FOIA and VMAP1 anyone?

[Chris Holmes]

Hey all, was wondering if anyone here might be excited about doing 
Freedom of Information requests and legal action on full VMAP1 datasets?

http://www.mapability.com/index1.html?http&&&www.mapability.com/info/vmap1_index.html

Has an introduction, if you don't know basically it's 1:250,000 scale 
vectors for the whole world.  Only portions have been released, and NGA 
ignores FOIA requests for access to more.  I have a good friend who's a 
lawyer who recently set up a non-profit legal institution to do, among 
other things, FOIA actions.  He's pretty excited about going after this, 
and with some more information feels we have a good chance of winning 
it.  You take them to court and if successful the court demands that the 
data be handed over.

So my question is, is this something that the geodata committee could 
get behind?  We may be able to get fee waivers on the requests if we can 
show that it's an organization helping to 'understand government' or 
some such, basically we can pretty easily spin what we are in to 
something that could get a fee waiver.  And indeed if we have the 
apparatus to distribute the data once we get it then it also may be 
easier.

He's willing to give us a very good discount on time spent, and the cool 
thing is that if we win, which we should, then the government will pay 
all his attorney fees.  And in that case any money he takes from us will 
be returned.  I was thinking we could set up a fund, use pledgebank or 
something for the initial money, and then if/when we win that money goes 
back in to more FOIA actions.  Perhaps go after things like NYCMap, 
things at a more regional level that have really nice data (we don't all 
have organizations like MassGIS :( ).

  Chris

-- 
Chris Holmes
The Open Planning Project
http://topp.openplans.org
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