Possibly a Serious Possibility

Such a literal interpretation isn't reasonable. There are all sorts of patterns that can be indirectly leaked through supposedly unrelated data. Yet FOIA exists and is obviously intended to be useful.

So obviously there must be some threshold for the value to an attacker. He attempted to communicate that schemas are clearly below such a threshold and they used his wording to attempt to argue the opposite.

> “only marginal value” to an attacker

> “see, you yourself agree that a schema is of some value to an attacker.”

IANAL, it appears justice systems universally interpret this type of "technically yes if that makes you happy but honestly unlikely" statements as "yes with technical bonus", not a "no with extra steps" at all, and it has to be shortened as just "unlikely from my professional perspective" or something lawyer approved for intended effect. Courts are weird.

Yes really. Our argument, upheld by a judge, was that there was no value to an attacker. Their point stands legally, but nothing else.

Despite all that, Chicago still pushes back aggressively. Here's a fun one from a recent denial letter they sent for data within the same database:

    "When DOF referred to reviewing over 300 variable CANVAS pages, these are not analog sequential book style pages of data. Instead, they are 300 different webpages with unique file layouts for which there is no designated first page."

They also argued the same 7(1)(g) exemption despite me being explicit about not wanting the column names. Effectively turning their argument into them saying that the release of information within a database, fullstop, is exempt because it could be used to figure out what data exists within a database. That's against the spirit of IL FOIA, which includes this incredibly direct statutory language:

    Sec. 1.2. Presumption. All records in the custody or possession of a public body are presumed to be open to inspection or copying. Any public body that asserts that a record is exempt from disclosure has the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence that it is exempt.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25930501-foia-burden...

> The City of Chicago's argument was that something of ANY value, no matter how insignificant, would help an attacker exploit their system, and was therefore possible to keep secret under the FOIA law.

I’m glad that argument lost, since it totally subverts the purpose and intention of the FOIA. Any piece of information could be of value to some attacker, but that doesn’t outweigh the need for transparency.

A 1-in-a-million chance seems quite remote, yet if you are rolling the dice once a millisecond...

This applies to any repeated chance, so it probably doesn't need to be called out again when translating odds to verbal language.

> It’s generally difficult to quantify such risks in any meaningful manner

According to the literature 33 out of 100 patients who underwent this operation in the US within the past 10 years died. 90% of those had complicating factors. You [ do / do not ] have such a factor.

Who knows if any given layman will appreciate the particular quantification you provide but I'm fairly certain that data exists for the vast majority of serious procedures at this point.

I've actually had this exact issue with the veterinarian. I've worked in biomed. I pulled the literature for the condition. I had lots of different numbers but I knew that I didn't have the full picture. I'm trying to quantify the possible outcomes between different options being presented to me. When I asked the specialist, who handles multiple such cases every day, I got back (approximately) "oh I couldn't say" and "it varies". The latter is obviously true but the entire attitude is just uncooperative bullshit.

> puts you in a damned-if-does, damned-if-it-doesn’t-work-out situation

Not really. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a litigious person could use just about anything to go after you and so I appreciate that it might be sensible to simply refuse to answer. But from an academic standpoint the future outcome of a single sample does not change the rigor of your risk assessment.

> Doctors are in no way incentivised to do so

Don't they use quantifications of risk to determine treatment plans to at least some extent? What's the alternative? Blindly following a flowchart? (Honest question.)

> The returned chance of 1/3 probably had an error margin of +/-33% itself

What do you mean by this? Surely there's some error margin on the assessment itself but I don't see how any of us commenting could have any idea what it might have been.

I would expect almost NO numbers are rational (integer or fraction) with an infinite number of Reals between each.

The semantics are almost always reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_all

Sure but that’s because 100% of real numbers, by any standard measure, aren’t integers or fractions. It bothers me if it’s used to mean 95% of something though.

> "Almost all" in math can mean "except at every integer or fraction" :)

I am a mathematician, but, even so, I think that this is one of those instances where we have to admit that we have mangled everyday terminology when appropriating it, and so non-measure theoretic users should just ignore our definition. (Similarly with "group," where, at the risk of sounding tongue-in-cheek because it's so obvious, if I were trying to analyze how people usually understand its everyday meaning I wouldn't include the requirement that every element have an inverse.)

I hate “one in a million” because its meaning depends on how many times you’re rolling the die!

I’ll never forgot old World of Warcraft discussions about crit probability. If a particular sequence is “one in a million” and there are 10 million players and each player encounters hundreds or thousands of sequences per day then “one in a million” is pretty effing common!

maybe something like dyslexia but for semantics. I did some searching and couldn't find a term for this.

When they won't quit asking, I'm "willing to commit to a definite maybe".