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FOIA officers will still find a way to send me scanned PDFs of spreadsheets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't sure if you were disclosing the relationship because of the nature of your comment or if you were just bragging about knowing them. It is/was odd.
My opinion is that he’s an expert on the legislation, but I wanted to be clear that I could be biased :)
I wonder if this open data can be (will be?) used by a foreign entity and be turned against the american people? It should be open but not free-for-all
FOIA officers will still find a way to send me scanned PDFs of spreadsheets.
Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…
Is this an open source project? Or what’s the way for licensing to use with US data?
> there was a carve out “for data that does not concern monetary policy,” which relates to the Federal Reserve, among others. Does that mean they won't open data that affects monetary policy or that they will only open data that affects monetary policy? Either way that seems huge.
FOIA officers will still find a way to send me scanned PDFs of spreadsheets.
I’ll defend this practice. It’s the only way of knowing for sure that you’re transmitting exactly the information you intend to send. Even copy/paste often picks up other stuff you don’t intend.
Having a data review process with automated integrity, confidentiality, and quality checks is not terribly difficult.
But having a prototocol to export the pdf to csv is also dead easy for confirming only the data relevant is included. ASCII is just as “easy” as scan, but it requires training clerks to be data-oriented rather than document.
I wonder if this open data can be (will be?) used by a foreign entity and be turned against the american people? It should be open but not free-for-all
I'm not convinced there are really any important national security secrets other than passcodes and so on. The rest seems to be excuses for hiding corruption of various kinds. Secrecy in government is incompatible with democracy by definition.
Take Khashoggi as a contemporary example. Undoubtedly there have been countless heavily classified conversations weighting the pros and cons of any action against Saudi Arabia or MBS as a result of this. How we are extremely dependent on Saudi Arabia for reasons outside the scope of this post, and they know this. And this is all happening at a time when Saudi:US relations souring would greatly stand to strengthen the geopolitical position and power of nations such as China and Russia. In my opinion it's extremely likely we will do nothing, but that's because it's better than doing something. If this was not classified, social media would throw a nonstop hissy fit. Not because they actually care or think we're making the wrong decision, but because it's an incredibly easy way score those imaginary points and followers which are the hottest commodity since sliced bread. Another issue here is that knowing the mechanisms of our decision making here, and how close we came to 'breaking', would be incredibly valuable information to nations such as Saudi Arabia which they could then use to exploit the US.
So while I do agree with you that classification is very often abused, I also think there are indeed vast amounts of information that must be classified. People are not mature enough to impartially process our decision making processes, and the details of such processes would provide invaluable information to other nations which could then be used to exploit the US.