#we'll just go with exeller for now

[incorrect-sonic-the-hedgehog]

Team Exeller

Alright, there's another quick plot point I need to explain.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with Sonic.exe. If you are not, then you're too young to be on this blog.

Anyway, in the Sonic.exe: The Spirits of Hell, he's referred to as Exeller. His origins vary based on the writers, but I've come up with some of my own:

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

We all remember the scene from Sonic X where Maria saved Shadow. But there were supposedly three pods that escaped from the ARK. One of those pods contained Shadow.

With all the trials and tribulations that came with Project Shadow, it led me to wonder whether or not Shadow himself was the only prototype for such an experiment. Were there more 'Shadows'? Were they what was contained in the other two escape pods? And if so, where are they now?

That's where Exeller comes in.

Exeller was the first prototype for Project Shadow. However, he found a way to tap into a power even stronger than the Chaos Emeralds. A power that could warp time and space beyond recognition. Gerald Robotnik had no idea he'd need the inhibitors that our Shadow wears, so he sealed Exeller away until he can find a way to contain his power.

The second prototype was less threatening, but he still had a lust for trouble. He would often pull pranks on the staff and Maria that would go too far, like smashing beakers containing important substances or throwing staining ink on all of Maria's clothes. Gerald grew sick of it, so he sealed that one away as well. He became known as Luster.

Finally, then came Shadow. He was much more disciplined than Luster, and Gerald had finally completed the inhibitors he started working on for Exeller. But then GUN raided the ARK. Maria was killed, she saved Shadow, and the rest is history, right?

Wrong.

Like I said, Maria pulled the lever to eject three pods, and only one contained Shadow. So what was in the other two?

Why, Luster and Exeller, of course.

Why did Maria save the 'defective' prototypes?

Well, it was because she thought they deserved a chance of redemption and also because if GUN got their hands on them, it would be bad.

Anyway, Luster and Exeller awoke long before Shadow did. They were both confused as to why there were two of them. Soon enough, they managed to put the pieces together and were furious with Gerald and Maria. However, the two were already dead, so they couldn't take their anger out on them. So everything was fine, right?

Wrong.

Because, whoopsie, they found out about Shadow.

And double whoopsie, Exeller had no inhibitors, so he was far too powerful to be let loose on Mobius, but he was anyway.

And whoopsie number threesie, neither he nor Luster were big fans of Shadow after learning that he was the Robotnik's 'favorite'.

So the two decide to split up and get revenge on this 'perfect' Shadow. Exeller's powers include - but are not limited to - traversing the different multiverses. He also has the ability to create artificial life forms of his own, made of nothing but pure malice and lust for carnage. So that's exactly what he did. He created his own minions: Stitch and Rosy (who are parodies of Tails Doll and Rosy Rascal). With his powers and lackeys by his side, Exeller became known as the Lord of the Multiverse.

Over time, he came to learn that he needed to find a way to get closer to Shadow with minimal effort.

Enter Opal.

Exeller also has the ability to possess a host and drive them into madness. So he took advantage of Gadget's disappearance to push Opal over the edge. Ever since, she's been doing his bidding to find her brother and bring him home. Only recently has she broken free of his control.

Whatever could that mean, I wonder?

It's unclear what Luster was doing during that time, but he was most likely tracking down Shadow. When he met back up with his 'brother', they became known as Team Exeller. And now, if they find Shadow, they're probably not gonna allow him to live.

And another thing: over time, Exeller has developed something he calls 'Dusk Rings'. The full name of the golden Rings Sonic has is 'Dawn Rings'. The Dawn Rings allow one to traverse space. The Dusk Rings allow one to traverse time. If the two are combined, they become 'Eclipse Rings', which allow one to traverse anywhere in time and space.

Okay, that's all.

[sentientcave]

It's wip wednesday once again. Have a little more Rugby! Just a short segment bc I'm actually getting close to finishing it and posting the whole thing. Sorry it's mostly dialogue a lot of the other stuff gets added in the editing stages lmao

We join Ripper at his office job... (Your welcome to anyone who thinks Ripper would look hot in a suit. Because he absolutely would)

You're eyeing the clock as it crawls just past 4:15, when someone knocks on your office door. "Come in," you call, reopening exel on your computer so it at least looks like you're doing something productive.

