Eric Worrall writes: It looks like NOAA have found a new way to stifle FOIA inquiries from the public. According to Steve Goddard, NOAA have just demanded a $262,000 administrative fee for zipping up a few raw data files.
Steve Goddard has published a scan of the outrageous fee demand he and fellow FOIA requestor Kent Clizbe received from NOAA administrator Maria S Williams. The letter, sent on March 17th, demands $262,000 by March 24th, or further communication – otherwise Maria says they will consider the matter closed.
https://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/fee-notification-letter-2014-001602.pdf
The NOAA staff directory lists Maria Williams as the Chief of Staff Support Services Branch. https://nsd.rdc.noaa.gov/nsd/pubresult?LNAME=wil
For the full story read Steve’s post – https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/freedom-isnt-free/
As an IT expert with over 20 years of experience, my expert opinion on the claim by NOAA that it would require $262,000 to gather up a few computer files and send them to Steve is that it sounds like a complete crock. Even if some of the files are in printed form, they can just be run through a scanner – my automatic page feed scanner can process a page every few seconds, even cheap scanners can process thousands of pages per day. If the files are too big to put in an email (likely), for trivial cost NOAA could publish them on a password protected web page – it would take at most a day to set up such a web page, and add the files to it.
If NOAA’s data files really are so poorly catalogued that several man years of effort would be required to find them, this is something NOAA should be fixing on their own time. If this is the case, NOAA should not be attempting to charge FOIA petitioners outrageous fees to cover NOAA’s own incompetence.
The NOAA FOI administrator did offer to ‘negotiate’ with Goddard over a reduced set of data which would therefore be much cheaper (or free) and much quicker to arrive.
I understand that in the UK, it is common, in complex FOI cases to ‘negotiate’ once all parties ‘understand’ the impact of each line in a FOI request.
Perhaps a rewrite or negotiation, to get some/most/nearly all data then consider what to do about the remainder?
A dir /s *.txt is cheaper than a dir /s *.* ?
May be the new senate and congress will sort them out?
Reblogged this on Wolsten and commented:
Hard to believe this isn’t made up. Either NOAA are completely incompetent at record handling, which ought to be a scandal in itself, or they want to hide the data, derived from publicly funded research, from the public. Either way, this stinks.
NOAA /sarc
40 days and nights of rain
FROM THEIR WEBSITE:
“NOAA’s dedicated scientists use cutting-edge research and high-tech instrumentation to provide citizens, planners, emergency managers and other decision makers with reliable information they need when they need it.”
I didn’t see a mention of: “For just $262,000”
LOL. Website “mission” statements, or statements of due diligence? I used to work for IBM (UK), Fujitsu (NZ), Honda (UK), Renault (UK), ANZ Bank (NZ and Aus), Bank of New Zealand, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, HP (Aus), did work for Ministory of Justice (NZ), Department of Conservation (NZ). All such similar statements were bullcarp! HAH! NIWA’s (NZ) fish “database” was, I dunno, one probably that the use of crayons to create something more reliable and workable would have been better!
NOAA had their data on Hillary Clinton’s mail server before it was wiped clean. The backup unfortunately was on Lois Lerner’s harddrive.
The 262,000 USD pays for a wholesale reconstruction from memory, and the necessary crayons.
If the files are too big, they can burn them to a CD or DVD and put it in the mail. Decidedly low-tech, yes, but a lot less effort than setting up a password-protected website.
Why not start a crowd sourced fund-raising effort? I’d pay a reasonable amount to have shared open access to all that information. My guess is thousands of other readers of this blog would as well. All we need is $10 each from 26,200 people (a small fraction of total readers of WUWT). I would really love to see NOAA’s bluff called on this.
I’d join that lovely party.
Yeah, give the bloodsuckers more money to be used against us. Great plan.
How about reminding them who is funding their freaking budget by sending NOAA an e-mail from all WUWT readers?
That will teach them.
Call in the expert: Chris Horner.
I’m fairly sure that if Steve Goddard got together with Chris Horner from CEI they should be able to get the info for free. I’ve read through some of Horner’s FOIA requests and they are incredibly comprehensive and to the point.
FREEDOM of information means just that and the courts have supported that attempting to charge exorbitant violates they act. NOAA is screwing with Goddard.
Whatever is cheaper: either sue NOAA, with the help of Chris Horner, or ‘buy’ the information requested. Anyway, it’s going to be a nice embarassment. Or a nauseating experience for NOAA when they have to admit in public that their files and data are anything else but orderly kept.
I’d join that lovely party.
Doing the math, they’re saying it will take around 6,000 man hours to do the search. What, are they doing it by hand?!
Oops! The previous comment is from Bob Shapiro, and I have the http://www.US-Issue.com Blog.
So why not just take NOAA up on their offer to scope the request more precisely?
I don’t understand what the problem is here.
