[HN Gopher] Show HN: New search engine and free-FOIA-by-fax-via-...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: New search engine and free-FOIA-by-fax-via-web for US
veteran records
Hi HN. I'm the president and founder of a small non-profit called
Reclaim The Records that identifies historical and genealogical
materials and data sets held by government agencies, archives, and
libraries -- and then returns them to the public domain, for free
public use. Back in September 2017, our organization made a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the US Department of
Veterans Affairs (the VA) asking for a copy of a database they
maintain called "BIRLS", which stands for the Beneficiary
Identification Records Locator Subsystem. While it's not exactly an
index of every single post-Civil-War veteran of every branch of the
US military, it's possibly the closest thing that exists to it.
BIRLS is a database that indexes all the known-to-the-VA-in-or-
after-the-1970s * _veterans ' benefits claims files*_, also called
C-Files or sometimes XC-Files. Older veterans' claims files have
been moved to the National Archives (NARA), such as the famous
Civil War pension files. But 95% of the later benefits claim files,
from the late nineteenth century up to today, are still held at the
VA, in their warehouses, and still haven't been sent to NARA. And
even if you know these files exist, the VA really doesn't make it
easy to get them. The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) group
within the VA only seems to accept FOIA requests for copies of
C-Files by fax (!) and also seems to have made up a whole new rule
whereby you have to have an actual wet ink signature on your FOIA
request, not just a typed letter. Well, seven years and one very
successful FOIA lawsuit in SDNY against the VA later, we at Reclaim
The Records are very proud to announce the acquisition and first-
ever free public release of the BIRLS database, AND that we built a
new website to make the data freely and easily searchable AND that
we even built a free FOIA-by-FAX-API system (with a signature
widget, to get around the dumb new not-FOIA rules!) built into our
website's search results, that makes it much, much easier for
people to finally get these files out of the VA warehouses and into
your mailbox. :-) We also added the ability to do searches through
the data for soundalike names, abbreviated names, common nicknames,
wildcards, searches by date of birth or death, or ranges of birth
and death years, or search by SSN, or by branch(es) of services, or
by gender... For a lot more information about our FOIA lawsuit
against the VA for the database, including copies of our court
papers and the SDNY judge's order:
https://mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/the-birls-database-goes... As
for the tech stuff, actually building the website, the search
engine, and its FOIAing capability...well, it has been a pretty fun
project to build. The BIRLS dataset was eventually provided to us
by the VA (several years after we originally asked for it...) as a
large zip file which, when decompressed via the command line,
yielded the hilarious file name of * _Redacted_Full.csv*_. I then
loaded the cleaned CSV data into a MySQL database, and then used a
modified version of the Apache Solr search engine to index the
data, so that it could become searchable by soundalike names (using
Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching), nicknames (using Solr 's synonyms
feature), partial names (using wildcards), with dates converted to
ISO 8601 format to enable both exact date and date range searches,
and various other search criteria. The front-end of the website is
built with Nuxt and hosted on Digital Ocean's App Platform, with
backups of the FOIA request data on the cloud storage service
Wasabi. The fax interface for submitting FOIA requests is powered
by the Notifyre API. We use Mailchimp to send e-mail newsletters,
and their product Mandrill for programmatic e-mail sending. We use
Sentry for error monitoring, Better Stack for server logging, and
TinyBird to collect FOIA submission analytics. Enjoy!
Author : Asparagirl
Score : 105 points
Date : 2025-01-13 04:22 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.birls.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.birls.org)
| redeux wrote:
| As a veteran, I am aghast that this exists. What an invasion of
| people's lives. To me this is far worse than when I was notified
| that a foreign adversary had stolen my military records, because
| at least they're not publishing it on the web for all to see.
|
| Veterans aren't politicians, and they don't deserve to have their
| lives put on display like this without their permission. Some
| vets signed up because they wanted to serve their country, some
| because they were running from people or poverty, but they were
| all just ordinary people trying to eke out a living.
|
| I believe people, good people just trying to do their thing will
| be hurt by this information and that's unfair. It's just another
| example of people using veterans as pawns to achieve their ends.
|
| What is the ends in this case? I couldn't tell you. I do believe
| this will having a chilling effect on veterans seeking help from
| the VA at a time when they need it more and more.
