I had many visitors yesterday. Dave and Demon Spawn and Dave’s AG whore and disbarment dude and Todd—who the fuck are you? Are you actually Todd, or are you counterterrorism? Or neither? Whatever, your name is Todd now. Live with it.
I hope everyone enjoyed my public comments. I’ve been thinking deeply about the Public Records Task Force. I halfway don’t want to go to the last meeting. I also feel compelled to see it through and ultimately have the last word. I’ve been talking to myself all day long about shit I could say. I don’t, however, know what I should say.
First, I want to calmly and clearly explain to the government side that they have made a mistake. And right now, that’s all it is. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing with survey design. They lawyered it and made it an interrogatory, which means, for this purpose, you can’t do that. You can’t elicit the response you prefer, that fits your narrative, and call it a survey. You also can’t take it yourself and then mix your answers in with everyone else’s anonymously.
You also cannot cherry-pick your respondents. It bothers me that I see names I recognize on that email list. Like, too many of them. I find that concerning. If it were just the PIO or publicly available email for records requests, that would make sense. But you have administrators on there. And I have paperwork with too many of their names on it.
I just want to say: you can recognize it now, do the right thing, and pull your data. It sucks when that happens, but you’ve been told what you did wrong. If it’s completely biased from start to finish, the only ethical decision is to pull it. You made a mistake. Let it go and move on.
The thing is, listening to them, they never asked the questions they needed answers to. The biggest point is the time it takes to redact and the lack of clear guidelines about whether certain things should be redacted.
So I would suggest a proposal to the legislature for a study involving PIOs and general counsel for each division or department. Ask them for the specific questions that are unclear to them in their particular offices. It’s going to be different for each of them, but those answers can be synthesized, and you can get the big questions out of the way. If you are constantly having an issue with a specific question, that can be codified. Not every little hypothetical, but the questions that are always an issue.
This goes directly to their pain points of cost and ease of redaction. They wouldn’t have to rethink the same questions line by line on the bulk of their responses. Fix the big three for your department while erring on the side of transparency, as the law states.
I could tell them all this, but they aren’t going to do that. They don’t give a fuck what I have to say and will inevitably do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, regardless of the known consequences of their lack of ethics. They think they are right.
I am thinking about an impassioned plea via email to calmly explain the issues and why they really shouldn’t do this.
Then there is the matter of money. That was the other pain point. The law allows charging for actual costs, including ink and toner, rather than ordinary staff time. Okay, but video redaction of body-camera footage is expensive, and Metro was in court just today defending itself against allegations that it overcharges for that.
They didn’t get it when I gave them the actual fucking answer to the question. They didn’t understand, or they would have gone with it.
I said the modern way to charge is per byte of data. Nobody prints anything anymore, so data is the modern equivalent of paper and toner.
What this does is give you a basis. Let’s say you have a document that is 100 KB. It’s just text, nothing more, one page. Let’s say the final redacted file is 200 KB. I am making this shit up as I go along.
Using decimal units, 1 KB equals 1,000 bytes, so that document is 200,000 bytes. If we use $0.10 as the equivalent paper-and-toner cost for that page, the rate is $0.0000005 per byte.
That is an incredibly small number. But the total depends on how much data you’re requesting.
Now here is where this math gets interesting. At that rate, a 1 GB video would cost $500. A 3 GB video would cost $1,500.
That gives you a consistent scale. Whether those totals are reasonable is something you can actually test and debate instead of pulling numbers out of the air.
Who knew? Oh, I knew there was a model worth looking at, and they didn’t see it or understand the fucking golden fucking ticket I had just handed them. Because they’re stupid. Because they are Govie rats in suits.
You fucking idiots, this gives you a basis for the charge. Charge for the data instead of trying to force digital records into paper-and-toner math. Set the rate, show people what it means at different file sizes, and figure out where the limits should be.
Ta-da, fucking idiots.
Several hours later...
So I wrote it all up and sent it to Nino Piro. Kind of an exchange program to get her to stop that survey data from getting a government stamp. I’m sure they will just ignore it.
Or I just wrote some really revolutionary, kick-ass policy for public records data.
The Per Byte Standard.
It’s simple, really: a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny per byte, scaled as you go. The rate could be tested against the general prices they are requesting now, but without all the bullshit.
This is where we have to go. Just do it already. If Nevada could lead the way on a fair digital standard, that would be pretty fucking cool.
I also wrote up a legislative study proposal they actually need because they have no idea what is what, and they keep saying it takes so long. They need clarification. Well, I wrote a study.
It puts a lot of the work on general counsel’s table, but they are the ones who should know exactly what the weird legal pitfalls and loopholes are. I suppose I shouldn’t say that as a definitive statement, but one would assume general counsel for any given agency would know the little weird, only-applies-to-us shit off the top of their head.
I don’t know why I care about this. It’s fucking bullshit anyway. All of it.
But it was fun to write up, I guess. I do wish I could make a career out of this kind of stuff. I don’t do people well, I don’t have experience in this field, I’m not a lawyer, and I am just some loser. Whatever. A pipe dream of getting into politics and changing the world.
All I’ve done my whole life is try to change the world, and look at me now. So worth it.
It’s sad, though. It feels like such a waste of intelligence and potential. Or maybe I’m fooling myself about what I could do. Whatever it is, I could have done something with my life.
Oh well. Too late now.
Another day closer to death.
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