How a Video Game About Sheep Exposes the FBI's Broken FOIA System (dailydot.com) 116
blottsie writes from a report via Daily Dot: Earlier this year, the FBI released a free, online video game featuring sheep in its attempts to fight terrorism recruitment efforts. The game is called The Slippery Slope of Violent Extremism, and it is a real thing that exists. You can play it here. After journalists filed a FOIA request to find out more about the game, the FBI said it would take two years to respond -- a staggeringly long wait that helps expose how the Bureau actively avoids responding to open-records requests. The information requested asked for "all documents -- specifically memos, email correspondence, and budgets -- around the development, release, and public reception of the FBI's Slippery Slope game. It's the one with the sheep." There are several reasons why it would take two years to respond. One reason is because of the lack of requests. "If 500 people want to have the FBI file on a famous dead person, that's going to be available, and it's going to be available quickly," J. Pat Brown, an employee at MuckRock, a nonprofit that helps journalists, researchers, good government groups, and interested members of the public make FOIA requests of government agencies, said. "But basic requests about agency activities are pushed into their own pile," adds Daily Dot. Another part of the problem has to do with the outdated technology used by government agencies. "Many of the computers the FBI is using to search for this material are from the 1980s and lack graphical interfaces. Outdated technology being a hurdle to government transparency is common across many federal agencies. The CIA only accepts FOIA request by fax machine, for example," reports Daily Dot. "In 2013, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which oversees the NSA among other agencies, was unable to accept FOIA requests for months because its fax machine broke and it had to wait until the next fiscal year to get it replaced." What's more is that government agencies are often not required to disclose information after long wait times for processing FOIAs. "As Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the Daily Dot in 2014, she once waited four years with near total silence on a FOIA request about the TSA's airport body-scanner technology only to get a note out of the blue from TSA saying she had to respond with 30 days if she wanted them to continue processing her request," reports Daily Dot. "When McCall reached out to others who had made FOIA requests to agencies under the Department of Homeland Security umbrella, they reported similar experiences."
The FOIA is not broken (Score:5, Insightful)
It is working exactly as designed, to stonewall.
Re: The FOIA is not broken (Score:2)
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They are never supposed to.
They are supposed to set policy to provide a direction instead of micromanaging.
The idea that they actually run the country is very common but still incredibly naive. We also don't really want them to do it directly, there was a war to take control away from a King remember.
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Once again Yes, Minister shows itself to be a frighteningly accurate look at how government works:
Sir Humphrey: Minister I have something to say to you which you may not like to hear.
Jim: Why should today be any different?
Sir Humphrey: Minister, the traditional allocation of executive responsibilities has always been so determined as to liberate the Ministerial incumbent from the administrative minutiae by devolving the managerial functions to those whose experience and qualifications have better formed
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They are never supposed to.
They are supposed to set policy to provide a direction instead of micromanaging.
I guess you haven't read Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United State of America.
Here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And here's the text:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Hope this helps.
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Government agencies loooove their secrets. They will fight tooth and nail to keep them safe. Some secrets should stay safe as they may lead to great ham in the wrong hands. Other's will only humiliate some one or worst yet, require a lazy low-level government employee to actually do something job related at work!
Re:The FOIA is not broken (Score:5, Funny)
... they may lead to great ham in the wrong hands.
Someone is going to steal my prosciutto?
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No, EVIL TERRORISTS are going to *MAKE* prosciutto, using the FBI's super secret curing method.
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How much of this is due to dated infrastructure, and how much is deliberate foot-dragging?
That's a fair question, but I think the answer is obvious. It is all due to foot-dragging. It the rules are byzantine and difficult to follow, requests can be denied for perfectly valid reasons.
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https://www.nsa.gov/resources/everyone/foia/
25 days to respond. If something feels 'wrong' about how your case is being handled give them a call or send an email to get an update. If it feels 'extra wrong' file an IG complaint. People don't realize that the lawyers working in IG essentially hate every other government employee. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a whiteboard in the office with tick marks showing how many times they have proven fraud, waste or abuse.
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FOIA's purpose is served even with a lag. As long as records will reach the public then it serves as pressure on people. That's the intent.
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Let's say you were required to produce all memos and emails from your organization related to a particular project. How much time, effort, and money would have to be wasted on that?
Nowhere near two years.
Is it trying to root out corruption and waste, or is every item of day-to-day government business supposed to be liable to second-guessing by the taxpayers?
I'd say corruption, yes.
