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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?"
And that's why you shouldn't use Access for your Enterprise Solutions.
Well we could, but then he would have to come up with ANOTHER bogus reason. Cut him some slack, the man works hard enough as it is.
In other news, I won't be paying my taxes this year as I firmly believe the influx of cash will "Break the Bank".
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
Hmm, so I guess they don't keep backups of their own data, if making copies of it would cause the data to be lost. I guess we just have to hope (or not) that their computers or hard drives never fail.
Does this mean that they never make backups either? Sounds like just a bad excuse...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
What this REALLY means is that they have already suffered a "major loss of data" but never made any backups and have been trying to hide the fact that the database has been GONE for weeks, months, or even years under grade school-level excuses.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Wow, i think I broke something whilst picking my jaw up off the floor.
If the computer will crash by accessing these records, then this implies the records are inaccessible. Not to mention that if the records magically 'disappear' all they have to say it "look we told you so"
I dont think anyone is gonna believe this for a second. More like a lot of people want this information permanently buried as to avoid letting the public know whats going on.
How will the FBI put all that old information on these new systems then?
Open Source Sushi
particularly because the policy allows withholding information due to "foreseeable harm" to the Administration, and not necessarily to the country.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
The government said an overhaul of the system should be finished by December and copies should be available then.
Not available until after the November election, eh? How conveeeenient.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
This paces the Justice Department on par with Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the recently retired Iraqi Information Minister in it's inovation of repartee in the face of fact!
I hope they do not copyright this reason as it is so good I think I will use it (if I can) when the circumstances arise.
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
I am sure there are pr0n websites with backend databases more relieable than what the government is using.
One of my Linux machines is currently suffering from some substandard SCSI equipment and some DMA problems on one of the hard drive controllers; until I can schedule the downtime for software upgrades and hardware troubleshooting, I'm leaving things the way they are. As long as that's the case, the system mostly works, but certain disk-intensive operations (such as searching hundreds of MB of logs) degrade performance enough to make the system nearly unusable.
I doubt that this is terribly relevant to the computing problems experienced by massive government databases, but I can at least conceive of how a "mass export of all stored images" (to quote the article) could significantly interfere with the database's everyday usage on a sufficiently poorly-designed/maintained/updated system.
The article also states that the government plans on having the upgrades completed, and the data available, by December. (I'm not going to touch the issue of how accurate this statement is.)
This warning just in from John Ashcroft:
"Whatever you do, do not vote for Senator John Kerry in the upcoming presidential election. Implementing such a vote risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating."
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
it's all just another lie told to us by our government. it's nothing new, but i think this republican majority government is realizing that all this access to information is not beneficial to the government powers which widely conflict civil liberties.
it seems they've simply given up and just make up blantant lies which are served to the american public as excuses.
Whatever process they use to look at the data could be used to copy it and give it to the FOIA petitioners.
Or maybe they just put stuff in there and don't look at the data, because it would crash. That would make a lot of sense.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Maybe we should tell John Ashcroft about open source database and copying solutions?"
With the Patriot Act in effect, and all of your lines tapped, I'd say John Ashcroft already knows.
What this is, is perjury, and Ashcroft should be brought to task for it by Congress (*sigh* As _if_ they could be expected to do their job...).
Ashcroft issued a directive upon taking office that F.O.I.A. requests should be obstructed as far as possible, in line with the secrecy that has surrounded this entire administration. This is merely one more crass lie in furtherance of that ideology. The man has lied constantly since taking office and has been allowed to get away with it. Why?
Have we stopped caring about transparancy and republican values at home, whilst at the same time singing the praises of 'democracy' abroad? Are we all content to allow this proud nation to slip slowly but surely into a permanently-militarised social order? Will _you_ accept the suspension of habeus corpus, or of the entire Constitution, and live happily in a police state?
Me, I'd rather die on my feet, with my fist in the air, than my knees. I refuse to trade my freedom for cold comfort.
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
I hereby call for the resignation of John Ashcroft on the grounds that his ineptitude in responding to legitimate FOIA requests clearly causes "forseeable harm" to American democracy.