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| I think the people in this are deceased? Does that change your
| view (genuinely asking)?
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Not GP, but no, these aren't long dead people, but recently
| departed veterans with way too much information being
| disclosed than should be given the timeline.
| redeux wrote:
| It's the recency that bothers me the most. These aren't
| veterans from "some distant time" where we're merely trying
| to better understand history through the lens these people
| provided in their private effects, mostly donated by private
| individuals or museums.
|
| These are people who still have young children today, people
| who's widows may still be grieving. Now their parent's or
| partner's VA history is up for display, for people to use for
| whatever means they want? That doesn't make sense to me.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| I'm also a veteran and immediately had the same thought. Thank
| you for thoughtfully replying, I probably would've been more
| aggressively toned had I not read your reply first.
| floydnoel wrote:
| same here, was having a hard time finding appropriate words.
| i guess serving our country came with some fine print that we
| never got the chance to read.
|
| but how could a vietnam war veteran possibly consent to
| having their records accessible to the entire world via the
| internet?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| As a person, not a Veteran, I totally agree. This data should
| not be public domain. Definitely only accessible to family
| members (if at all).
|
| Having obtained my father's military records, I can definitely
| say that I'm glad these weren't online, searchable. Via those
| records I learnt much concerning my father and I'm glad I
| obtained them.
|
| To get those records, I had to prove I was his son, that my
| father was indeed deceased and that he hadn't said/written
| anything to prevent me from having his records. That should be
| the minimum (IMHO) for obtaining such records. This wasn't in
| the USA though.
| ty6853 wrote:
| The military uses the gun of the taxman to force us to pay
| for them. If they're going to put me in a tiny cage for not
| paying up while they're galavanting around the world drone
| striking brown people and us citizens the least I can get out
| of it is the records.
| redeux wrote:
| This dump will give you the personal records of the rank
| and file. The "military" that you're talking about is
| really congress and the president. It makes much more sense
| to go after the actions and communication of those folks
| than some grunts who gave their bodies shoveling shit for a
| chance at a future.
| 0134340 wrote:
| Maybe OP should be going after the politicians and
| corporations that have used government benefits. Where's
| that freely searchable database?
| stonogo wrote:
| Most of the people in this database were drafted. I think
| you're angry at the wrong people.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| If you give the government tools for hiding information, the
| government will abuse those tools. This is what freedom looks
| like. I have family members in this dataset, and they would be
| fine with it because they would pick freedom and this is what
| freedom has to look like.
| redeux wrote:
| That's your deviant, extremist definition of freedom. It
| aligns neither with the founding father's definition nor what
| a typical person would say if asked to define freedom.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| The founding fathers understood freedom needs public
| accountability. That includes how government decisions are
| made and how public funds are used, including at the VA.
| The founding fathers believed a well-informed citizenry was
| vital to a free society.
|
| FOIA deters misconduct, corruption, and waste. Even in this
| context, doctors diagnosis/judgement of service members has
| come up for discussion.
|
| A free society empowers the public, which is exactly what
| this information does.
|
| Transparency fosters trust. When we can look inside
| institutions we are more likely to trust them. For the VA,
| that means looking at the treatments they are providing and
| how they are treating those they are supposed to serve. The
| VA has historically had very low public/veteran trust.
|
| Access to information such as this fosters relevant
| discussions and debate. Especially for an entity like the
| VA which receive virtually all of it's funding from the
| government and needs to constantly (sadly) resell the
| public on the necesity of it's budget.
|
| Were the VA (whose purpose is medical care of our veterans
| and is almost exclusively funded by us the taxpayers) to
| restrict access to... information about medical care to our
| veterans would be a huge issue for a free society.
|
| My position is not deviant, extremist, nor alien to the
| concept/definition of the burdens/requirements of freedom
| promoted by the founding fathers.
| wtfssn38 wrote:
| Are you aware that the API appears to be publishing the SSN of
| each individual? Although I'm aware most SSNs are leaked in one
| breach or another, I still thought it was customary in the U.S.
| to attempt to keep such information somewhat protected.
| ldoughty wrote:
| I agree it probably isn't a great idea to publish it... I'm
| guessing some malicious actor could find a way to use this
| information to fiddle with the remaining benefits their family
| might be receiving...
|
| That said, the _typical_ things an SSN is used for would not be
| terribly useful for someone that's been dead >2-4 years...
| Automated checks should flag e.g. credit applications as being
| for a dead person :-)
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Do voting registration boards check for this too?
