I woke this morn­ing to a fran­tic email from some­one who’s con­tributed some infor­ma­tion as a self-appointed mem­ber of my DDoS-FOIA Mar­vels (and peo­ple of other appellations).

 

1. My secret group.  Sooooo secret even I don’t know about it.

In her/his email this per­son said that UIUC-FOIA had sent a long legalese-filled doc­u­ment telling this per­son that he/she was a “recurrent-requester” because she/he was some­how in my secret “group” because he/she:

1. saw my site;
2. saw my appeal to peo­ple to file FOIAs; and,
3. filed FOIA.

Appar­ently UIUC-FOIA went on to tell this per­son that, since she/he was in my secret group, he/she would be sub­jected to the same end­less delay tac­tics that UIUC-FOIA applies to me.

UIUC-FOIA also informed this con­trib­u­tor that not only was she/he going to be put in this cat­e­gory, so too were all the other peo­ple UIUC-FOIA had taken it upon itself to label as mem­bers of my group.  I’m not sure how they decided who was in and who was out — as I’ve said, I would myself never join a group that would have me as a member.

But we can no doubt trust UIUC-FOIA to know such things; maybe they put the money they save by not buy­ing a time­stamp into such detec­tive work.  Not that they can search a com­puter sys­tem of course …

 

2. What UIUC-FOIA’s done isn’t remotely amus­ing or acceptable.

I’d like to say I find this funny, just another exam­ple of UIUC-FOIAs audience-pleasing hyjinks, you know like not being able to find doc­u­ments they’re by law sup­posed to pre­serve, or reject­ing any and all FOIAs as “unduly bur­den­some,” etc. etc. etc.¹ What the Illi­nois Attor­ney General’s office has explic­itly labelled “ille­gal behavior.”

But this isn’t funny, because my DDoS-FOIA con­nec­tion who wrote was truly ter­ri­fied about what UIUC-FOIA had sent.  I’ve not seen the spe­cific doc­u­ment, but this per­son seems to have taken it as a per­sonal threat.  Or at the very least an attempt to pierce the anonymity that’s a fun­da­men­tal right of Illi­nois FOIA law.

So it’s hard not to think that what UIUC-FOIA is try­ing to accom­plish is to find yet another way to act squarely against the explicit intent of the Illi­nois FOIA law — that intent of course being to pro­vide a frame­work for cit­i­zens to have straight­for­ward access to pub­lic information.

 

3. What UIUC-FOIA’s done is also patently ille­gal — see the Illi­nois Attor­ney General’s bind­ing opin­ion PAC 12–001 (1/9/12).

Now I sup­pose you could argue that what UIUC-FOIA’s done is a result of there being unset­tled aspects of FOIA law that they’re using to sup­port their actions.

Yeah, well.  Here’s a bit of text from a bind­ing opin­ion issued on Jan­u­ary 9, 2012, by the Illi­nois Attor­ney General’s Pub­lic Access Coun­selor (“PAC”):²

 

 

As you see, even when 1) a mar­ried cou­ple 2)  liv­ing in the same house filed FOIA requests in 3) the same enve­lope, the AG’s office defin­i­tively stated that the requests could NOT be aggregated.

And that was in 2012.  You’d have thought that, after being good law for 3 years,³ the UIUC-FOIA office might just pos­si­bly have been aware of this case, and there­fore would not have made what cer­tainly appears to be an ille­gal and harass­ing attempt to bad­ger FOIA filers.

 

4. Meet Laura Clower and what appears to be a full-blown case of “Clower-power.”

Now obvi­ously I can’t speak for the UIUC-FOIA office, for their read­ing abil­i­ties or the reg­u­lar­ity of their con­sump­tion of the writ­ten word.  And I would never think to make a claim to such knowledge!

But. I do know that the actions that my DDoS-FOIA person’s reported seem to uncan­nily par­al­lel expe­ri­ences I’ve had pre­vi­ously with the UIUC-FOIA office in the form of Ms. Laura Clower.

Ms. Clower is Senior Asso­ciate Uni­ver­sity Coun­sel at UIUC.⁴  She’s a for­mer lit­i­ga­tor, and, in action, dis­plays what seems to me to be the incred­i­bly bom­bas­tic behav­ior that most if not all lit­i­ga­tors exhibit.

In lit­i­ga­tion this isn’t a bad thing — hyper­bolic claims punc­tu­ated by unpleas­ant prose dri­ves peo­ple to set­tle, and set­tle­ment is a lot cheaper and more effi­cient than years in court.  I never wanted to be a lit­i­ga­tor because of these seem­ing require­ments for the job, but I respect those who lit­i­gate, Laura Clower among them.

The prob­lem is that it seems to me that Ms. Clower is exhibit­ing this same stan­dard behav­ior in her UIUC posi­tion in asso­ci­a­tion with the FOIA office.  And FOIA dis­clo­sures aren’t sup­posed to be adver­sar­ial – the goal of a FOIA office is (pre­sum­ably) to do their best to dis­close infor­ma­tion, not to pre­vent its disclosure.

From my expe­ri­ences with Ms. Clower — and there are many of them — I think she’s con­sci­en­tious and hard-working … and still very much in the mind­set that infor­ma­tion wants to be impris­oned behind high walls rather than free.

 

5. Advice to DDoS-FOIA fil­ers, wher­ever you are.

I’ll have much more to say about Ms. Clower in later posts.  For now let’s say that UIUC-FOIA’s lat­est action may well be attrib­ut­able to her, but that the real focus needs to be on the appro­pri­ate response, not who’s behind things.

For all you present DDoS-FOIA con­trib­u­tors or non-contributors, I’d sug­gest you write back to UIUC-FOIA if they send you an email like the one my cor­re­spon­dent described.  I’d sug­gest you write back and point out the facts of PAC 12–001.

I’d sug­gest you point out in no uncer­tain terms that we cer­tainly can’t be co-conspirators if a mar­ried cou­ple liv­ing together and mail­ing FOIAs in a sin­gle enve­lope aren’t co-conspirators.

You might want to rant and rave about how what UIUC-FOIA’s doing is to try to sup­press FOIA fil­ings and scare FOIA fil­ers.  You might remind them that the AG’s office has already labeled their actions “illegal.”

You can do all of these things.  Or none of them.  We’re not a group, we’re not an orga­ni­za­tion.  You’re all indi­vid­u­als, as am I.

Sort of the anti-Alice’s Restau­rant Mas­sacree Move­ment.  If you know the reference …

 

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The mar­quee image is “Mar­tyrs sus­pended by one or both feet, by the arms with heavy weights attached to the feet; cru­ci­fied; Chris­t­ian women hung up by the hair,” and is avail­able at Chris­t­ian Mar­tyrs.

I note I have mixed feel­ings about using this image.  Obvi­ously I’m being inflam­ma­tory; that said, I don’t think there’s any­thing funny about tor­ture.  Not new tor­ture, not tor­ture that occurred 2,000 years ago.

I guess I also don’t find any­thing funny about per­se­cut­ing peo­ple for their beliefs or for ask­ing ques­tions.  Which is why this image seemed so apt for this post.

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1. Awwww, aren’t they just the cutest? … [↩]
2. Avail­able at http://foia.ilattorneygeneral.net/pdf/opinions/2012/12–001.pdf. [↩]
3. Note I don’t see any evi­dence this ruling’s been over­turned. [↩]
4. See UIUC — Laura Clower. [↩]