Simon Willison’s Weblog

I Went To SQL Injection Court (via) Thomas Ptacek talks about his ongoing involvement as an expert witness in an Illinois legal battle lead by Matt Chapman over whether a SQL schema (e.g. for the CANVAS parking ticket database) should be accessible to Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests against the Illinois state government.

They eventually lost in the Illinois Supreme Court, but there's still hope in the shape of IL SB0226, a proposed bill that would amend the FOIA act to ensure "that the public body shall provide a sufficient description of the structures of all databases under the control of the public body to allow a requester to request the public body to perform specific database queries".

Thomas posted this comment on Hacker News:

Permit me a PSA about local politics: engaging in national politics is bleak and dispiriting, like being a gnat bouncing off the glass plate window of a skyscraper. Local politics is, by contrast, extremely responsive. I've gotten things done --- including a law passed --- in my spare time and at practically no expense (drastically unlike national politics).