Who it’s for / FOIA & Public Records Officer
Grotabyte for FOIA and Public Records Officers
Your deadline is set by statute, it started running the day the request arrived, and it does not pause while you wait for IT to pull mailboxes. Every day of that clock is spent on someone else's queue unless you can search the records yourself.
Rated 5 out of 5. “Ten-year holds, answered by self-service.” — College of DuPage
Also for: Public Records Officer · Open Records Coordinator · Records Custodian
What you are accountable for
You are accountable for getting a complete, lawful response out of the door before the statutory clock expires — and for justifying every withholding and every fee on it.
What makes that hard
The clock starts on receipt, not on access
A statutory deadline runs from the day the request lands. If collecting the records means a ticket, a queue and a week of someone else's priorities, a third of your response window is gone before you have read a single document.
Deadline rules differ, and they change
Business days or calendar days, when tolling applies, what a permissible extension looks like — every jurisdiction answers differently, and answers change. A rule updated today must not retroactively rewrite how a request answered last year was calculated.
Every withholding has to be justified
You do not withhold a document, you withhold a span and cite an exemption for it. A redaction that leaves the text recoverable in the produced file is a disclosure you will have to explain, and an appeal you will lose.
Adequacy of search gets challenged, not just the result
Requesters and courts ask what you searched, where, with which terms, and when. If that account is reconstructed after the fact from memory, it is weak precisely when you need it most.
What Grotabyte gives you
Statutory deadlines encoded and versioned
Versioned deadline rules across fifteen encoded jurisdictions. Because the rules are versioned, a change to a jurisdiction's statute applies going forward without rewriting the calculation on a request that was already answered under the previous rule.
Exemptions applied span by span
A federal exemption library, with redaction implemented as removal from the produced text rather than a box drawn over words that stay selectable underneath. Each span carries one of seven stated bases, and the sealed native record remains byte-identical for any appeal or in camera review.
Search effort recorded against the request
The searches run for each request are recorded against it, so the account of what you searched and with which terms is a contemporaneous record rather than a reconstruction. That is the evidence adequacy-of-search challenges turn on.
Fees calculated, not estimated
Fee calculation is built into the request workflow, so what you charge follows from the work the system recorded rather than from an after-the-fact guess that a requester can dispute.
One search across everything the agency holds
Email, Teams 1:1 and group chats, OneDrive, SharePoint and Drive files, and legacy PST and MBOX archives all answer the same query — thirteen searchable fields with phrase, wildcard, fuzzy and proximity operators, full CJK indexing, and semantic search for concepts a keyword misses.
One checkable thing
Where a jurisdiction's statutory figure could not be verified against the statute itself, the rule is marked UNVERIFIED and excluded from deadline calculation rather than guessed at.
Questions this role asks
What happens when our jurisdiction changes its deadline rules?
The rules are versioned, so a new version applies to requests going forward while a request already calculated under the previous version keeps that calculation. You are never in the position of having a system retroactively claim a past response was late, or having to explain why a deadline it displayed changed after the fact. Fifteen jurisdictions are encoded, and where a statutory figure could not be verified against the statute the rule is marked UNVERIFIED and left out of the calculation rather than approximated.
How do we show that our search was adequate?
The searches run against each request are recorded on the request itself — terms, scope and when they ran — so the account you give a requester or a court is contemporaneous rather than reconstructed months later. That, plus the tamper-evident ledger that records every query and export, is what turns 'we searched thoroughly' into something demonstrable.
If we redact under an exemption, can the text be recovered from the file we release?
No, because the redaction is a removal rather than an overlay. The text within the redacted span is not present in the produced document, so there is no hidden layer to copy out or extract with a PDF tool. Each span carries the basis it was withheld under, and the sealed native stays byte-identical for an appeal or in camera review.