"Hey, pally," Brandon says cheerfully, throwing your door open and sitting in the chair in front of your desk. "How's things?"

A social visit? Brandon is the boss's nephew, and a right idiot. You steer clear, generally, and he's mostly left you alone thus far. "Uh. Fine. Headed out soon."

"Rugby on Friday," he says.

You frown at him. Why would he know that? "Uh. Yeah?"

His grin widens. "Your team's playin' mine. Think you've got a chance?"

You think of Simon and Johnny, and the way they can plow through the opposing team. You didn't even know Brandon played. "Uh. Yeah. Figure we do."

"Care to make it interesting?"

A bet? Is that what he interrupted your day for? "Guess I'd put a tenner on it."

He shakes his head, like you’re being ridiculous. "That wouldn't be very interesting, would it?"

He's angling for something, but it's hard to tell what, exactly. "You have stakes in mind?"

"I do. Figure if my team wins, you'll let me take you out for dinner. If yours does, we can, I dunno, switch offices? Two windows in mine. Your little houseplants might like that." He wiggles his fingers at the plants you have hanging in and sitting in front of the window (Spiderplant Georg, Pontius Pilea, and Monstera Mash. Not that you had ever told anyone in the office that you’d named them).

"Dinner?" You ask. "With you?" It's an insane notion. You barely speak to him. You don't want to speak to him.

"Course with me." He grins at you again, propping his feet up on your desk, leaning back in his chair.

You blink at him. "You're kidding."

"What, you don't think I haven't noticed the way you fill out that suit? You're a little unit, Ripley. Wouldn't mind seeing you outside the office now and again."

"I've got a boyfriend," you say automatically. "It wouldn't be anything more than just dinner."

"We'll see."

You hate him for the way he smiles at you, like he doesn't believe you for a second. You're going to have to ask yet another favour, and see if Johnny or Simon will pretend to be your boyfriend. "Well, I'll take the bet. Wouldn't mind two windows."

He sets his feet down and sticks his hand across the desk. "Can't wait to take you out. We'll have fun."

You stand up to shake his hand, glancing at the clock again. Time to go, thank fucking god. “You’re gonna lose, you know. And even if you don’t, there’s no way Simon won’t sit across the restaurant and glare at you the whole time we have dinner.” Internally, you kick yourself for saying Simon. Johnny’s the more obvious choice, and easier to approach for a favour like that too.

[popculturebuffet]

Monthly Muppet Madness: Sesame Street Luis and Maria Valentine's Day Special (Comission for Emma Fici)

Happy valentine's day all you happy people and welcome back to monthly muppet madness. All the muppets you can handle once a month. And for this special day of love and chocolate we're going down to sesame street to look at the love story and wedding of Luis and Maria.

Now this one was a bit of a challenge for two reasons: the first is that my Seasame Street knowledge is limited: i know the 2010's decently enough as I watched a ton of it when my niece and nephew were toddlers, and I reviewed Follow that Bird last year, which was exellent.. but I really don't know who most of the cast are as characters outside of the major muppets and even some of those escape me as many have been phased out over the years. I mean why they don't use the two headed monster ine verything is beyond me, he's a two headed monster> that's awesome.

Thankfully the muppet wiki is super expansive so if like me you didn't know these characters going into this article yoru great. If you did, well... go get some juice or a pop while I fill in the blanks.

Luis and Maria were both introduced in season 3 of Seasame street and lasted all the way to 2015. Luis was introduced as the owner of the local fixit shop, a kind man who fixed bikes, toasters what have you. He also fixed them for Snuffy before knowing he was real. They were dropped off and picked up by... oh let's say moe. He's notable for playing the longest lasting mexican american roll on a television series and Seasame Street celebrated his heritage frequently. Sesame Street did not fuck around and I appricate that. Maria was introduced as a local teen who worked at the library, aging in real time and quickly becoming a young adult. She soon started working with Luis at the fixit shop, getting hired by simply pitching in when he was too busy to actually listen to her ask for a job and being hired on the spot as it helped with his work load. She later asked for a raise... only to not only get THAT but be promoted to partner.