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| >49 states plus the District of Columbia have voter
| registration lists and in all of them there is a process
| for removing deceased voters from the list. (Note: North
| Dakota does not require people to register to vote.)
|
| https://tracker.votingrightslab.org/issues/voter-list-
| mainte...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Social Security Admin publishes a master death file
| containing a list of SSNs of those who have died. This is how
| institutions know to close credit, deposit, and brokerage
| accounts; they subscribe to and consume the file. Some copies
| of it have been uploaded to the Internet Archive when someone
| has obtained a copy (cost to obtain from NTIS is prohibitive
| for individuals, but reasonable for commercial customers).
|
| Broadly speaking, right to privacy evaporates at death, and
| when the Machine is working properly, SSNs have no value once
| they have been marked as deceased in SSA's system of record
| (as that flows through to various gov and commercial systems
| to ensure benefits cease and next of kin processes kick off
| for anything of value).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Master_File
|
| https://www.ntis.gov/ladmf/ladmf.xhtml
| Asparagirl wrote:
| Yes, that's on purpose. SSNs of * _deceased*_ people are
| public, not private. They are never reused. They are available
| under FOIA from other sources as well, such as the SSDMF.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Neat, Submitted a request for my grandfather's records. Some
| comments:
|
| 1) May want to auto-magically handle input for things like
| apostrophes. E.g. "O'Hare"... It looks like somewhere in the
| process this data was not preserved/saved/sent, but people will
| probably try to search with it. Might also want to handle the
| accent marks and what not too
|
| 2) The terms & conditions for Step 3, the checkbox at the bottom
| doesn't have enough contrast when checked. I do not have a
| disability, and I still found it very faint. Someone with a
| disability would likely have a lot of trouble (not to mention, it
| requires scrolling to the bottom to check it in the first place,
| which isn't awesome for accessibility)
|
| 3) I appreciate the warning on the terms and conditions about
| seeing things you might not want to see. A good reminder for
| those that might not want to tarnish a memory of someone...
| Reminds me of the DNA tests for Christmas, or learning about
| Punnett Squares and genetics, sometimes you might not want to go
| looking :-)
| owenmarshall wrote:
| > 3) I appreciate the warning on the terms and conditions about
| seeing things you might not want to see.
|
| I'd echo this. I found that to be exceptionally well-written
| and helped me understand the records I'd receive were unlikely
| to be the records I was interested in, so I cancelled at that
| point.
|
| Your abandon rate at that step could make for interesting
| reading!
| tivert wrote:
| >> 3) I appreciate the warning on the terms and conditions
| about seeing things you might not want to see. A good
| reminder for those that might not want to tarnish a memory of
| someone... Reminds me of the DNA tests for Christmas, or
| learning about Punnett Squares and genetics, sometimes you
| might not want to go looking :-)
|
| > I'd echo this. I found that to be exceptionally well-
| written and helped me understand the records I'd receive were
| unlikely to be the records I was interested in, so I
| cancelled at that point.
|
| I was curious, so clicked through the form far enough to get
| those warnings:
|
| > ...
|
| > The specific type of FOIA request that you can make through
| this website is one that asks the VA for a copy of a deceased
| veteran's Claims File (C-File). This file primarily contains
| a record of the veteran's contact with the VA (or the
| veteran's heirs' and family's contact with the VA)
| specifically regarding veterans' benefits. It may include
| copies of some of the veteran's service-related records,
| including entry/induction and separation/discharge documents,
| but often only to the extent that those records were
| considered necessary in order to establish their identity or
| to make a claim for a benefit. A C-File is not the same as an
| Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), although it
| sometimes may contain parts of the OMPF within it.