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Underfund so there is plausible deniability
Most Transparent Administration In History! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Most Transparent Administration In History! (Score:5, Funny)
This is where you are wrong. The current administration IS being transparent.
Do you see any information? Nope. That's because it is perfectly transparent, thus invisible to all known forms of visual detection.
We have gotten what we were promised. We just need the 'courage' to accept it.
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However, were previous administrations *more* transparent? No, not really. Administrations have been secretive forever. The only thing new with the Obama administration was the campaign promise to be more open, which then draws peoples attention to the fact that there is no transparency. And given the public's inability to remember the past they assume that only the Obama administration is being opaque. Of course there's some partisanship playing a part - the president you like is forgiven, the preside
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Perhaps they are, but by going from "F" to a "D-"
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Nothing new. The Obama administration has the worst record of blanket FOIA denial of any since FOIA became a thing.
There was a lawyer who sent the FBI an FOIA wanting to know what offenses would make a person a "domestic abuser" and disqualify them from buying a gun. The FBI said the list was secret and refused to answer. There's your most transparent administration ever!
The BATFE has stopped responding to FOIAs completely. If you want anything from them, you have to sue, pay for counsel, and wait for the
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Yeah, but how long has the FOIA been effective? 50 years? At some point, the FBI's e-mail and document management systems need to be updated to handle the use cases that this legislation mandated. SGML or XML databases with entries pre-tagged (by the author) with attributes describing each passages classification level. One query to dump all entries applicable to the request, suitably filtered and redacted based on classification attributes. Job done.
Sure, the FBI doesn't have the budget for this. But look
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Depends on your definition of budget, actually.
They underfund privacy for you and overfund the PAFFO ignoring your request.
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So we need to take the line item budget power away from Congress and the Administration and replace it with a first in/first out queue system. We can't spend money on the toys until the old work is done.
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Hard to tell, man.
If they have an appropriated budget with $100K for office equipment, legally they cannot buy more if they already spent it all. It doesn't matter if they still have $200K left in their toilet paper budget.
They could repurpose another machine or borrow hardware from elsewhere. The government even maintains a surplus warehouse where they might find a workable machine that is otherwise destined for the landfill.
But maybe none of those options panned out. Or maybe they just don't care about FO
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No, according to the CIA's website, they also accept FOIA requests by snail mail. AFAIK, this has always been the case. However, the only electronic way to submit a FOIA request is by fax (still), AFAIK.
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Just the fax ma'am.
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fax machines were an archaic communications technology.
lol. That's what they are now. They weren't archaic when they came out, bud.
Shall we talk about FOIA or this game? (Score:5, Funny)
Because I'm playing the game right now, and it's the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Play a game trying to steer a greased sheep through a Dire Straits music video, all the while being told that the enemy is trying to brainwash me. It feels eerily similar to old-school public service announcements [youtube.com] that have a message completely unrelated to the content delivered with it.
"Don't be a puppet!" Hilarious. Who in their right mind would think this would stop terrorists?
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?
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Who in their right mind would think this would stop terrorists?
I'm kind of worried it will have the opposite effect because, if anything, the sloppy controls make me want to send a bomb to person responsible.
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"Who the fuck eats raw eggs, man? I think the government's telling us it's time to burn one."
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I was waiting for someone to say something funny about sheeple but greased sheep in a dire straits video made me damn near fall out of my chair...
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Because I'm playing the game right now, and it's the funniest thing I've seen in a while.
Far be it from me to tell you and your enormous balls how to have fun, but I'd steer clear of any Flash being served up by fbi.gov.
Trouble (Score:5, Funny)
The sheep are starting to ask questions.
Re:Trouble (Score:4, Funny)
That's always a very baaaaad sign.
Re:Trouble wool come (Score:1)
It's hard to pull the wool over your eyes.
Shearly impossible, in fact.
Baaa!
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Where's the MOO guy? He'd actually be semi-on-topic for once!!!
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Just tell them to use the A-a-a-a-a-sk Toolbar that comes with Java, Sheep Edition.
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You better watch out-
There may be dogs about
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Controls (Score:2)
The controls for that game are horrible. If it took more than a day and $500 to create then taxpayers should be ticked.
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It's the reason the F-35 program is so over budget - it paid for this fine piece of software.
The game before you is the result of years of quality government work. It's the optimal use of other people's money. It took 456 different committee meetings just to decide to use sheep. The pizza costs alone for the programmers was in the millions. All minority groups and special interest groups had to be involved. The labor unions had to agree to the terms of the labor contract. The choice of Flash required a requ
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Because you are holding the sheep wrong.
