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  • Hacker News
  • Headline should read “North Richland Hills TX…” Texas City TX is near Galveston. ;)
    by jt2190
  • Texas sure does a lot of treading for being the don't tread on me capital
    by WokeUp420
  • FOIA requests that have to be redacted are labor intensive. However, flock shouldn’t need to be redacted right? They’re just public webcams. Lots of those already exist and many stream live.
    by therealdrag0
  • If the data is so difficult to get, that it's unreasonable to get, just get rid of flock then. You're already not getting any benefit.

    Unless... no, that couldn't have been a lie, could it? The government would never try to overcharge anyone, right?

    by nilamo
  • Original article specific to the $2.3M invoice:

    https://www.texastribune.org/2026/10/05/texas-flock-cameras-...

    Less egregious, but still egregious, a few weeks ago a local news investigator in Houston was quoted $121,000 for public records request related to Flock cameras:

    https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/09/24/harris-c...

    by chao-
  • The public information thing is so abused. I'm from a nordic european country where my local hackerspace figured out that the public transport app we use should be considered public information, and we should be able to request its source code.

    But when we contacted the person in charge of *Digitalisation* they said they can only PRINT the source code for us, and it would cost an estimated 4000 dollars in paper printing. This is the person in charge of digitising their organisation... in a time when we're measuring every page printed and counting it towards our sustainability scores.

    Really makes you wonder if they're being difficult on purpose to hide shitty source code.

    by INTPenis
  • Been there with a 33M cost estimate [1]. If the requester is reading this -- hold them to it and request a much smaller but still significant amount of records. Use that as the foundation for "how much time it actually takes". Another option is to get clever with helping them with means and modes of review/redaction. This is how I got the email metadata for 6M emails from Houston for example.

    Another example from Vermont's governor's office: https://www.muckrock.com/foi/vermont-80/email-metadata-55744...

    Happy to help more but I'll probably be unavailable tonight.

    [1] https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...

    by chaps

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