Try the revised and trimmed request (eg using Horner’s skills), then if that doesn’t get NOAA attention or a climb down, go for the crowd funding mechanism to buy the info as NOAA outlined in their response……I’d be happy to contribute…..regularlurker
This shows how deep we have sunk. Our Governments and Government Institutions financed with taxpayer money no longer serve the public. Defunding them is the only solution. Fortunately they are on path of self destruction producing the biggest National debt in history. In the meantime civil servant got a whole different meaning.
They’re all parasites now kanabalising their host. It’s them or us. Any questions?
Having spent well over a half century as a scientist working very closely with NASA and NOAA on a great many programs I am extremely disappointed that those once respected scientific organizations have become totally politicalized. NOAA had a special problem, that problem was NASA. After the moon project NASA was running out of things to do so over the years, helped by their high public profile, they started moving in and taking over NOAA’s traditional programs (most of the public never heard of NOAA) leaving NOAA, so to speak, “sucking hind tit”, thus when the opportunity came knocking NOAA quickly jumped on the Obama bandwagon. Today Obama, NASA and NOAA are loyal members and strong supporters of the IPCC Anthropogenic Club; in fact if both NASA and NOAA stopped supporting IPCC that organization would quickly disappear from public view…
Without any comment:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-27/government-secrecy-all-time-high
and
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-28/proof-positive-recovery-lie-and-fed-only-interested-tbtfs
Providing internal and external e-mails, letters, phone logs, memos, and other communications would be very difficult. As far as the cost, it is a government estimate so expect the final cost to be at least 4 times the cost if it ever actually completed.
On the other hand as public servants, NOAA could have responded with, “It would be problematic to provide external e-mails, letters, phone logs, memos, and other communications, however this is what we can provide. In addition to the raw data for the time period requested, we can provide the specifications that explains the rational and change to the raw data.”
When I worked in Information technology, nothing changed in the system, the programming as well as data such as look-up data (factors, rates, constants, etc) without a change request which included the reason for the change, and a specification that detailed the changes that would be made. This formal process insured a complete historical record of what, why and how of changes. Transactional data would go through an even more rigorous process, since it represented a legally binding transaction in point in time. If NOAA does not have a record of the what, why and how of the changes made and cannot provide this information easily and in a timely way then that organization is grossly incompetent; I wouldn’t put them in charge of keeping track of the money at a bake sale.
So it looks like Steve goofed in asking for the communications, however NOAAs ill-considered, non-responsive response leads to questions of gross incompetence at NOAA in managing the temperature record.
Here is a documentary film on Trey Gowdy tirelessly chasing down NOAA and Hillary’s missing e-mails:
http://youtu.be/iRlZaSWocQk
Steve Goddard appears to have built a straw man here – the response from NOAA seems reasonable given the scope of the FOI request.
Ever hear of the internet? Why is it public information isn’t already posted on a web server?
Straw man arguments are pretty weak. Who says all the info is public – why would an agency put their emails, telephone logs, meeting minutes on the internet?
why didnt goddard post a copy of his request and all correspondence?
what is he hiding?
harrytwinotter,
For a great example of a ‘strawman’ argument, see Steven Mosher’s post above.
The letter was typed on the 17th, and the quarter million dollars and change to pull some data was due a week later—or screw the FOI request!
Question: If it takes $262,000 every time you want to pull some data, how useful is that data?
Well it doesn’t matter. It’s obviously a coverup.
But whatever amount of money they’re asking for so they can bury their data, Monday? Seriously, by Monday?
Because science.
Has anyone yet considered the fact that simply calculating the estimation of those costs – $262,000, for pity’s sake! – in about a week is goddam remarkable?
Has anyone reading here ever dealt with a federal or state bureaucracy, trying to get anything like cost estimates out of them? Nobody working on the taxpayer’s dime ever responds with such alacrity to a taxpayer’s request with that kind of alleged precision.
What, has NOAA got some kind of fee schedule for responding to FOIA requests?
One schedule, of course, for members of Mike’s Hockey Team, and another for “deniers.”
Christoph Dollis says:
Question: If it takes $262,000 every time you want to pull some data, how useful is that data?
For that matter, if it costs $262,000 every time you want to pull some data, how useful is the FOI law?
If only they believed in AGW then that info would not only be free, but filtered and sorted. Being that’s it is 1. public info, and 2. the public has paid for it already. But the non believer???!! They must pay so that no erroneous conclusions can be reached that disagree with official dogma.
It’s nothing short of a simple attempt to avoid insight, access and transparency, hardly legal.
Just par for the course during the “most transparent administration ever”.
When I tried to request a copy or copies of one or more of the WBAN Form-10 reports I personally authored, I ran into the same runaround from one office to the next only to be told the cost of even one copy of a form was going to be non-specific and too expensive to contemplate. While talking to these various offices I learned that many of these original forms were being stored in a government office basement, and the forms I wanted may have already been destroyed as a result of waterlogging, mold, mildew, and being eaten by insects. It was suggested it may not be possible to retrieve my forms because they had been destroyed and lost as a result of such damage.