So the two already had a working relationship and friendship when Sonia Manzano, Maria's Actress, got pregnant. Rather than dance around it Seasame Street decided to integrate the story, but since it was the 80's by the time of this pregnancy, they also needed Maria to get married first because GASP apparently kids couldn't handle the idea of a single parent. Or a multiracial couple as her previous love intrest David, was also ruled out though the why is a bit murky: One documentary said his actor was leaving anyway , another said he was devistated. I wouldn't rule out an 80's tv show avoiding an interracial marriage to avoid scandal.. but I also think Seasame Street was progressive enough to try it anyway, so i'm inclined to belivie the actor simply wasn't avaliable, especailly since the idea was pitched by Carol Spinney's wife Debra and passed on to Caroll himself. Given the two characters were already close as friends, buisness partners and on good terms, having them do the relationship upgrade makes some sense: while friends to lovers CAN be really tricky, here it just feels wholesome: like two people who were simply friends for a long time, caught feelings eventually and fell in love.

So today we'll be covering the two realizing their in love and thent heir wedding day. I wish I had something for the middle but Sesame Street.. is hard to track down these days. Most of it WAS on max.. but Max being max, a lot of it was removed and digtially most of seasame street is best of compliations and what not. There really isn't a consitent, episode by episode archive for the show that I found. So I found two complitions on youtube covering parts of this storyline. I am sorry that I coudln't find a more in depth one covering the whole thing up to the wedding, and would be glad to cover more of their story in the future. For now though let's tell the timeless tale of man and woman brought together by two 5 year olds asking difficult questions.

Part 1: In Love So the Luis and Maria story has a LOT of parts to it, and like I said I could only find so much on youtube. I tried archive of our own too, no luck. So before this the two started growing from friends to something more after tending to a baby bird... and not the normal one they tend to what lives in the back of their store.

The building feelings pay off here.. but first what most people come to seasame street for: two five year olds arguing: while playing Cowboys, Big Bird wants to go Eha Eha, and Snuffy wants to go Eha Eha Eha. Somehow it's far from the most gripping cowboy dillema i've seen

Gordon easily solves the issue and the two get their eha's on when they notice Maria and Luis holding hands. We don't see it because they only have a set for that part of sesame street, but it leaves the boys confused and they decide to go ask the adults up front.

Luis and Maria.. have no adquate explination for why they were holding hands and i'ts hilarous, mostly beause it feels so REAL. Kids will oftne ask questions that end up super awkward simply because they don't know any better. The two REALLY don't know how to answer this, saying adults do it because they like each other not because they need to, but not sure how they feel about each other. Until an idea hits

But since it would they instead realize their in love and go to tell each other and we get a really sweet well done shot as we look in on the fixit store through it's window as the two confess. it's some really well done acting and really cute.. then they shut the curtain so all of sesame street dosen't see their live sex celebration.

That night Big BIrd asks when their getting married which panics the two especially since you know THEY JUST STARTED DATING. Again it works because it's a harmless kid thing and Big Bird is just a giant toddler. But he bets they will

And he's right though there's according to the wiki a whole ass arc where everyone in sesame street is pressuring the two to get married. I mean Delgado's pregnancy is part of why they speed it up and as a show for younger kids they don't have to really get into emotional complexity... buuuuut it dosen't make it any less hilarous that all the muppets are wondering when this couple's going to get hitched already depsite being none of thier buisness.

Eventually Luis proposes, we get some planning and now it's time for the wedding.

Part 2: It's Your Wedding Day

So we get to the wedding, as everyone prepares: Maria's been so nervous she can't sleep while Luiz

Maria talks to linda, her bestie and just the best. Linda is kinda sorta dating bob, the og sesame street human and local teacher, the two even getting a mental duet about possibly getting maried and Linda catching the boquet. Both of these things go nowhere but given the two never married anyone else, I like to think they just had a quiet wedding officiated by kermit off screen.

Anyways everyone prepares for the wedding day with a big fucking musical number, as you should, and then has the wedding to one as the soon to be weds panic internally, the various adults and their relatives sing about how in love they are , and Oscar hopes fo ra fight because of course he does. Also elmo looks like Oscar slipped him about 80 ounces of cocaine because he is TRIPPING BALLS the entire cermony while panicking about dropping the rings.

