The CDC immediately denied expedited processing and waiver of fees and asserted that “unusual circumstances” warranted an extension of time to respond to the request. Id. at 30–31. Thereafter, Defendants issued a final determination to withhold all the free-text response entries because many free-text responses included unsolicited personally identifiable information (“PII”) — like names, birthdates, and social security numbers — and Defendants’ lack of resources to
manually review the data to segregate the non-exempt portions. Id. at 33–34.
who would submit their SSN when entering a site like that, especially a health-related site; that would break the HIPPA rules. I think that is a BS excuse; maybe one person was stupid enough to do it (or they just faked an entry with it), so they can claim the whole thing can't be released.
Agree, it's pretty cut and dry but CDC's thirteen FOIA employees seemed unable to handle it. Judge disagreed and told them to do their farcking jobs:
Having reviewed Andoh’s declaration, the Court does not find it ultimately persuasive. Instead, this Court finds that production is not unreasonably burdensome for at least four reasons: the requested records are not so voluminous; only a small percent of records will require any redaction; the redaction process is largely straightforward and capable of automated assistance; and blanket exemption claims covering a mass of records are impermissible.
I wonder if the fastest way to remove the PI would be to cut out all the meaningless words, leaving just the records with numbers, names, etc. Seems like a task that you could never do perfectly (e.g. if a user were trying to encode their PI they could probably do it), but would at least be a good faith effort.
https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/040-Memorandum-Order-and-Opinion-2024-01-08.pdf
It's amazing how frequently the government becomes privacy or cost-conscious when it assist in covering up their crimes...
who would submit their SSN when entering a site like that, especially a health-related site; that would break the HIPPA rules. I think that is a BS excuse; maybe one person was stupid enough to do it (or they just faked an entry with it), so they can claim the whole thing can't be released.
Agree, it's pretty cut and dry but CDC's thirteen FOIA employees seemed unable to handle it. Judge disagreed and told them to do their farcking jobs:
I wonder if the fastest way to remove the PI would be to cut out all the meaningless words, leaving just the records with numbers, names, etc. Seems like a task that you could never do perfectly (e.g. if a user were trying to encode their PI they could probably do it), but would at least be a good faith effort.