|
| > Many of these C-Files will include medical information and
| medical claims that were brought by the veteran (or their
| family or heirs) from before, during, and/or after their
| service. This often includes basic physical and health
| information about the veteran, including their height,
| weight, descriptions of childhood illnesses, past surgeries,
| notations of scars or distinctive markings, and so on.
| However, these files might also include medical information
| that would otherwise be considered private or sensitive,
| including graphic depictions of injuries, illnesses or
| diseases, and/or wartime trauma suffered while the veteran
| was in the service, or after service, or concerning end-of-
| life care. The file may also include discussions of
| disabilities, service-related or not, only some of which may
| have been covered by veterans' benefits, while others may
| have been denied by the VA, possibly unfairly.
|
| > The file may also include sensitive information about the
| veteran's mental health, including their experiences with,
| treatment for, and/or claims for disability for psychological
| trauma or for mental illnesses. This may include descriptions
| of what we would today recognize as service-related Post-
| Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but which may be listed in
| the veteran's file with outdated phrases such as "shell
| shock" or "psychoneurosis, anxiety state" or even more
| overtly disparaging terms from former military or VA medical
| personnel. It may also include archaic medical terminology,
| depictions, presumed causes, or treatments for various types
| of mental illness. This information may be troubling to read,
| not just for the sometimes graphic depiction of the veteran's
| trauma or mental state, but also because of the way it was
| often treated (or negligently untreated) in their official VA
| file.
|
| > (For example, in one C-File we've seen, an Army doctor
| officially "diagnosed" a hospitalized World War I veteran
| with "hypochondriasis on a constitutionally inferior basis"
| [sic] before discharging him from the service. This record
| remained in his file, even after his death in 1973.)
|
| > The file may also include information about the veteran's
| alcohol use, drug use, and/or tobacco use, or at least to the
| extent that the veteran reported their "habits" to the Armed
| Services or to VA personnel or to medical doctors.
|
| > The file may also include information about the veteran's
| sexual behavior or sexual orientation, including possible
| military discharge or punishment for same-sex relations or
| non-heterosexual identity, whether actual or perceived.
|
| > The file may also make explicit note of any venereal
| diseases or sexually transmitted infections experienced by
| the veteran, including documentation of ongoing or past
| treatments for what may have (at the time) been a chronic
| incurable illness such as advanced or tertiary syphilis. This
| information may therefore be medically relevant or
| potentially damaging to the veteran's spouse(s) or partner(s)
| or other family members.
|
| > The file may also have information about the veteran's
| financial or educational information, or other typically-
| private information, particularly if they were using or
| attempting to qualify for a pension, a disability benefit, a
| VA Home Loan, the GI Bill of Rights for educational benefits,
| or other benefits.
|
| > In addition to the veteran's own information, the veteran's
| C-File may sometimes include information about their non-
| veteran family members, including their parents and spouses
| and siblings and sometimes even extended family members, even
| a veteran's spouse's former spouse. This is generally just
| basic information, including for example the parents' places
| of birth or a spouse's date of marriage, but it may include
| family medical information (including reports of physical or
| mental health conditions that might be genetic), financial
| information, educational information, or other details of
| their lives. The file sometimes contains actual copies of
| family members' vital records such as birth, marriage,
| divorce, and death records. While the veteran is deceased,
| making their C-File largely open to the public under FOIA (as
| the Privacy Act of 1974 only refers to the files of living
| people), it is still possible that some of the other people
| mentioned in that now-open file may still be alive. If you
| come across sensitive information about a third party
| referenced in a deceased veteran's file that was (wrongly)
| not redacted by the VA, you are strongly urged to not
| disseminate, re-publish, or misuse any part of that
| information which could affect a living person's privacy.
|
| > You, the FOIA requester, therefore understand that these
| files might contain all sorts of information which might be
| considered sensitive, objectionable, upsetting, disparaging,
| invasive, or otherwise cause you or the veteran's family
| members or heirs distress. If you are not okay with the
| possibility of learning this kind of information, then you
| should not make a FOIA request for this kind of file, and you
| should hit the cancel button now.
|
| > ...