Hey kids, just a life lesson if the garbage monster on your street offers you cocaine to help you relax before a wedding, don't take it. he's probably just wnatin ga laugh at your expense. Also just.. don't give 5 year olds cocaine. That's not a good thing to do. And don't shake them.. unless your Larry david then that sorta thing is just expected of you and you'll be dealt with later.

This message has been brought to you by popculturebuffet and the two penguins on my desk.

The wedding ends up working an dis beautiful. Also oscar the grouch somehow got a plus one, his girlfriend grungetta who i'm somehow just finding out exists. Oscar was getting it on the reg and not ONE of you fuckers thought it was a good idea to tell me. Good for him. A reception is held and everyone is happy... well almost everyone.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

[aresielle]

While reading some Star wars prequel trilogy fanfictions I suddenly realise something. Prequel's fans use mando'a in the same way anime's fans use Japanese.

It's fascinating. How many of theses fans where anime's fans before? How many correspondance between the 2 vocabulary can we find?

Let's try with some of the most common terms used.

Mando'a (English) => Japanese used by anime's fans (not always in the original or correct meaning in Japanese but one I have often see the past 20 years.)

ba'buir (grandfather, grandmother)=> Baba (old woman), Jiji (old man), ojii-san (grand father), obaa-san (grand mother). In the two cases the terms are also used to design any old people.

ba'vodu (uncle, aunt)=> oji-san (uncle), oba-san (aunt).

beskad/kad (slightly curved, pointed saber of Mandalorian iron/saber, sword) => Katana

buir (parent/father / mother)=> otou-san (father), okaa-san (mother)

cabur (guardian, protector)=> depending of the situation it could be the same think than ba'vodu or buir

copikla (charming, cute (babies and animals - never women unless you want your head ripped off)) => Kawaii or moe except it's totally ok tu used this word for woman.

cyare (beloved, loved, popular) => i know there is one but I can remember it right now. Maybe the habit of people to use the honorific sama for the man or hime for the woman to show the characters are love interest?

di'kut (idiot, useless individual, waste of space) => baka

Gedet'ye (Please)=> Onegaishimasu, onegai

Gev (Stop it!)=>yameru or yamete kudasai

Ka'ra (stars - ancient Mandalorian myth - ruling council of fallen kings) => Kami-sama

kih'vod (little brother/sister ?) =>imouto and otouto

mandokarla (having the "right stuff", showing guts and spirit, the state of being the epitome of Mando virtue) => kakkoii (“good-looking”, “handsome”, “cool in a manly way”, they totally used the 2 terms in the sames way)

mesh'la (beautiful) => bishounen and bishoujo

Me'ven? (Huh? What? ) => nani?

Ne'johaa! (Shut up!) =>urusai ("Noisy", "Loud", "Annoying" or "Fussy". In some context heavily implied they need to just shut up)

Ni ceta (sorry (lit: I kneel) grovelling apology - rare) => sumimasen or gomenasai and other variations

ori'jate/jate (exelent/good) => sugoi

ori'vod (big brother, older brother, special friend) => onii-san, ani-ki, sempai, onee-chan and all the others variations.

osik (dung, shit)=> kuso !

Oya! (Many meanings: literally "Let's hunt!" and also "Stay alive!", but also Hoorah!, "Go you!", "Cheers!" Always positive and triumphant.)=> Yatta!

Re'turcye mhi (Goodbye - lit. "Maybe we'll meet again")=>sayounara

Su cuy'gar (Hello - lit. "You're still alive.") => konichiwa, ohaoyou, kombanwa

verd'ika (private (rank of a soldier)) => kouhai (it's the younger student or less experience worker in a company in the relation sempai/kouhai. The meaning are different but I think it's often used in the same way. With ori'vod used in the place of sempai. )

vod (comrade, "mate", brother, sister) => nakama (especially in the one piece fandom. They probably could make a contest with the star wars fandom to see who will use vod or nakama the most often.)

Vor'e! (Thanks!) => arrigato

I'm pretty sure there is a lot of other exemples. I hope my rambling was not too incomprehensible. My English is not always very good. And my japanese is almost inexistant. But, bloody hell, this think hit me yesterday evening like a train and I need to vent it somewhere to get it out of my head.

