Having been on the other side, the delay may not be a deliberate strategy.

Your question likely landed in someone's inbox. The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job. There's likely zero guidance on how to answer and an implication that the person is personally liable if they accidentally reveal something that legitimately should not be revealed, like PII. And the question is competing with many other priorities in their inbox making it easier to snooze it for another day.

This is not an excuse just an explanation. I was not aware of some of this until I got here. I try hard to answer thoroughly and with as much detail as possible. Sometimes it just takes a while.

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SOLAR_FIELDS 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can tell you that I worked at a local government many many years ago and purposefully delaying or charging a lot for open records requests the entity did not want to complete is absolutely something that was discussed and employed internally. Almost certainly there is malicious intent here, you are giving them too much benefit of doubt.

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rahimnathwani 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job."

Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).

The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.

One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.

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pessimizer 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Like another commenter, I've also been on the other side, and there was open discussion about how to delay responses or leave incriminating information out of them.

I remember specific examples of figuring out spurious legal objections to raise that would immediately fall if challenged, but would take months to challenge. I also remember people using records retention policies as 1) an excuse to destroy records that were still held, and pretending like they had been destroyed in the past, and 2) actively changing them in order to destroy things that had been requested, but maybe the request had been withdrawn to be resubmitted. I, as the IT person, remember being asked to come up with technical reasons why something could not be done, or would be expensive to do.

Related: I remember my innocence as an eager little guy in one of his earliest professional jobs, installing a system that would make everybody's email easily searchable if a subpoena or a FOIA had to be responded to, and the sheer panic and chaos that ensued. The solution was to install a chat that instantly dumped history and was not searchable, and to have a lot more face to face meetings.

Hanlon's Razor is a corruption enabler that only resonates because people confuse it with Occam's Razor. Occam was a logician; Hanlon's Razor was some bullshit submitted to a jokebook, and nobody knows who "Hanlon" is supposed to refer to.

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paulddraper 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As in, the email was misrouted?

Or simply it falls into no one’s job?

The latter is deliberate. The former, maybe.

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Hnrobert42 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In my case it is the latter.

In one example, someone wanted all internal training, presentations, engineering documentation, internal policies, etc related to the use of AI to accomplish a specific goal.

I was temporarily assigned to be a kind of product manager for the project, so I have the best access to all the multiple departments with 100s of staff involved. That said, I have no authority over them. I don't know every related policy, who developed what training, what engineering documents exist in some random share drive.

It meant calling meetings with the project leads to explain the request. Then hassling them to hassle their staff to check all their drives. Reading through all that material to ensure engineering didn't screen cap PII while making a training slide or put security-sensitive details in an engineering document. There was no guidance on what is not releasable.

And we get maybe one or two of these requests a year for different projects. So it wouldn't be a judicious use of taxpayer resources to build a reliable system for answering these requests.

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pixl97 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, I'd say it's way more complex than that. State agencies are under budget and staffing constraints just like regular businesses. Every employee tends to have more work than they can finish, and tax payers don't want to increase funding or want to actively lower it.

	▲	wat10000 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s definitely deliberate. It’s not like this is a natural phenomenon. The only question is who makes the choice and whether it’s a choice specifically to make the FOIA process painful or merely not to give it enough resources and priority.
	▲	paulddraper 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So they’re busy.

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gxs 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m with you and always the first to point out an alternative explanation

But having to do with this subject specifically, the pattern is so common and the behavior so blatant, the amount of looking out for each other is so absurd, that I’d reject any claim that gives them the benefit of the doubt that doesn’t come with convincing evidence