| Asparagirl wrote:
| Thanks. The original data set, as provided by the VA, has all
| sorts of data errors and oddities in it. The major ones
| involving surnames include the inconsistent use of apostrophes
| in names like O'BRIEN, often written as O BRIEN, and/or vice
| versa -- or the inconsistent formatting of MC and MAC names
| like MCMAHON as MC MAHON, and/or vice versa. There are also
| some names where the VA includes an errant dash, not meant to
| be a hyphen, and other mistakes, as well.
|
| So we try our best to help a user find the veteran even with
| the dirty data we have. For example, there is code here (using
| a common NPM package) to convert a user's potential typed
| accent marks to a non-accented version of the same letter. In
| compound surnames we will also break up the surname on a space
| or a hyphen and search both parts, but not if a surname part is
| three letters or fewer. It's imperfect but we have to work with
| the data we've got and can't and shouldn't normalize or clean
| the underlying file.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >names like MCMAHON as MC MAHON, and/or vice versa.
|
| My mom has a Van name and it's hell trying to use government
| and insurance websites, because they'll take the space out or
| add one in irregardless of what you use when signing up and
| then fail to find the account when doing a lookup for things
| like password resets or for activating the account that they
| created for her.
|
| It'd seem logical that some sort of fuzzy matching for
| apostrophe and spaces would be built in, but I've yet to find
| a government site where that's the case.
| archerjax wrote:
| My father, grandfathers and all my uncles are here. All deceased.
| I'm failing to find a use case for social security numbers to be
| present here. Or any of it to be honest.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Dead people's SSNs are published on a regular basis by the
| Social Security Administration (the "Death Master File" or
| "Social Security Death Index"). Once you're dead it's not
| really private information.
|
| I agree with you re: living people's SSNs, though.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| This site feels icky and I'm not quite sure how to articulate
| why. What is the purpose of this service? Why is it good for the
| public have access to detailed records of individual, recently
| deceased veterans? Isn't this a gold mine for scammers? Is this
| project LDS affiliated?
| tivert wrote:
| > This site feels icky and I'm not quite sure how to articulate
| why. What is the purpose of this service?
|
| Sounds like genealogy, and a small fraction of the documents in
| a veteran's would probably be very helpful in fleshing out some
| basic details of their military service (especially given a
| fire destroyed many of the original copies of those documents).
|
| The actual medical records part seems inappropriate, though.
|
| > Why is it good for the public have access to detailed records
| of individual, recently deceased veterans? Isn't this a gold
| mine for scammers? Is this project LDS affiliated?
|
| It seems like it's a gap in FOIA. These records should be
| available, just not to _everyone in the whole world_ (at least
| not before, say, 60 years after the veteran 's death). It seems
| legitimate that an appropriately-close family member should be
| able to request them (similar to restrictions in requesting
| birth certificates).
| fergbrain wrote:
| Thanks for your efforts in liberating this data so that
| Ancestry.com isn't the only ones with it!
|
| Reminds me a bit muckrock.com as well.
| Asparagirl wrote:
| We love MuckRock! And we made the original FOIA request to the
| VA for this dataset via MuckRock's platform. You can see the
| actual screenshot in the "Reclaiming These Records" legal
| papers section. They also get a shoutout in our colophon for
| indirectly inspiring the FOIA-by-fax-via-web method, although I
| believe their site uses e-mail, including interfacing with
| agency FOIA portals when possible.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Spent a few minutes trying to find an answer to "why do this?"
| Beyond just implying that it should be done and the most I was
| able to find was one sentence buried amongst paragraphs and
| paragraphs of "what" and "how".
|
| > these materials were largely unknown and inaccessible to
| historians, journalists, and genealogists
|
| I think it would be worthwhile to lead with that and include a
| little more detail too.
|
| If there isn't a clear motivation, people will assume the worst.
| draftsman wrote:
| I think it's critically important to mention that the VA
| provided all this data to Ancestry.com years ago. According to
| the newletter op linked, Ancestry.com charges $300/year for
| access to this data. This unfairness is what prompted the
| lawsuit and ultimate release of data.
| Asparagirl wrote:
| Indeed. This is ABSOLUTELY not the first time we've dealt
| with a government agency (at the local, state, or federal
| levels) providing a copy of a public dataset to Ancestry.com
| and not to the general public. Our taxpayer-funded data keeps
| ending up solely behind a $300/year paywall. It's not fair.