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

October 19, 2018 — Matt Chapman

Background

In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic (megaspoiler: they are) and to also start mapping communication across the United States. Since then, I’ve submitted over a hundred requests for email metadata across the United States – at least two per state.

The first large batch of requests for email metadata were sent to the largest cities of fourteen arbitrary states in a trial run of sorts. In the end of that batch, only two cities were willing to continue with the request - Houston and Seattle. Houston complied surprisingly quickly and snail mailed the metadata for 6m emails.

Seattle on the other hand...

The Request

On April 2, 2017 I sent this fairly boilerplate request to Seattle's IT department:

For all emails sent to/from any Seattle owned email address in 2017, please provide the following information: 1. From address 2. To address 3. bcc addresses 4. cc addresses 5. Time 6. Date

Technically this request can done with a single line powershell command. At a policy level, though, it usually gets a lot of pushback. Seattle's first response included a bit of gobsmackery that I’ve almost become used to:

Based on my preliminary research, there have been 5.5 million emails sent and 26.8 million emails received by seattle.gov email addresses in the past 90 days. This is a significant amount of records that will need to be reviewed prior to sharing them with you. Do you have a more targeted list of email addresses you might be interested in? If not, I will work to find out how long review will take and will be in touch.

Of course, I still want the records, so -

I would like to stick with this request as-is for all ~32m emails.  Since this request is for metadata only, the amount of review needed should be relatively small.

Fee Estimate of 33 Million Dollars

A week later, I received this glorious response. Each paragraph is interesting in itself, so let’s break most of it down piece by piece.

Rewording of request

This acknowledges receipt of your public disclosure request C012032-041017 received on April 03, 2017 regarding: All emails sent to/from any Seattle owned email address in 2017 including metadata:1. From address2. To address3. bcc addresses4. cc addresses5. Time6. Date

Notice the change of language from the original wording. Their rewording completely changes the scope of the request so that it's not just for metadata, but also the emails contents. No idea why they did that.

Salary Fees

With that being said, Seattle IT estimates spending 30 seconds to two minutes to review each email. It has been estimated that this work will take approximately 320 years of staff time at an expense of $33 million in salary.

Wot.

Normally, a flustered public records officer would just reject a giant request for being for “unduly burdensome”… but this sort of estimate is practically unheard of. So much so that other FOIA nerds have told me that this is the second biggest request they've ever seen. The passive aggression is thick. Needless to say, it's not something I'm willing to pay for!

The estimate of 30s per metadata entry is also a bit suspect. Especially with the use of Excel, which would be useful for removing duplicates, etc.

Storage Fees

We estimate that this request contains 8-10 terabytes of information, for which we could need to stand up an FTP server through which the requester will be able to download cleared email meta data. As allowed under RCW 42.56.120, we would charge the requester for the actual copying costs of fulfilling this request. Based on the Seattle IT cost model used for internal City charge backs, the anticipated cost to the requester is $2,480 per year plus $2.11 per gigabyte of storage. We are still working on the storage requirements for this effort. If we assume 10 TB of storage, this would require $21,606.40/year in requester fees.

Heh. Any sysadmin can tell you that The costs of storage doesn’t exactly come from the storage medium itself; administration costs, supporting hardware, etc, are the bulk of the costs. But come on, let’s be realistic here. There’s very little room for good faith in their cost estimates – especially since the last time a single gigabyte cost that much was between 2002 and 2004.

That said – some other interesting things going on here:

Their file size estimation is huge. For comparison, that Houston’s email metadata dump was only 1.2GB.

The fact that they mention “meta data” [sic] implies that they did acknowledge that the request was for metadata.

Seattle already uses Amazon S3 to store public records requests’ data. At the time, S3 was charging $.023/GB

Continue anyway?

At this time, the City anticipates that it will be able to provide a first installment of records on or about May 29, 2017. However, please note that this time estimate may change depending on the clarification you provide and as we continue to process your request.  If the City does not hear from you within 30 days, the City will consider your request closed.

Oddly, they don't actually close out the request and instead ask whether I wanted to continue or not. I responded to their amazing email by asking how many records I'd receive on May 29th, but never received an answer back.