Not to mention that the excuse he gave is *not* one of the reasons permitted to be cited by the government to avoid giving us -- the American people, who paid for it all -- *our* information.
Mr. Ashcroft is from Missouri, the "Show Me" state. Tell me, Mr. Ashcroft: what part of "Show me the public records" do you not understand?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
That's like a request being denied because the clerk was too tired to go down in the basement to find the files.
If fulfilling the request somehow breaks something, then the response should be to fix the damn thing and then fulfill the request.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
What they mean is their database runs on "EasyDB123 Trial Version" and they cant give more than 10 queries per day or they will be forced to upgrade.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
How do they know that the records will be destroyed by accessing them? Have they accessed the records already and destroyed them?
More importantly, if they can "fix" the records in time for December, by their logic, wouldn't this process endanger the records from destruction in the first place?
Only government would pull a paradox out of its ass as an excuse.
Hmmm....
No, sir. Not a terrorist.
..." doesn't qualify as "Information".
;)
Simply not "+5, Informative"
Moderators, get a clue. Your job, when moderating something as "Informative", is to promote posts which, when viewed with a reasonably objective eye, actual contain (get ready now...) Information.
Perhaps I'm just not enough of a lib-leftie wing-nut, but "ultra-right wing Jesus freak who actively hates gays, black people, non-Christians,
If, to the liberals in the group, this does indeed qualify as "Information", then please accept my humble apology...
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
DEEP VOICE: Unfortunately, no one can be -told- what the data on contributions from foreign lobbyists is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
(shows a blue pill.)
You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe about the FOIA.
(a red pill is shown in his other hand)
You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how fucked up the DOJ really is.
(you begin to reach for the red pill) Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.
I've written enough letters to my congresscritters that the probably have me filed under "wacko" in several different categories. Their replies show a polite distain for my pitiful rights and nearly-useless vote.
Knowledge is power, and those in power are determined that we lemmings be kept ignorant of the the deeds done in our name for our own good. The only thing more dependable than finding our representatives have sold us down the river for personal profit, is that keeping such dealings quiet is a matter of national security. After all, if all the little lemmings figured out they were being cheerfully led over a cliff they might not follow so blindly. Computer malfunction my arse. I work as an Oracle DBA -- if I EVER responded to a request for data this way I'd be canned on the spot, and rightly so. Somehow, I doubt anyone is suddenly unemployed at the justice department.
Personally, I'm beyond disgusted. I'm voting again EVERY encumbent, since I don't think there's a human being in office worth the air they breath. Maybe if everyone voted against all incumbents for a decade or so we'd flush the professional policiticians out and take back our country.
On the other hand, I'm seriously considering emigration to a land where freedom means something, like Russia!
Translation, for any non-techies visiting today:
Seriously folks, I firmly believe that another four years under this administration threatens our physical security, as well as our civil liberties. I'm not one to usualy cry "Special Interests!", but this is exactly the kind of data that must be made public for a democratic republic to work. December is just too late to allow voters to make an informed decision, but I suspect thats the point.
"...such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating"
Dear IRS:
Thank you for the kind note reminding us about payroll tax withholdings (yes, we do remember that the S in IRS stands for 'service' though the little pamplet you sent about all that was appreciated).
Regarding the issue of us not submitting any payroll tax payments, well, you see our database gurus got together and discovered that the process of running such reports through our employee database actually risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data which would be devestating.
I'm sure you'll appreciate this difficulty (if not, please contact the Justice Department and they can fill you in on the details). I'm sure there's enough other taxpayers to chase that the loss of our money is of no significant matter.
Good luck with your own database issues, by the way. I see you too have your hands full - apparently several billion dollars spent upgrading things didn't work after all. If I were you, I'd stop sending out those tax deliquency messages or else you too could be affected by these nasty database crash problems!
And the MPAA for that matter. The Government has found a truly uncopyable storage media and I'm certain both of these organizations will be overjoyed to put it to good use.
I don't know quite how these things tend to play in the states, but over here I would read this as "that database on which we spent X millions of your money is in fact total crap and we couldn't find our arses with both hands"
While most readers will [probably correctly] take this to be a rather poor government whitewash, it could equally be a sign that the government's IT strategy has been fragmented and piecemeal for ages.