|
| (Also, the stripped-down version of BIRLS that has been on
| the Ancestry website for a while now is much smaller and
| older.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tremendous work on this, thanks for the work to unlock
| these records for the public.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious why this material should be
| available.
|
| >If there isn't a clear motivation, people will assume the
| worst.
|
| This is just a weird assumption.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| As someone trying to piece together family history, after most of
| my family has died, I really appreciate this. Any and all efforts
| to make records available helps with clues. Building an accurate
| family history is a process of "one more document". This effort
| is definitely helpful to me. I've already utilized your service
| to submit a request for my grandfather's records. I'll be
| spending time searching for other relatives as well. Thanks!
| necovek wrote:
| I believe you should work to limit exposure of sensitive
| information like SSN: while it's ok to allow search by an exact
| SSN, you should probably not display it unless the requestor
| already knows what it is.
|
| OTOH, if you have really succesfully worked to make this database
| public domain and do publish it somewhere (and you did, as I can
| see at https://archive.org/details/BIRLS_database), this wouldn't
| be of much help against any malicious actors out there.
|
| But really, it seems the burden is on VA if there are non-
| deceased persons in the database since they have done a bad job
| of maintaining the data, and they would be liable for any leakage
| of information (unless Reclaim the Records was aware of any in
| particular). Even so, RTR might have put themselves out on the
| fence for some lawsuits against them too.
| Asparagirl wrote:
| The VA worked to confirm that everyone in this dataset is
| deceased, in order to satisfy the judge's order, and produced
| an internal document about how they did it -- which we then
| FOIAed and posted online too. (It's up on the site, next to the
| legal paperwork.) The veterans and their SSNs are believed to
| have been deceased prior to mid-2020, checked by the VA's
| internal datasets as well as public data sets such as the
| SSDMF. And SSNs of deceased people are * _not private*_ , since
| they are never reused. The Social Security Administration also
| makes copies of all deceased peoples' original SS-5
| applications available to the public under FOIA.
| greentxt wrote:
| Have you ever worried about your impact on veterans? Maybe
| not a concern?
| Asparagirl wrote:
| The veterans in the data set are all deceased, and I have
| not heard any complaints from them so far.
| greentxt wrote:
| The VA who you sued does serve vets with whatever money
| they dont spend fighting you.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The VA is obligated to follow the law as it relates to
| open records. Broadly speaking, America actively chooses
| to treat vets poorly. Call your Congressional rep (who
| directly controls policy that controls funding) versus
| taking your feelings out on your fellow citizen working
| for little or no pay to encourage government
| accountability as it relates to their legal obligations.
| greentxt wrote:
| So you would prefer I sue the VA?! They tried to preserve
| my families' privacy and reduce risk to current heirs
| like me. No, doxxing the dead cause "letter of the law
| matters" for some stupid side project like this is far
| from commendable. I will bet those of us with a lot of
| family in there, especially recently deceased, will feel
| very different than you or the CEO of doxx the dead.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes, I recommend you sue the VA if you believe a law is
| being violated. If a law isn't being violated, I
| recommend therapy (or some other form of support) if you
| are upset about open records law and aren't able to
| change the law. Those are your options. How you feel is,
| with all due respect, immaterial to the availability as
| it relates to the records in scope. Feelings aren't laws.
| You're angry with the law and openness of the records in
| question, and taking it out on others.
|
| If you believe I'm unsympathetic, I'm not (I have four
| siblings who have served), and there is no snark intended
| in any of my comments. As I said above, call your
| Congressional rep, they are the only one empowered to
| change legislation on this topic (perhaps around the
| blackout period for records of recent veteran deaths).
| Anything else is tilting at windmills.
| patwolf wrote:
| I previously tried getting military records for my deceased
| grandfather. From what I can recall, it was complicated by the
| fact that I wasn't "next of kin", which would limit the data I'd
| have access to. Even my parent, who was next of kin, would have
| needed additional paperwork as proof, e.g. a death/marriage
| certificate for my grandmother.
|
| On one hand, if this works then I'll be happy to have the
| information I otherwise wouldn't have. But on the other hand, all
| these processes, no matter how convoluted, exist for a reason. It
| feels weird bypassing those.