Reversal of the Original Cost Estimate

On June 5, they sent a new response admitting that their initial fee estimation was wrong, and asked for $1.25 for two days’ (out of three months) of records:

At this point I can send you an exel spreadsheet with the data points you are requesting.  The cost for the first installment is $1.25 for emails sent or received on January 1 and 2, 2017.  Because the spreadsheet does not contain the body of the email and just the metadata that you requested, no review will be necessary, and we'll be able to get this information to you at a faster pace than the 320 years quoted you earlier. 

Because they're asking for a single check for $1.25 for just two days’ worth of metadata – and wouldn’t send anything until that first check came in, my interpretation is that they’re taking a page from /r/maliciouscompliance and just making this request as painful as possible just for the simple sake of making it difficult. So in response, I preemptively sent them fourteen separate checks. The first thirteen checks were all around ~$1.25. That seemed to work, since they never asked for a single payment afterwards.

From there, my inbox went mostly silent for two months, and I mostly forgot about the request, though they eventually cashed all of the checks and made me an account for their public records portal.

SNAFU

Fast forward to August 22, when I randomly added that email account back to my phone. Unexpectedly, it turned out they actually finished the request! And without a bill for millions of dollars! Sure enough, their public records request portal had about 400 files available to download, which all in all contained metadata for about 32 million emails. Neat!

Problem though... they accidentally included the first 256 characters of all 32 million emails.

Here are some things I found in the emails:

Usernames and passwords.

Credit card numbers.

Social security numbers and drivers licenses.

Ongoing police investigations and arrest reports.

Texts of cheating husbands to their lovers.

FBI Investigations.

Zabbix alerts.

In other words... they just leaked to me a massive dataset filled with intimately private information. In the process, they very likely broke many laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974 and many of WA's own public records laws. Frankly, I'm still at a loss of words.

It’s hard to say how any of this happened exactly, but odds are that a combination of request’s rewording and the original public records officer going on vacation led to a communication breakdown. I don’t want to dwell on the mistake itself, so I’ll stop it at that.

Side note to Seattle's IT department - clean up your disks. You shouldn't have that many disks at 100%!

Raising the Issue

I responded as passively as possible in the hopes that they’d catch their mistake on their own:

The responsive records are not consistent with my request and includes much more info than I initially requested. Could you please revisit this request and provide the records responsive to my initial request?

Their response:

The information that you requestedis located in columns: From address = column J To address = column K bcc address = column M cc address = column L Time and date = column R  of the reports.  The records were generatedfrom a system report and I am unable to limit the report to generate only thefields you requested.  The City has no duty to create a record that doesnot exist.  As such, we have provided all records responsive to yourrequest and consider your request closed.

Disregarding the fact that they used a very common tactic of denying information on the basis that its disclosure would require the creation of new records… they didn’t get the point. I explained what information they leaked, and made it very clear how I was going to escalate this:

Please address this matter as if it was a large data breach. For now, I will be raising this matter to the WA Office of Privacy and Data Protection. None of the files provided to me have been shared with anyone else, nor do I have any future intention of sharing.

Their response:

Thank you for your email and bringing this inadvertent error to our attention so quickly. We have temporarily suspended access to GovQA while we look into the cause of this issue. We are also working on reprocessing your request and anticipate providing you with corrected copies of the records you requested through GovQA next week. In the meantime, please do not review, share, copy or otherwise use these records for any purpose. We are sorry for any inconvenience.

Phone Call

Not too long after that, after contacting some folks on Seattle’s Open Data , I found my way onto a conference phone call with both Seattle’s Chief Technology officer and their Chief Privacy Officer and we discussed what happened, and what should happen with the records. They thanked me for bringing the situation to their attention and all that, but the mood of the call was as if both parties had a knife behind their back. Somewhere towards the end of the call, I asked them if it was okay to keep the emails. Why not at least ask, right?

Funny enough, in the middle of that question, my internet died and interrupted the call for the first time in the six months I lived in that house. Odd. It came back ten minutes later, and I dialed back into the conference line, but the mood of the call pretty much 180’d. They told me:

All files were to be deleted.

Seattle would hire Kroll to scan my hard drives to prove deletion.

Agreeing to #1 and #2 would give me full legal indemnification.

This isn't something I'm even remotely cool with, so we ended the call a couple minutes later, and agreed to have our lawyers speak going forward.

