DoJ - Making Data Public Would 'Crash System'

orthogonal writes "The Justice Department today denied Freedom of Information Act requests to make public data on foreign lobbyists, claiming that '[i]mplementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating'. The requestor responded that '[t]his was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them,' Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. Maybe we should tell John Ashcroft about open source database and copying solutions?"