Currently FOIA requests are free or nearly so, are you willing to pay true cost recovery fees for your information. Based on the fees developed by my local gov. we are talking about $150/hr. remember true cost recovery includes total hrly labor costs (wages + benes.+ taxes), overhead costs and materials costs. As more and more "unimportant" info is saved each search takes that much longer. I'll wager that 2 hrs is the minimum search time and 4 to 8 is more likely and would become more common as the doc. load increased. So are you going to publish a blog whining about having to spend $300 to $1200 for a document that ' you should get for free’? Because I don't see as how I should have to pay for it.

Every piece of information destroyed is important to someone but it is impossible to store everything so retention plans are developed. If you work for any company with more than 10 employees you are likely working under a retention plan. These plans become more important as companies get bigger and the cost of document maintenance increases, as the aggregate value of the "noise" documents gets smaller.

Again since everything the gov. does costs me money the question here is, how much are you willing to pay for a doc. which may have value to you but not so much to anybody else? Because to be honest I'm just a bit tired of having people tell me that I should be paying for something that has no benefit to me.