Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uranium is totally legal to possess.
With many restrictions.
Not really. You can buy it on Amazon.
Now, enriched uranium is a whole different story.
The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
211–220 of 230 posts
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#212Companies and governments will always undermine privacy either by incompetence or because it's good for business. In every case the only party that benefits from more privacy is really the end user. So what can we as users do about this? Is there an email service that can generate unique alias addresses? just.for.bloated.govt.dept.123@xyz.com would really help but I'm guessing the big companies like Google and Micros…
SimpleLogin (https://simplelogin.io) is excellent for this purpose.
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#213Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the city employees don't want to follow the laws relating to disclosure of public records, they should find a new line of business. Just because they're incompetent doesn't mean the public should suffer for it.
What does that have to do with it? The writer could easily, with no additional effort, treat people more respectfully and get the same results. We should not celebrate casual meanness.
"slightest bit of irritation or frustration in response."
I'll admit I could have been kinder, but I'm not sure I'd call their irritation "slight". You're really downplaying the (clearly intentional) audacity of their response as well as how often these sorts of audacious responses happen. It's hard NOT to get aggressive in these communications when their intentions are clearly rooted in just making me go away. It's a very common pattern and a very frustrating one at that, especially when the gov folks are intentionally obstinate on top of everything else. Here's another example of an agency that started off aggressively and got egg on their face from their hubris to show what I mean:
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/vermont-80/email-metadata-55744...
From:
"The production of the requested records for March 5, required the time of 5 interns (3 unpaid) who all worked 6 hours cutting and pasting the emails from paper copies. This also required staff time to collect and print the emails and review for the security concerns we indicated in an earlier email. The estimated cost, which was not charged to you, was conservatively, $412 for the record we produced:"
I have been working with our IT folks and may be able to extract to a spreadsheet to fulfill your request.
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#215For all emails sent to/from any Seattle owned email address in 2017, please provide the following information: 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date Is this really a reasonable request that the government is expected to answer? Doesn't this expose a bunch of private information about government employees and the people they interact with? I understand this post (and apparently…
These are all things performed by employees of the government, as they run the government, why shouldn’t they be public?
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where does all the money go? Healthcare.gov cost $840 million, in 2014 dollars, to develop.
In that case, probably a lot of external consultants. Plus that is just inherently a gigantic project with a million stakeholders etc.
But there's tons of very very large projects and they surely don't cost $840m to develop.
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. You can buy it on Amazon. Now, enriched uranium is a whole different story.
Yeah, but don't buy more than 7 kg.
Up to a ton of ore I believe, as long as you don’t refine it. The rules are a bit inconsistent.
As long as you don’t hurt anyone with it, or try to blackmail the US with it.
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/831]
The 7kg limit is apparently a ‘depleted’ (aka refined/filtered) thing - https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part040/p...
But commonly misquoted.
7kg is a pretty large quantity.
It can be up to 150lbs a year if extracted from drinking water (!!).
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do I find more information out about FOIA requests? Also, in your post I think you mentioned "FOIA junkies" or something along those lines, this implies to me there's a community of people who understand this stuff and talk about it. That sounds really interesting to join. Is there a subreddit or something?
Muckrock.com is a wonderful source of information as a starting point. It has many, many, many requests publicly online. They also run documentcloud.org, which has many millions of documents received through FOIA. There are definitely groups out there that have collectively caught the "FOIA bug". It's a very fun culture of sharing and holding those in power accountable when they otherwise wouldn't be. I recommend jus…
Thank you for all of this! I chuckled at "... then they sue. It's all very organic and it's very uplifting" out of context lol
This stuff is really interesting to me for sure! I guess my biggest concerns are kind of just a generic paranoia about "getting on some list" and also the kind of thing that happened in the article. They send you too much info then suddenly are threatening you and are asking to scan your hard drive. Not saying I'm deterred but dealing with government feels like a kind of frightening task at times for some reason!
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#219Wow, this person seems really annoying and entitled.
This person is doing the dirty ground work of protecting our rights, and incurring legal fees because of it. The entitled prima donnas are the public employees of Seattle that seem to have the attitude that they shouldn't be bothered to do their jobs properly.
If this is your attitude, I hope there are people in your line of work that make it their personal hobby to bait you into getting you fired like this guy did.
What this is is pure scumbaggery using the guise of public service. It's akin to those "first amendment auditors" on YouTube.
Re: The City of Seattle accidentally gave me 32M emails for $40 (2018)
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but if you demand a warrant to confirm you don't have uranium, you can't be surprised if they are going to treat you as hostile.
So the feds can just ship anyone uranium, then insist on searching their house “to confirm it’s all gone”, and you think they’d be able to get a warrant to do so if you refused to consent? Bypass anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights with this one weird trick discovered by some guy on HN (civil rights attorneys HATE him!)
Or just say there's potentially uranium there? Pretty sure that's been done before