1. Alsip’s Date– and Time-stamp.
Alsip Illinois is a village of about 20,000 souls out in Chicagoland. They’re the location of the Griffith Laboratories headquarters, and they have a Coke bottling plant.1
They also have a FOIA office. That FOIA office has a date and time stamp that they routinely use to date and timestamp FOIAs they receive. It looks like this:
If you’d like to see another 89 examples of this timestamp, you can look at those 89 examples in my earlier post on the topic (What constitutes REAL vexatiousness). Note that all those 90 documents were all stamped on the same day (September 7, 2010) by the same very nice lady in the Alsip FOIA office. Wow, I wonder if her hand hurt?
2. UIUC-FOIA’s Date– and Time-stamp.
UIUC is located in the Urbana/Champaign area. It’s a major research university. It gets more NSF funding than any other university in the country. It’s known for its engineering programs. It’s particularly well-known for its computer science prowess.
The Freedom-of-Information-Act (“FOIA”) office at UIUC also has a date– and time-stamp. It looks like this:
I know this because I filed an appeal against UIUC-FOIA on October 24 with the Illinois Attorney General’s office (the “PAC”), and the PAC mailed that on to UIUC-FOIA on the 14th of November.
UIUC claims it didn’t get that letter from the PAC for 10 full days, that is, not till the 24th. So I filed FOIA with UIUC-FOIA to obtain evidence to support their claim that the document didn’t get processed in at their office until the 24th.2 The letter you see in the marquee is the letter from the PAC that UIUC-FOIA received, As you’ll note, the timestamp is hand-written, and is signed by … well looks like someone who was a physician at some point (i.e., it’s illegible).
2. We can do it — a Kickstarter campaign to buy UIUC-FOIA a Date– and Time-stamp.
Now I know it’s not fair to expect UIUC-FOIA to have the same resources as Alsip. After all, UIUC is only a major research university with a world-class program in computer science and engineering. Whereas Alsip is a village of a whole 20,000 people!
But my heart goes out to that poor .… well I can’t read his/her signature … but he/she must have carpal tunnel what with all those FOIA filings and appeals she/he has to hand date and timestamp.
So I call on my readers to help me set up a kickstarter campaign to raise money to buy poor resource-limited UIUC-FOIA a timestamp.
And not just any timestamp. Let’s not subject them to the Dodge Dart quality timestamps! Let’s get them a Cadillac-class one, like this:
Yes, it’s a lot ($30.00 from Amazon (Amazon Timestamp)). But I’m sure that together, with a lot of effort and can-do-idness we can raise that kind of money.
And really, the sky’s-the-limit. Why maybe we can purchase them some written procedures too, or even … even get them an IMSAI 8080 so that they can actually search their email system! (See UIUC FOIA — No Procedures, No Search Capability.)