- Steve Jo-o-o-o-obs
I made legendary jihadist in 12 rounds! (Score:2)
I made legendary jihadist in 12 rounds! I dare you to beat my high score!
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Congratulations! You get to the next level and receive 72 sheep.
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But they are very attractive sheep.
Graphical interface? (Score:1)
Many of the computers the FBI is using to search for this material are from the 1980s and lack graphical interfaces.
What does a graphical interface have to do with collecting data? What's more important is that the systems is hooked to a network and has a remote way of accessing it.
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Don't you hate it when you are stuck using grep to find things?
It would be so much quicker if you could just use windows search. Someone should create a windows search emulator for unix.
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Government workers don't know how to use the old computer systems. My state paid tens of millions of dollars a few years ago to create a slow, fragile web-based system to replace the old CICS system because new workers were afraid of "DOS".
Stop (Score:4, Insightful)
Serfs. You're all serfs. (Score:1)
Sheep in video games have more rights than you do.
And you just lap it up, like sheep at a pond.
Three questions from a PC gamer (Score:4, Funny)
1: Is there multiplayer?
2: Can I get 60fps on a GeForce 960?
3: Is the sheep a 6 or a 10?
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With lipstick and a black leather skirt, I'd give it an 8 or 9.
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Oh, you like your sheep slutty.
Nice.
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No, I wear those, not the sheep.
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Nice.
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The FBI inde developer hyped it as multi-player, and promised it would be. However, after go-live, there were two sheep who were supposedly in the same field, but they couldn't see each other.
What does it cost taxpayers? (Score:2)
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Please submit a FOIA request for the answer to your question. We do need at least 5 years for this type of request. In the meantime, please try our latest game called How To Dodge Investigations Involving E-mail Server Scandals.
Not enough requests (Score:1)
Hilarious coincedence (Score:1)
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That FOIA asking for a lot (Score:2)
"The information requested asked for "all documents -- specifically memos, email correspondence, and budgets -- around the development, release, and public reception of the FBI's Slippery Slope game."
This is a lot of information, maybe it would make sense to ask for a budget and a list of developers instead?
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I agree. That's probably somewhere between 10k and 200k of printed pages I would guestimate. Somebody has to review each one to make sure unrelated and/or personal or sensitive info is not included, like employee vacation dates. And they may have to ask a lot of questions to know what it's talking about being the sifters were possibly not on the design team(s).
It's probably not a good expenditure of tax money unless there's decent evidence of nefarious activity. The problem is w
It'll be released... (Score:1)
FOIA request will be properly responded to, just in time for the release of the Slippery Upwards Slope of Calm Transparency Demands game that is coming as a sequel.
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FOIA = required by law
publishing tax returns = political tradition that could lead to identity theft
If you disagree, I propose that you post a link to your tax returns here.
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Vote Trump 2016 to end this madness
...and start a whole new kind of madness?
Disclaimer: I have no plans to vote at this point. Aside from writing in a joke candidate, I can't think of a single option that wouldn't leave me feeling filthy afterwards.
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Disclaimer: I have no plans to vote at this point. Aside from writing in a joke candidate, I can't think of a single option that wouldn't leave me feeling filthy afterwards.
You could follow this [xkcd.com] example and try: "Robert'); DROP TABLE Candidates;--"
But, I don't know how filthy you'd feel afterwards ... :-)
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Yes. Insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results. This is different, doing something different expecting different results.
The problem is, that the results will be exactly the same as previously outlined, because the people running the country, aren't really the ones running the country. They are figureheads using elections to pretend to be in power, all to gain wealth and fame. Nobody but Politicians can take an under 200K job and milk it for hundreds of millions of dollars. If that isn't
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What if trump wins by one vote? In a winner take all state one vote could swing the entire electoral college.
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There are two major ways to view your vote:
1) Your tactical token to play in political matters
2) Your free statement of support for something
One of the logical correlaries to #1 is that a third party vote is essentially never a valid vote, since you're throwing away the token you could be using to keep out the greater of the two primary evils.
I don't subscribe to that line of thinking.
I'm firmly in camp #2. I believe that my vote is a statement of support FOR something, not a mere token to be used against s
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We ended up wanting "America to Be Great Again" due the the decline that happened after that.
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Now that Glen Beck endorsed Hillary Trump looks to be the sane and sensible solution. In an insane situation, total madness is the best solution.