If you really want to piss off a bureaucrat that you're dealing with

[MrCoffee]

request a copy of your file under the Privacy Act.

I like redacting as much as the next guy, but this is obscene. I've literally got a 2 foot tall stack of paper in front of me.


No good will come of this, I assure you.

[arcadian]

1. Which bureaucracy are you dealing with?

If it's them trying to get at me, I usually just pretend like I don't understand a single word they are saying, I also ask questions completely irrelevant to the conversation.

[MrCoffee]

2. I'm the bureaucrat!

Me waste morning redacting. Me no like.

[arcadian]

3. Are you dealing with FOIA requests?

Federal?

[MrCoffee]

4. It's a Privacy Act request

The file, the whole file, and nothing but the file (except for where I have to go through and redact other people's Personally Identifiable Information (PII)).


There's loads of PII up in this one, too. Sigh.


I'm a Fed.

[arcadian]

7. So Privacy Act is dealing with other federal employees.

n/t

[MrCoffee]

10. No...

It's the mechanism by which our office provides people who've filed claims through us with a copy of their personal file.

[arcadian]

11. If I wanted to request a file about me from the federal government.

I would use Privacy Act and not FOIA?

[MrCoffee]

15. Yeah

Of course, they would actually have to have a file on you, and departments like DOJ or DHS might be a teensy bit stricter than we are about the exemptions to the Act, but that's what I'd recomment is use the Privacy Act.

A PA request is far more comprehensive for an individual seeking their own records than FOIA, and much much easier to request.

Of course, it will piss off whoever has to process it and no good will come of it.

[redqueen]

5. I wonder if there are any pages...

where you could block out words and have the remaining words be a nearly-unidentifiable quote from some movie.

I don't know what made me wonder that, though. :crazy:

[MrCoffee]

6. See, you make redacting fun!

I was leaning towards creative origami, but there's no way I'm folding that many cranes.

I bet I could get most of the script to Caddyshack out of this giant stack.

[redqueen]

8. My mind works in weird ways...

I'm glad you find the idea more fun than crazy. :D

[MrCoffee]

9. Thom Yorke's giant red eye of doom is compelling me

I just redacted the scene where Bill Murray is talking about caddying for the Dali Lama.

[mainegreen]

12. you should black out words in such a way to make the file read as ominously as possible.

:D

[sarge43]

14. That works, too. n/t

[MrCoffee]

16. The awesome part is that 95% of the file is stuff the person requesting it sent in

It's documentation they should have sitting right in front of them. The other 5% is stuff we mailed to them.

Here's to a pointless waste of a morning!

[sarge43]

13. Bureaucrat's revenge

Redact everything on the files of someone named Smith -- except for the last name.