Comment by greentxt
Really hope op and crew are sued to oblivion.
Really hope op and crew are sued to oblivion.
I think there’s a way you could do this ethically, but personally I believe that the way you are implementing this is unethical. Obviously you are much more familiar with what you’re doing than I am, and I’d be happy to be convinced otherwise. But I think at the very least you could work on your messaging about this but there are a few things I noticed and raised yellow flags:
1. Primarily, you seem to mention winning your lawsuit and legal battle with the VA a lot to justify what you’re doing, but just because what you’re doing is legal does not make it ethical. I do not believe the FOIA was ever intended to be used to expose an API for accessing veterans’ medical records, and even if it did intend to do that for some reason, it would still be wrong to make that data completely available to the public.
2. Your framing of your legal battles with the VA gives me the impression that you are seeking to be vindictive or spiteful with your Fax-API. It’s hard to believe you are doing this because you care about Veterans when you’re actively forcing the VA to expend what I imagine must be considerable time and resources to comply with your requests. Maybe you do have a justifiable vendetta against them but I don’t see how this makes them any better.
3. Some of this data is so recent and potentially damaging that there seems no way to justify making it accessible to the public because of how it benefits genealogy or historians.
All that said I do genuinely believe that this could be an amazing resource for historians, genealogists, and people wanting to learn more about their deceased relatives. I just personally believe that when dealing with such sensitive data you have an obligation to treat it more carefully than you seem to be, even if you are justifying it to yourself as “just” making it 1000x easier to access and telling the world exactly how to do it through legal means.
> Really hope op and crew are sued to oblivion.
Might a less vitriolic response be more productive here? Given the altruism that leads this endeavor, strong negativity might best be delayed until a more holistic understanding is gained.
For example, I've been accessing these same records thru Ancestry for some time - along with millions of other Ancestry users. If these records were a realistic vector for actual meaningful harm, the evidence should have manifested some time ago.
Broadly speaking, if we want privacy efforts to help in tangible ways, it's important to limit restrictions to where they do provable good. The alternative is restrictions that apply only to us - and not those with motivation (financial, power) to use private data for their own ends.
They are required by law to provide the data, and freely give it to Ancestry.com and the like.
You could argue they also shouldn't spend any money on computer security, investigating internal sexual harassment cases, or patching holes in their parking lot because that is just taking away money that could be used on veterans.
> It costs the VA money they could use to youknow be saving veterans lives with?
As someone who was the direct caregiver (guardian, POA) of a vet for 25 years, this assertion seems imagined.
It certainly doesn't reflect the factors that determine quality of care in the VA - that is, the factors that differentiate care between Tampa Bay's VA (very good) and Wichita or Atlanta (problematic).
Ah the government LOVES using that excuse to hide from sunlight. "I'm sorry we can't honor this FOIA request because it would be too expensive, money we could use on better things."
I'm sorry, but freedom isn't free. That includes a cost to have visibility into the government. Making special rules on 'what visibly' also just ends up getting abused like the 'expense'.
This is what freedom looks like.
Actually, “op and crew” were the Plaintiffs (well, really the Petitioners, to be pedantic) who already sued the VA for this database in federal court (SDNY), and won that multi-year lawsuit, and even won our attorneys fees too. If you had checked our website, you’d see we even posted the court papers online for free, from both sides — and the judge’s order in our favor, of course.