The explanation they provided in Court was "We can't release more than 5K pages per month because the documents have sensitive data that needs to be redacted before being made public."
Here is why that is BS: anyone who has ever worked in an office that manages tens of thousands of documents knows you can use OCR software to recognize text and make automatic redactions for words, phrases, and names.
Let's assume it would take the OCR 60 days to scan every document (it is a time consuming process.) On day 61, you could have documents that were properly redacted.
Pfizer and the FDA made it sound like one unpaid intern was going to go through all the docs with a sharpie and that "takes time."
to be fair, i work in data protection and do redactions every day. You canno rely on auto redactions. That is a recipe for a gigantic data loss. It has to be done line by line manually.
I was asking rhetorical questions. We shouldn't have to have FOIA; we shouldn't have to ask permission. All documents that interface with government or run with with government or the least bit funded by government should be public; period.
The explanation they provided in Court was "We can't release more than 5K pages per month because the documents have sensitive data that needs to be redacted before being made public."
Here is why that is BS: anyone who has ever worked in an office that manages tens of thousands of documents knows you can use OCR software to recognize text and make automatic redactions for words, phrases, and names.
Let's assume it would take the OCR 60 days to scan every document (it is a time consuming process.) On day 61, you could have documents that were properly redacted.
Pfizer and the FDA made it sound like one unpaid intern was going to go through all the docs with a sharpie and that "takes time."
to be fair, i work in data protection and do redactions every day. You canno rely on auto redactions. That is a recipe for a gigantic data loss. It has to be done line by line manually.
I was asking rhetorical questions. We shouldn't have to have FOIA; we shouldn't have to ask permission. All documents that interface with government or run with with government or the least bit funded by government should be public; period.