A Public Records Request That Would Take 14 Years of Labor to Fill

As bipartisan backlash against a company called Flock grows, some cities have responded to inquiries by asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees, Ars Technica reports. In one case, officials estimated that searching about a terabyte of communications about the Flock system's errors, misuse and effectiveness would take roughly 14 years of labor, billed at $15 an hour. The arithmetic is doing the arguing. A fee assembled from an estimate like that is less a price for copying files than a way to make an awkward request quietly go away — with the requester left to pay, litigate, or give up.