| Asparagirl wrote:
| The processes for getting these very particular records
| (C-Files, as opposed to something like an OMPF or other better
| known military records) has been horrendously broken for years.
| They were almost completely inaccessible from this specific
| agency (the VBA, inside the VA) their entire existence. Only 5%
| of the files have been turned over to NARA, even for records
| that are very old.
|
| And even now, the "processes" to get the records, as defined by
| a 58+-year-old law (FOIA) are not really being followed. An
| agency refusing to process any FOIA requests except by fax (!)
| is insane, in this day and age. But more specifically, it's
| against the law. A letter AND an e-mail are supposed to work.
| Hence our use of a fax API on this website...
|
| Furthermore, the "requirement" that a FOIA requester must hand-
| sign the paperwork is absolutely made up by this agency. Hence
| our signature widget on this website...
|
| Point being, if they're going to shamelessly ignore or
| misinterpret the federal law, we are going to just jump through
| those hoops and say no, we want the files, please do your jobs.
| greentxt wrote:
| But that may be bad actually.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >From what I can recall, it was complicated by the fact that I
| wasn't "next of kin", which would limit the data I'd have
| access to.
|
| My state has a process for claiming unclaimed funds that banks
| and such report to the government and that is what is keeping
| me from claiming some funds my grandmother has listed on the
| site. It's not even clear to me what constitutes 'next of kin'
| legally, presumably it'd be one of her kids, but it's not like
| we have laws designating the oldest male heir and then on down
| the list.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Your state should have information on their unclaimed
| property page to contact someone who can explain what
| documentation is necessary to establish legal order next of
| kin chain from your ancestor to whomever is claiming the
| property they are acting as custodian for. Call them! Most
| are usually very helpful.
| flippyhead wrote:
| I love the included legal timeline. Strong work!
| neilv wrote:
| This project might be entirely well-intentioned, but some
| possibilities to be careful of, with this kind of effort:
|
| * Intent is to sell the data, or otherwise "monetize" it, in the
| techbro sense.
|
| * "Shell" effort of a specific company that wants the data.
|
| * Shell effort of an organized crime group.
|
| * Shell effort of a foreign intelligence agency, or terrorist
| group.
|
| Awhile ago, there was a different project, which had the effect
| of making different US records, which were already reasonably
| accessible to US citizens and journalists, easily available to
| foreign adversaries, such as for espionage profiling and
| blackmail. When that project was promoted on HN, I caught the
| promoter seeming to use a sockpuppet account in the comments
| (accidentally using the wrong account to respond to themself),
| which I found additionally suspicious.
|
| Even when a project is fully honest and with good intentions, we
| also have to consider the risks of likely other consumers of the
| data, which include all the possibilities above.
| tivert wrote:
| Somewhat related: there was a fire in 1973 that destroyed the
| military records of a large fraction of former military personnel
| at the time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Cen....
| Asparagirl wrote:
| Yes, a terrible fire, although there are efforts ongoing to
| restore some of those files, even reading the data from charred
| papers and edges with newer technology.
|
| However, these particular files (benefits claims files, or
| C-Files) are a different type of file and never burned. Better
| yet, they often have some parts of the veteran's OMPF that were
| copied *into* the C-File, to establish eligibility for those
| benefits -- copies that were made before the fire! In other
| words, these files could serve as partial backups...
| tantalor wrote:
| _If and when the VA locates the file, scans it, and redacts it,
| you should expect to receive a DVD in the mail containing the
| newly-digitized images of the materials several weeks or months
| after your initial acknowledgement letter has arrived._
|
| Ha, the only device I have with DVD is a PS5, this should be fun.
| greentxt wrote:
| Really hope op and crew are sued to oblivion.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Why? I'm curious. What's wrong with making information on
| deceased service members searchable?
| greentxt wrote:
| It costs the VA money they could use to youknow be saving
| veterans lives with? That is the "explain to a five year old"
| tier reason. There are a lot of other reasons too besides
| that, but the simple one for you should suffice.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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).
| mike_d wrote:
| 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.
| Asparagirl wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > 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.
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