This tends to happen in democratic nations because big IT contracts, like other government contracts, tend to go to companies favoured by the extant administration (despite all the charming fiction about open tendering).
When a new administration is eventually voted in, it's time for them to pay back various favours to certain friendly companies, and so new expenditure will be announced.
The end result of this is government departments and organisations each with their own mishmash of systems with no thought at all given to interoperability.
The chances of them ever getting their shit together enough to collate everything into a massive uber-database with every record on every citizen in the UK is nil, so I'm not that worried.
Like I said, I don't know the situation in the States vis-a-vis government records, but everywhere in the world, governments all share the same founding principles of confusion and inertia.
That, and there's waaay more people in the USA. 5x population = at least 5x records = a lot more than 5x complexity.
All that being said, this remains a transparent and contemptible display of ass-covering by Ashcroft..
Overloading the DOJ servers at this crucial time during the War on Terror could bring critical network communications to a halt, making America vulnerable to terrorist activity.
To justify anything nowadays you have to use the "t" word.
It's intended to give the Government full access to information across it's many levels - not so the public can access it..
Really, who are we trying to fool here? The Gov't is not going to release anything it considers useful for at least 50-100 years.
Sorry, I guess I dont have much faith in the legal system when Judges and Gov't officials can outweigh the will of the people - this is not the America I was born in....frankly its more like the Russia I remember as a kid and thinking 'I sure am glad I live here in a Free Country'..... Now I sit here and wonder when an 'honest' Judicial/Governmental system will come around and really think about the people's needs instead of who's lining their pocket book..
I'm not holding my breath on this being released - because the Gov't is more paranoid about giving up data than p2p users are in sharing in public places, lol.
First of all, I can't believe anyone with a brain would try to use an open database during a software upgrade. I know ours won't let anyone log in during the upgrade process. I can't believe how lame this whole discussion is. Even though I *really* don't like some of Ashcroft's decisions, he's still better than the former by far. Anyway...
B A C K U P
Hasn't anyone thought about this??? Good grief. I NEVER work on a live database. We ALWAYS work from backups no matter what we're doing with them. I'm stunned that an excuse like this would even be spoken by someone in IT. "Oh yeah, it'll crash my system if I make that BACKUP/export that information... so I don't make backups or do exports...". Backup, export, whatever. If the system is that unstable whoever's running it should have a backup every hour or a darned good alternative job plan when it does crash.
I'm sorry I sound pissy, but it just irritates me to no end when people don't use simple common sense.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
One of the scariest things about this administration is the sheer lack of transparency. While all governments like hiding things, this one seems to think that the public has no right to know anything, of course for their own good. Even Congress seems to be out of the info loop! Everytime someone tries to ask them for transparency or information they stonewall them sometimes with ridiculous reasons like this (or by swearing at them aka. our vice-president). Combine this with laws that reduce rights of ordinary citizens (aka. Patriot Act) and how they are trying to increasingly concentrate power in the hands of the President (who seems to think that Congressional and Judicial oversight of his activities is a bad thing) who professes the theory that a President is legally allowed to do anything to foreign and US citizens eg. torture, infinitely holding them, invading a country etc. and the only reason he doesn't do it is because he's nice (rather than because it's say illegal to torture someone) and America is heading towards dangerous waters.
why the rest of the world believes you are not living in a "free society". Maybe NATO should invade your country and free you for your opressors.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
Perhaps it's not as simple as that. From what the DOJ seems to be saying, extracting and compiling a report of this size using the existing interface could, quite understandably, render the system unstable. In theory, then, such a system may behave unpredictably and could potentially damage the database. That would, of course, imply that the DOJ database is built on unstable, outdated technology--but we already knew that. They're working to improve that, but it will take many years and millions of dollars.
The reporters aren't asking for (nor are they entitled to) a complete backup of the database. That would be comparatively easy to provide, but is obviously out of the question, as it would include much more than just the authorized content.
Perhaps they'd have better luck if they made a whole bunch of small queries: Instead of saying "send me everything you've got", they could say "Send me all relevant content for August 1947", then "Send me all relevant content for September 1947", and so on.
