Yeah...but at least in that case, you can argue with the agency and publicize the outrageous request. I've done that in one instance where a city agency argued that it would take 40 hours and thousands of dollars to run a query to generate a simple payroll listing. After we threatened to write about how their payroll system was in such a sorry state that it takes thousands of taxpayer dollars to run queries against it, they handed over the data for a couple hundred dollars.

This avenue of inquiry does not exist if an agency is allowed to just say: "Sorry, that doesn't exist."

How would a city agency take advantage of this particular rules change? It specifically does not give FOIA respondents the blanket privilege of denying the existence of documents.

Here's the thing though - all the data should already be available as a free database, just like all NASA photos are public domain.

Then let people mine it on their own dime for waste.

The problem is they'd react to this by finding ways to make more and more stuff "classified" to claim it cannot be released.

NYC would appear to be a shining example of this: http://www.nyc.gov/data