As you’ll real­ize from my pre­vi­ous posts, I’ve filed a lot of FOIAs with UIUC-FOIA — so many in fact that I’m now a “habit­ual filer,” or some such thing.  This is emphat­i­cally not an hon­orific, instead it’s an excuse for UIUC-FOIA to delay respond­ing to my FOIA requests by weeks, months, and, the way it’s going, quite pos­si­bly years.

There are only three ways for me to over­come this des­ig­na­tion: 1) wait a year until it auto­mat­i­cally expires — a year dur­ing which I’d need to keep my fil­ings extremely low; 2) get myself con­sid­ered a jour­nal­ist, for which no lim­its apply; or, 3) incor­po­rate as a non-profit and file via that des­ig­na­tion, which is again limit-free.

On the other hand, if I don’t myself escape the moniker, I can still pro­vide ideas about FOIA fil­ings for oth­ers to under­take.  The law isn’t par­tic­u­larly clear on whether I can actu­ally script up FOIA fil­ings for oth­ers to make in a zombie-like fash­ion, but cer­tainly putting the ideas up for action by any­one who hap­pens on them of their own accord is com­pletely kosher.

 

1. A “Dis­trib­uted Denial-of-Stonewalling” (“DDoS”) group of FOIA filers.

I thus pro­pose the idea of a dis­trib­uted net­work of unas­so­ci­ated FOIA fil­ers, a net­work with the job of swamp­ing out the stonewalling that UIUC-FOIA engages in, appar­ently as a standard-operating-procedure.

But what to call this net­work?  Well,  the term “Dis­trib­uted Denial-of-Service” (“DDoS”) attack refers to shut­ting down a web­site by trig­ger­ing so many auto­mated hits on it that it becomes unavail­able to non-robot users, i.e., to the human beings it’s intended to cater to.  And DDoS attacks strike ter­ror in the hearts of the own­ers of the web­sites being attacked.

So … well I’m not for any­thing ille­gal, but I wouldn’t mind UIUC-FOIA expe­ri­enc­ing the sort of kindler-gentler-terror that would come from hav­ing their stonewalling pre­vented.  And so I pro­pose a “Dis­trib­uted  Denial-of-Stonewalling” (“DDoS”) FOIA approach, one where a dis­trib­uted net­work of unlinked FOIA fil­ers work with a com­mon aim of preventing/overcoming exactly this kind of stonewalling.

 

2. Catchy names for the DDoS-FOIA fil­ers?  How about: Cap­tain Mar­vel, Cap­tain Mar­vel Jr., Mary Mar­vel and Uncle Marvel?

If you’re form­ing a band you need to have catchy names for its mem­bers.  Look­ing around I came across the pre­miere issue of “Mar­vel Fam­ily Comics” from Dec, 1945,¹ and thought the fam­ily mem­ber names might be just what the fates ordered for this DDoS-FOIA fil­ers group, or at least the first four of them:

• Cap­tain Marvel;
• Cap­tain Mar­vel, Jr.;
• Mary Mar­vel; and,
• Uncle Mar­vel.

So here’s my pro­posal: my email address is [email protected] and I’d love to hear from read­ers who might like to vol­un­teer to adopt these super­heroes as their DDoS-FOIA fil­ing alter-egos.

Let’s see how that goes.  The more free-form alter­na­tive that I’m also con­sid­er­ing is to put up ideas for FOIAs and let peo­ple file as they will.  I real­ize it will be a melee of sorts, but, hey, UIUC-FOIA is bring­ing it on itself by not being forth­com­ing in the pro­duc­tion of infor­ma­tion that is, after all, public.

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1. See Mar­vel Fam­ily Comics #1. [↩]