood's censor police -- and that the annual cost will run about $10 million. Separately, the CBO notes that outside of the cost for taxpayers, the law would certainly impose costs on a variety of tech companies, by placing liability and requirements on them in regards to sites picked by Hollywood and the Justice Department to censor (you know, sites like that bastion of "piracy," the Internet Archive, which Hollywood has already put on its evil pirates list). However, it does not estimate that additional cost on those companies, since it will depend heavily on "future judicial proceedings."

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, costs, protect ip, taxpayers