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 :-)
> 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!
>> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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).
>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.)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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).
Agree completely with your comments and the parent's comment. It feels like this shouldn't have been allowed by the courts without better scrutiny and wisdom on the part of the courts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Ancestry has a somewhat smaller copy of the BIRLS database online, covering just the years 1850-2010 [1], and it seems to have been published on their website in 2011:
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2441/
Our data set from the VA contains data through mid-2020, and was turned over to us in 2022 after undergoing extensive double-checking by the agency, including through non-public VA sources, to confirm the veterans really were all deceased. There's a paper showing the agency's methodology on our site, which we FOIAed from them.
There are a significant number of deceased veterans whose data is *not* included in the BIRLS database, because they (or their family/heirs) simply did not have any contact with the VA concerning benefits in or after the 1970s, which is when the database was first starting to be built. That is, their files almost always still exist on a warehouse shelf somewhere, but they weren't active any time in the past fifty years so they didn't get pulled and indexed into the database. You can still make a FOIA request to the agency asking for one of those files, but the VA will have a lower chance of successfully finding the file, and it usually will take longer for you to get a response.
[1] 1850 is very likely an approximation. While there are certainly deceased veterans listed in the BIRLS database who had birthdates or deathdates in the mid nineteenth century and/or service in the late nineteenth century, they are relatively few. Many of them are actually veterans with likely birthdates or deathdates in the twentieth century whose data seems to have been initially recorded by the VA with a two digit year of birth or death or enlistment/entry, and then assigned to the wrong two digit prefix, causing an incorrect four digit year of birth or death or year of entry/enlistment into service.
In other words, the VA's historic data is very messy and is a great example of an actual Y2K issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
I need to get a copy of the database asap just for my data archiving neurosis lol. The amount of vitriolic comments here from entitled "service" members is astounding and makea me wish to safeguard it personally. I mean we have people in the comments calling people "extremist" and bringing up founding fathers bullshit ....
Only jarheads seem to think the parental tone of "you don't know what freedom is" actually works.... Maybe because they have been thru boot camp idk.
> The amount of vitriolic comments here from entitled "service" members is astounding and makea me wish to safeguard it personally.
As someone who's never been in the military and isn't even acquainted with that many people who have been, I think I should give you a head's up that you are being an entitled asshole.
I think most people would be mad if they found out some of the most private and personal records about them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685002) would be made public to anyone who'd care to request them. It's a pretty terrible violation of privacy. Try to think about how you'd feel if something like that was going to happen to you (say, your complete browsing history would be made public, because I'm sure you have one and you almost certainly want to keep it private).
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 :-)
> 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!
>> 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.
> ...
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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
Do voting registration boards check for this too?
>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...
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.
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.
But that may be bad actually.
>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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Have you ever worried about your impact on veterans? Maybe not a concern?
The veterans in the data set are all deceased, and I have not heard any complaints from them so far.
The VA who you sued does serve vets with whatever money they dont spend fighting you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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).
Agree completely with your comments and the parent's comment. It feels like this shouldn't have been allowed by the courts without better scrutiny and wisdom on the part of the courts.
Why exactly should arguably one of the MOST important parts of a state get exceptions to the law and transparency based on feelings?
> Why exactly should arguably one of the MOST important parts of a state get exceptions to the law and transparency based on feelings?
In exactly what way do you think people's personal medical records are "arguably one of the MOST important parts of a state"?
If you believe so much in transparency, put your money where your mouth is. Post all of your medical records here, right now.
Blood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
How recent was the last death of a veteran, given to Ancestry.com, compared to what your efforts have now exposed?
Ancestry has a somewhat smaller copy of the BIRLS database online, covering just the years 1850-2010 [1], and it seems to have been published on their website in 2011: https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2441/
Our data set from the VA contains data through mid-2020, and was turned over to us in 2022 after undergoing extensive double-checking by the agency, including through non-public VA sources, to confirm the veterans really were all deceased. There's a paper showing the agency's methodology on our site, which we FOIAed from them.
There are a significant number of deceased veterans whose data is *not* included in the BIRLS database, because they (or their family/heirs) simply did not have any contact with the VA concerning benefits in or after the 1970s, which is when the database was first starting to be built. That is, their files almost always still exist on a warehouse shelf somewhere, but they weren't active any time in the past fifty years so they didn't get pulled and indexed into the database. You can still make a FOIA request to the agency asking for one of those files, but the VA will have a lower chance of successfully finding the file, and it usually will take longer for you to get a response.
[1] 1850 is very likely an approximation. While there are certainly deceased veterans listed in the BIRLS database who had birthdates or deathdates in the mid nineteenth century and/or service in the late nineteenth century, they are relatively few. Many of them are actually veterans with likely birthdates or deathdates in the twentieth century whose data seems to have been initially recorded by the VA with a two digit year of birth or death or enlistment/entry, and then assigned to the wrong two digit prefix, causing an incorrect four digit year of birth or death or year of entry/enlistment into service.
In other words, the VA's historic data is very messy and is a great example of an actual Y2K issue.
Tremendous work on this, thanks for the work to unlock these records for the public.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most of the people in this database were drafted. I think you're angry at the wrong people.
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.
Maybe OP should be going after the politicians and corporations that have used government benefits. Where's that freely searchable database?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
You labeled me deviant and extremist, I replied with why I held my position. I think I deserve at least a reply after you made such a grose comment.
I think the people in this are deceased? Does that change your view (genuinely asking)?
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.
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.
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....
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…
I love the included legal timeline. Strong work!
Really hope op and crew are sued to oblivion.
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.
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.
Why? I'm curious. What's wrong with making information on deceased service members searchable?
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.
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.
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.
I need to get a copy of the database asap just for my data archiving neurosis lol. The amount of vitriolic comments here from entitled "service" members is astounding and makea me wish to safeguard it personally. I mean we have people in the comments calling people "extremist" and bringing up founding fathers bullshit ....
Only jarheads seem to think the parental tone of "you don't know what freedom is" actually works.... Maybe because they have been thru boot camp idk.
> The amount of vitriolic comments here from entitled "service" members is astounding and makea me wish to safeguard it personally.
As someone who's never been in the military and isn't even acquainted with that many people who have been, I think I should give you a head's up that you are being an entitled asshole.
I think most people would be mad if they found out some of the most private and personal records about them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42685002) would be made public to anyone who'd care to request them. It's a pretty terrible violation of privacy. Try to think about how you'd feel if something like that was going to happen to you (say, your complete browsing history would be made public, because I'm sure you have one and you almost certainly want to keep it private).