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The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

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Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#141

Post by plagiarist »

legitster wrote: post #98
thsksbd wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A warrant is required for all government search, and I can just as easily waive my right for a warrant w/ the police. In fact, a workers for the municipality is the very last government level Id want snooping in my house. Next thing I know Im getting fined for having the wrong colored bathroom tiles.

> A warrant is required for all government search This is not at all true. For example, if you enter into an agreement with your state to be a foster parent, you also have to agree for the state to inspect your home regularly. It's part of the agreement - no warrant required. The state is free to make search a condition of an agreement. So if the state wants to say "Agree to a search or we will pursue criminal procee…

Agreeing to a search as part of access to a nonessential service is quite different from being extorted with the thread of criminal proceedings if you don't allow them to violate your rights.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#142

Post by bxparks »

superhuzza wrote: post #140
bxparks wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 1.3M lawyers in the US according to the ABA. There are 250M adults in the US. I find it hard to believe that this is common (if "pretty common" means more than ~20% of adults?).

It's not like each person has a unique lawyer - One lawyer serves many clients. Especially since most people will only need legal help occasionally. But yes I do agree, it's probably a minority of people that regularly use a specific lawyer.

Yeah, I think took that into account in my estimation. Not every lawyer will be willing to work for free for a friend (it's like doctors constantly being bombarded for free medical advice, or software engineers constantly asked to provide free IT services to fix people's computers/phones/routers/network). I also assume that law is highly specialized, so a lawyer specialized in Constitutional or Patent law may not want to handle Family law, Contract law, Employment law, or Personal Injury law.

I figure the number of lawyers willing to do such small favors is in the range of 1% to 10% of the 1.3M (wild guess). So if each of them had 100 friends-and-family "clients", it still wouldn't add up to "pretty common".

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#143

Post by jabroni_salad »

froh wrote: post #4

wow! in Europe, this request 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date correlates person-related information (who was in contact with whom at which date and time). storing it, let alone processing it is only admissible on a need to know basis. even if you jump through the hoop of an officer acting on behalf of Seattle is not a person any more, which is a stretch already, even then…

Public records are for the public! I both love and hate it. I think it makes sense for citizens to be able to check in on what the govt is doing. Unfortunatley the govt likes to keep tabs on a lot of things and it'd sure be nice if they didn't and it'd be even nicer if those records didn't have to be public.

If you think that request was bad you should look up the history of LexisNexis. Their bread and butter is requesting data and collecting it all into a single database that you can use to background check anyone the american government vaguely knows about.

There also used to be a site called masscorruption that I'm pretty sure focused on a single county government in massachusetts run by some whacker with an axe to grind. He filed a FOIA request for every image file on a government desktop, which was fulfilled, and he went on to publish the employee's personal images that probably should not have been stored on a govt computer.

At my workplace whenever I put a government employee in the to: line a banner appears in outlook informing me that the message I am writing can be FOIA'd. Especially with local govts you just never know how people are going to get activated and what will be interesting to them.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#144

Post by stevage »

Argh. I used to work a lot in open data, including a stint within the open data department of a major city government.

This kind of behaviour does nothing to advance the cause. It just perpetuates the belief that open data and FOI are massive waste of time and resources and open legal risks for no good reason.

I'm also pretty surprised that people think email metadata from government is legitimate open data. Do you think it should be public how many times you have emailed government and gotten a response, and to which departments? I don't.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#145

Post by stevage »

jrockway wrote: post #137
legitster wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They thanked me for bringing the situation to their attention and all that, but the mood of the call was as if both parties had a knife behind their back. Somewhere towards the end of the call, I asked them if it was okay to keep the emails. Why not at least ask, right? >...This isn't something I'm even remotely cool with, so we ended the call a couple minutes later, and agreed to have our lawyers speak going forwa…

I don't think the OP trolled them. It's their mistake, and he pointed out the mistake. "We'll hire a contractor to do whatever they want with your computer, or you go to jail." is not a fair way of resolving the situation. It cover's the mistake-maker's ass at great cost to the person who reported the mistake. Would you ever use a computer again if someone else of unknown intent had unlimited access to it for an exte…

Unknown intent? The intent could not possibly be more clear.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#146

Post by stevage »

bradley13 wrote: post #11

Government IT is famously expensive, and so often a disaster. I recently needed to open an account with a local agency. The fun started with two date fields on the web form, which turned out (trial and error) to require different formats. I finally received my credentials, but they didn't work. Assuming that the password was likely the problem, I tried the password reset function, only to get a 404 error. The person…

Do you know any competent IT professionals who would want to work in government for that salary?

No. That is why government IT is not very good. It's a terrible environment to work in, and the pay is not good compared to private sector.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#147

Post by stevage »

bxparks wrote: post #133
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty common. My wife and I have a lawyer friend who handles small matters for us for the low, low cost of buying her meal the next time we go out. Plus I fix her (aluminum wired) electric.

There are 1.3M lawyers in the US according to the ABA. There are 250M adults in the US. I find it hard to believe that this is common (if "pretty common" means more than ~20% of adults?).

But there's a much smaller number of people from the social class likely to have lawyers as friends.

Also further reduce your number for adults in the name age bracket as practising lawyers.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#148

Post by stevage »

bxparks wrote: post #142
superhuzza wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like each person has a unique lawyer - One lawyer serves many clients. Especially since most people will only need legal help occasionally. But yes I do agree, it's probably a minority of people that regularly use a specific lawyer.

Yeah, I think took that into account in my estimation. Not every lawyer will be willing to work for free for a friend (it's like doctors constantly being bombarded for free medical advice, or software engineers constantly asked to provide free IT services to fix people's computers/phones/routers/network). I also assume that law is highly specialized, so a lawyer specialized in Constitutional or Patent law may not wan…

Yeah. I have three lawyers amongst very good friends and family. They are all up for general discussion about law or a bit of basic research. I don't think any would go as far as writing a letter on my behalf.

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#149

Post by chaps »

stevage wrote: post #145
jrockway wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the OP trolled them. It's their mistake, and he pointed out the mistake. "We'll hire a contractor to do whatever they want with your computer, or you go to jail." is not a fair way of resolving the situation. It cover's the mistake-maker's ass at great cost to the person who reported the mistake. Would you ever use a computer again if someone else of unknown intent had unlimited access to it for an exte…

Unknown intent? The intent could not possibly be more clear.

Which is? :)

Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)

#150

Post by jacobsenscott »

legitster wrote: post #37
jawns wrote: post #22

The most interesting part of this story is the potential legal risk of holding onto the records that were improperly disclosed. Had the author not notified the city that they had royally screwed up by divulging far more sensitive information than they had realized, they likely would have never realized the error, and he would have been free to do whatever he liked with the data. But once he notified them of their err…

> They thanked me for bringing the situation to their attention and all that, but the mood of the call was as if both parties had a knife behind their back. Somewhere towards the end of the call, I asked them if it was okay to keep the emails. Why not at least ask, right? >...This isn't something I'm even remotely cool with, so we ended the call a couple minutes later, and agreed to have our lawyers speak going forwa…

Are you kidding? Let some contractor a local government hires copy your drives? Those people will be incompetent at best. Protecting your property isn't "trolling".
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