Deleting the Files

After that call, I asked my lawyer to reach out to their lawyer and was pretty much told that Seattle was approaching the problem as if they were pursuing Computer Fraud And Abuse (CFAA) charges. For information that they sent. Jiminey Cricket..

So, I deleted the files.

Most of what happened next over a month or so was mostly between their lawyer and mine, so there’s not really that much for me to say. Early on I suggested that I write an affidavit that explains what happened, how I deleted the files, and I validated that the files were deleted. They mostly agreed, but still wanted to throw some silly assurance things my way – including asking me to run a bash script to overwrite any unused disk space with random bits. I eventually ran zerofree and fstrim instead, and they accepted the affidavit. No more legal threats from there.

Seattle’s Reaction

About a week after the phone call, a Seattle city employee contacted Seattle’s KIRO7 about the incident. In KIRO7's investigation, they learned that, Seattle hadn’t sent any disclosure of the leak - something required by WA’s public records request law. Only after their investigation did Seattle actually notify its employees about the emails leak. Link to their story (video inside).

A week later, another article was published by Seattle’s Crosscut which goes into a lot of detail, including some history of Seattle's IT department. This line towards the bottom still makes me laugh a little:

The buffer against potential legal and administrative chaos in this scenario is only that Chapman has turned out to be, as Armbruster described him, a "good Samaritan." Efforts to track down Chapman were not successful; Crosscut contacted several Matthew Chapmans who denied being the requester.

On January 19th, Seattle's CTO, Michael Mattmiller gave his resignation. Whether his resignation is related to the email leak is hard to say, but I just think the timing makes it worth mentioning.

Finally – The Metadata

Starting January 26th, Seattle started sending installments of the email metadata I requested. So far they've sent 27 million emails. As of the writing of this post, there are only two departments who haven’t provided their email metadata: the Police Department and Human Services.

You can download the raw data here.

Some things about the dataset:

It’s very messy – triple quotes, semicolons, commas, oh my.

There are a millions of systems alerts.

For seattle.gov → seattle.gov communication, there are two distinct metadata records.

In any case, it's still somewhat workable, so I've been working on a proof of concept for its use in the greater context of public records laws. Not ready to talk much about it yet, so here's here's is a gephi graph of one day's worth of metadata. Its layout is Yifan Hu and filtered with a k-core minimum of 5 and a minimum degree of 5:

Please reach out to me if you'd like to help model these networks.

One Last Thing: Legislative Immunity Kerfuffle

This last section might not be related, but the timing is interesting, so I feel it’s worth mentioning.

On February 23 - between the first installment of email metadata and the second - WA’s legislature attempted to pass SB6617, a bill which removes requirements for disclosure of many of their records – including email exchanges - from WA’s public records laws. What’s particularly interesting about this events of this bill is that it took less than 24 hours from the time it was read for the first time to the time that it passed at both the House and Senate and sent to the Governor’s office.

Seattle Times wrote a good article about it.

Thankfully, after the WA governor’s office received over 6,300 phone calls, 100 letters, and over 12,500 emails, the governor ended up vetoing the bill. Neat.

It's hard to say if that caused any sort of delay, but after a month and a half of waiting:

How are the installments looking? I saw that there was some recent legislative immunity kerfuffle around emails. Is that related to any delays?

And got this response:

Good news.  The recent Washington state legislative immunity kerfuffle will not impact your installments.  We have fixed the bug that was impacting our progress and are now on our way. In fact, I'll have more records for you this week.

A month later, they started sending the rest.

What’s Next?

The work done throughout this post has led to a massive trove of information that ought to be enormously useful in understanding the dynamics of one the US's biggest cities. A big hope in making this sort of information available to the public is that it will help in changing the dynamic of understanding what sorts of information is accessible.

That said, this is just one city of many which have given me email metadata. As more of it comes through, I’ll be able to map out more and more, but the difficulty in requesting those records continues to get in the way.

Once I get some of these bigger stories out of the way, I’ll start writing fewer stories and write more about public records requesting fundamentals – particularly for digital records.

Next post will be about my ongoing suit against the White House OMB for email metadata from January 2017. This past Wednesday was the first court date - where the defendent's counsel never showed up.

Hope you enjoyed!

Tags: seattle, foia, kerfuffle, metadata