Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/07/trumps-fbi-doubles-down-on-h.html
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Obviously many things are at work here, but I can imagine that one reason for this is to reduce the number of requests. I don’t think that we should make it that easy on them. Email-to-fax gateways are ubiquitous, so, if anything, we all need to step up those requests. Have you been waiting to FOIA your own records? Well after Mar 1 is the time to do it. Let’s keep the fax lines solid!
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Should we consider ourselves lucky that the mandated method for submitting a FOIA has not been turned into something like this 
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General observation. Trump voters don’t care. They don’t care about the big stuff or the little stuff like this. Among Republicans his approve rating is still in the 86% range. They like him. And what he’s doing. I can’t see that changing.
The goal of Democrats I think needs to change from convincing people Trump is an ass (which looks more and more like convincing cilantro haters that it’s good) and convincing other Democrats to take action – donate, bring in other Democrats and vote. Me personally I am done trying to talk people out of liking Trump. All it does is piss me off.
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Good thing I kept a supply of those arcane hacker tools called modems.
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Typo alert: I assume you mean “you’ll have to MAIL or fax them”.
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I’m pretty sure that is a picture of an ADF scanner, not a fax machine.
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Passive Aggressive Fukkery? COLOR ME THERE!!!
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If you go into the Drudge report and stuff, a lot of the news just isn’t there about Trump. There are starting to be some negative ones, but also links to polls that show he has great approval ratings and such. I live with a Trump supporter and I asked him about what he thought about Spicer’s first press conference the day of and he was like, “Press conference?”
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Is it your spouse? Mine said she doesn’t know how she’d handle me being a Trump supporter.
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Yes. We have a lot of conversations that end with, “let’s just agree to disagree,” or just me looking at him blankly because he laid out some counternarrative so truth stretching that I am dumbfounded.
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The ones that set this up obviously don’t know about fax gateways.
They probably also don’t know about circa 1990 evil tricks like sending an endless series of solid black pages to a physical fax machine - I hope they’re more advanced behind the receiving end but I doubt it
In any case, yeah, this is getting pretty disgusting - I’d like to get back to my real life instead of finding it necessary to monitor how far my government is going off the rails.
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I keep making that point.
You don’t necessarily need to fight dirty, but you have to fight hard, and with endurance. The current situation is a menace that cannot be ignored.
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Add the Peace Corps to the list - in 2002 I happened to be a fly on the wall for a whole meeting in PC HQ in DC about how to avoid responding to requests for information, including FOIAs. One popular strategy was to link any question to an individual’s medical records, since of course individuals’ medical records are always super confidential, at least until someone higher up the ladder deems it expedient to leak them. “I’d like to help you, but that’s medical” was their shorthand for “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”
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They can foil you by falling back to teletype:
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So you have a serial port in your current computer to plug it into?
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Oh yes. (And a terminal in the basement.)
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Me too!
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What’s so onerous about service of process rules? Providing adequate notice is an important element of due process.
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