You could argue that the instead of forcing the reporters to take the time and money to make thousands of small, separate requests, they should be able to make a single blanket request and have the government office subdivide it internally. However, such an assumption would not take into consideration the fact that you're working with a government office that is only helping you because they're required to by law. Give them a single excuse to say no and they won't hesitate to give you nothing at all.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
when he said "will crash the system" he really ment "will crash The System" .... ie having the people know more about what the government is doing is inherently bad for having a well run govt. and besides if we find out who's paying off who it might be made to stop
Maybe they're quantum databases containing all possible information, and actually looking at them to copy them would collapse the possibilities into only one state.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Uh, hello -- The Bush <=> Nazi comparison is not about gas chambers. It is about systematically exploiting public anger/fear (9/11 anyone?) to push through their ultra-Nationalist war-mongering agenda.
There one was a datavault built on compartively unusual hardware which operated post-maintenance for many years, it was an insanity to empty because the vendor did not do Gigabit ethernet for it and the 100 MBit cards were scrounged from the vendor's junk-pile. Sucking terrabytes of data from crappy, second qaulity NICs took months. So negligence rather than conspiracy might be the actual reason.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Florida pulled a really fast one on the entire nation. While everyone was talking about hanging chads, dimpled chads, and killer-ninja chads, we missed the real point. The chads made a few thousand votes indeterminate.
But we got so caught up in them that we missed the 10's of thousands of black voters who were erroneously classified as felons and denied their right to vote. It's a simple search on Google to see some things about it, and the classification was done in what appeared to be a deliberately incompetent manner.
So maybe the electronic voting machines will be used to throw the election.
Or maybe the electronic voting machines will be a smokescreen for some other shenanigans.
Or maybe we're all seeing conspiracies where there are none.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I believe they misquoted Thomas J. McIntyre at the top of the article. This should have read:
"Implementing such a request risks a crash of our Administration that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of credibility, which would be devastating to our hopes of being reelected."
Notice that they will be able to supply this information in December, which is conveniently after November.
This could work out like Nixon's tapes though; the fact that this information exists and the current administration is withholding it from us could be enough evidence to damn them in the court of public opinion.
From your post ...
...
Please equate Ashcroft to being a "Nazi,"
From the FA
The Center for Public Integrity sought information about lobbying activities available under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1938 law passed in response to German propaganda before World War II.
At the time (1938), for those of you too young to know, Germany was run by the Nazis.
I know there's a conspiracy in there somewhere, but I'd probably have to file a FOI request to find it.
Infuriate left and right
... and then down. And then up a couple of times, then down one more by a stickler for on-topic posts. Then down to zero by one pissed off moderator using all his points at once. Slowly climb back to +3. Down again. Up again. Down. Up. Down. Finally, when the story is 13 days old and the editors have already posted a couple of duplicates, sneak in and mod it up to +5, Insightful.
Hey, if they won't give me mod points, I can at least be a Back Seat Moderator!
The political excuse of this time appears to be something like "I'm a useless idiot so it isn't my fault - and I didn't know about the money no matter how many people told me". An excuse like that should not be acceptable.
This current excuse that letting people look at things will let all the smoke out of the magic box is just childish.
In the city where I live a state government department (not in USA) has a wharehouse full of boxes with dates marked on them, and no other form of identification. These boxes have been building up for decades, and all of the paperwork is effectively inaccessable.The paperwork involving lobbying is undoubtably a different story - we got to see the Nixon-Saharto connection (Indonesion president - big donation one day proir to the invasion of Timor) when the paperwork was released recently, but the information would have been a tightly gaurded secret back in 1975 since it could have brought down the government sooner.
Wow, that's creative. I've personally never heard of people refer to a human as "departed" except in death Hence the problem with applying modern day euphimisms with a 6,000 year old lawbook.
Not Howard Dean; read John Dean's book. Former counsel to Richard Nixon. The book is Worse than Watergate.
I believe Juanita
The soul gets installed after it's downloaded but before it's executed. If it comes as source code, it must also be compiled, usually with a "make" script (R-rated).
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