> It took more than three years for the Department of National Defence (DND) to provide the documents requested by CBC News.
> [...] "Recognizing that backlog files require more attention, DND recently created a new team in the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Directorate as part of a Backlog Reduction Initiative. This team has been assigned the task of working solely on backlog files so that the other processing teams can concentrate on ensuring newer files do not go late," she said.
LOL, what a waste of resources.
Edit: I don't get why I'm being downvoted. These things do have a cost. FOIA requests are not free. FOIA requests can be frivolous. Here we have one branch of the Canadian government (the CBC) getting another branch of the Canadian government (the military) to spend time collecting information, scanning documents, reviewing everything for security... all so that Brett can write a lame "quirky" story about a video game that's three years old at this point. For what? Clicks? Ad revenue? It's obviously pure waste. No wonder they had to create a special team to deal with the backlog, when the government itself files bullshit requests against itself.
I don't know, maybe the Canadian military has nothing better to do. Maybe Canada's government journalists have nothing more pressing to look into with respect to the military. I guess it's possible. It still leaves you wondering what the Canadian public is paying them for.
BTW, just a few days ago there was an article about how America used to be able to complete large engineering projects quickly and cheaply, and now they can't. Some were pointing out that perhaps the cumulative cost of all the new systems we built on top since then has something to do with it (whether they are public systems due to regulation or private systems due to litigation). Well, maybe it's because our governments keep making laws that say "do this within 60 days or else", and the cost remains forever unexamined.
Then let me at least point out that this is a clear instance of pure waste. And yes, a certain level of frivolous requests probably needs to be tolerated for the system to work at all. But when it's the _government_ creating waste _for itself_ to write a Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article because it's all magic free government money, all I can say is: dear Brett, you're not a stalwart guard-dog of democracy just because your job title has "journalist" in it. You need to actually think about what you're doing and try to do something useful with your government paycheck.
* FOIA is American, ATIP is Canadian. Anyhow, of course they aren't "free", no one said they were. It's (at best) incoherent to make straw-man arguments against the wrong thing...
* Just because there are worse things in the world doesn't mean we can't consider lesser ones. It's not like journalists are all only ever allowed to write about whatever you consider to be the single most pressing topic at the time.
* Just because this article doesn't interest you, personally (it obviously interests other HNers, considering it's on the front page) doesn't mean that it's a "Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article".
* Not all government spending is bad, as you seem to imply, and some oversight is absolutely necessary to prevent corruption.
* This ATIP request resulted in an interesting article that covered Canadian culture, geo-location games and trespassing issues, the health of the ATIP program, as well as humourous anecdotes on how military policy discovered and handled the issue of PokemonGo.
I can think of a couple of reasons why you are being down voted:
1. The CBC operates at arms length (similar to the BBC) and is not "one branch of the Canadian government".
2. The point of a FOIA request is that they are SUPPOSED to find nothing. The FOIA "threat" is what keeps the government in line, it's not a "waste of time". That the reporter found nothing and went on to write a fluff piece is the system working as designed.
Perhaps one small point; how Canada handled this differently to say, perhaps the US might, makes this worth something. Also FOIA requests are generally processed only when the cost and resource required are "reasonable". At least here in the UK that's the case.
You're getting down voted for making a whole lot of assumptions that aren't valid.
Pure waste? Give me a break.. I guess it's foreign to you that if the public asks the government something in Canada, they better serve us the citizens, because we're who the government serves, not the other way around.
And when something like this happens, Canadian's aren't brainwashed and go straight for the gun as an option. They actually use common sense to adjust to situations unlike those in our southern border.
I find it hilarious that you would rather have work undone and marked unimportant than actually try and serve the public.
Consider living abroad, it'll cleanse your American brainwashing.
FOIA requests can be frivolous, but the actions of government can be both frivolous and extremely harmful. Transparency is a fundamental tool of preventing government from being frivolous and extremely harmful. Fielding FOIA requests is going to have some wasted effort due to frivolous requests, but that's an unavoidable side effect of effective transparency in government, which is fundamentally, critically important.
If anything, I'd rather see a policy of default-open rather than default-closed--if people want to classify information they should need to provide a justification for why it needs to be classified, not the other way around.
> [...] "Recognizing that backlog files require more attention, DND recently created a new team in the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Directorate as part of a Backlog Reduction Initiative. This team has been assigned the task of working solely on backlog files so that the other processing teams can concentrate on ensuring newer files do not go late," she said.
LOL, what a waste of resources.
Edit: I don't get why I'm being downvoted. These things do have a cost. FOIA requests are not free. FOIA requests can be frivolous. Here we have one branch of the Canadian government (the CBC) getting another branch of the Canadian government (the military) to spend time collecting information, scanning documents, reviewing everything for security... all so that Brett can write a lame "quirky" story about a video game that's three years old at this point. For what? Clicks? Ad revenue? It's obviously pure waste. No wonder they had to create a special team to deal with the backlog, when the government itself files bullshit requests against itself.
I don't know, maybe the Canadian military has nothing better to do. Maybe Canada's government journalists have nothing more pressing to look into with respect to the military. I guess it's possible. It still leaves you wondering what the Canadian public is paying them for.
BTW, just a few days ago there was an article about how America used to be able to complete large engineering projects quickly and cheaply, and now they can't. Some were pointing out that perhaps the cumulative cost of all the new systems we built on top since then has something to do with it (whether they are public systems due to regulation or private systems due to litigation). Well, maybe it's because our governments keep making laws that say "do this within 60 days or else", and the cost remains forever unexamined.
Then let me at least point out that this is a clear instance of pure waste. And yes, a certain level of frivolous requests probably needs to be tolerated for the system to work at all. But when it's the _government_ creating waste _for itself_ to write a Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article because it's all magic free government money, all I can say is: dear Brett, you're not a stalwart guard-dog of democracy just because your job title has "journalist" in it. You need to actually think about what you're doing and try to do something useful with your government paycheck.