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The Ridiculous LexisNexis Search that the Justice Department Used
[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
Needless to say, when asked about it, Williams first said she didn't remember ever seeing it, then said she'd used an edited version just once. LexisNexis records show she used it, as shown, 25 times." Note that 'sex!' appears twice in the query. Must be VERY important.
It is THE most powerful database of public records and sometimes not-so public records in the entire world. You can start with a name and city and match a person and get social, dob, city of birth, all their criminal and civil cases, any citations including speeding tickets, any mention of them in other criminal or civil cases, news articles, legal findings etc. etc. etc.
Needless to say it is very dangerous in the wrong hands.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis
They used Lexis to do a form of background search on people. They used the information from these searches to decide who to hire. The DOJ said the way they did this is federally illegal and also against DOJ policy.
And if you're an actual RTFAer, here you go: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/goodling072408.pdf
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
First and foremost, because it's illegal.
But there are two types of nominations in the DoJ: "Career" & "Political". Political appointments are indeed open to scrutiny of political affiliation, but are temporary and remain active only until a change of administration. Career posts are normal jobs, and those people are supposed to be more neutral. Filtering people for Career jobs based on political affiliations is illegal. The issue coming to light now is that Bush administration officials used the same questionnaires and methods for both types of posts.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I found this here:
/n, +n, NOT /n /s /p /seg /seg
/p and /s connectors with a proximity connector (e.g., /n).
/25 discharg! AND student OR college OR education /5 loan is operated on in the following manner:
/5, the smaller of the /n connectors, ties together the term loan and the previously formed unit of student OR college OR education!. /25 operates next and creates a unit of bankrupt! /25 discharg!.
Connector Order and Priority
Connectors operate in the following order of priority:
1. OR
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. NOT
7. AND
8. AND NOT
If you use two or more of the same connector, they operate left to right. If the "n" (number) connectors have different numbers, the smallest number is operated on first. You cannot use the
Example: bankrupt!
* Because OR has the highest priority, it operates first and creates a unit of student OR college OR education!.
*
*
* AND, with the lowest priority, operates last and links the units formed in the second and third bullets above.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
In the civil service, there is a clear line between "professionals" and "political appointees". The idea being, while the head of the justice department, and probably most of his deputies, change every administration, the people who actually understand the inner workings stay on.
If the search is used to vest someone's political position for a "political appointee" position, that's fine. If it's used the screen "technical/professional" candidates it's probably a violation of civil service provisions and most likely some statutes.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Indeed. Our Sheriff's department uses it (along with other services by the same company), and it's downright scary the ammount of stuff they can pull.
Want all the blue and gray SUV's that have a 9 and an F within a 100 mile radius of a given location? It can pull that up. Want to find out if a particular person has ANY connection to the owner of that vehicle. It can do that. As a demonstration it was able to connect our sherrif to a woman that his wife had been roomates with over 20 years ago (before they were even married).
It was astonishing how much information it could coordinate on any person in the room that we plugged into it.
Also was tied into the sex offenders database. If you wanted to narrow that search for the blue/gray SUV earlier down to sexual offenders within a certain radius that owned or were associated with the owner of such a vehicle, then it could do that.
What's scary is that some level of this functionality is available to whoever wants to pay for it (afterall, most of the information is just public records correlated into a massive database). Law enforcement and such agencies do get more access (for instance, the ability to pull up social security numbers), but the average person with deep pockets could still get a hell of a lot of information for it. They do TRY to be secure with the LEO-only portions though.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Why shouldn't an administration be able to hire people on their side of the political fence?
Because it's illegal to do so for these types of Justice department jobs (and rightly so).
Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that President Clinton's administration didn't weed out conservatives from executive branch jobs?
For prosecutors in the justice department? I'll tell you that with a very straight face unless you can show otherwise. Everything I've read says this just doesn't happen for these kinds of appointees. The fired prosecutors were shocked to be fired for political reasons.
but I would assume that a given administration would not want to hire attorneys who hate everything that administration stands for, whether the administration is conservative, liberal or anything in between.
I find that a very strange attitude. Criminal prosecutions (which is what the Justice department does) shouldn't have a political slant to it. I'd hope you'd agree that that would be a horrible horrible thing no matter who was doing it. There's a reason why the image representing justice (the one holding the scales) is blindfolded.
AccountKiller
Reading some other articles about this, it appears that was not the full extent. They were even excluding Republicans and conservatives that weren't Republican or conservative enough for them. Basically people that they thought would not make loyal "Bushies".
It also appears that experience was not as highly evaluated as political considerations. One cited example of the was a well regarded senior prosecutor with counterterrorism experience was passed over for a junior attorney with no experience for a counterterrorism post just because the senior prosecutor's wife was a Democrat.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's a Shibboleth. Something that you can use to guess at another person's social/regional/political origin.
Back in 1992, there was a plan to log some forest. Republicans liked the idea of logging. Democrats didn't like the idea of logging.
Democrats went with environmentalism -- the notion that a risk to 50 of the 500-odd remaining spotted owls in existence outweighed the commercial interests of the loggers -- as their means of obsctructing the Republicans' goals.
Republicans went with the commercial argument -- "preposterous to forego millions of dollars in revenue over 50 spotted owls!" -- as their means of embarassing the Democrats.
The spotted owl became a shibboleth. Anyone who said "save the endangered owls!" was likely to be a Democrat, and anyone who said "to hell with the owls!" was a Democrat.
Many of the things in that list are shibboleths from the Clinton era. If you followed events such as Iran-Contra (a scandal embarassing to the Republicans), the spotted owl (a shibboleth for environmentalism), the recounts in Florida (which could have only benefited the Democrats), or worked (or ruled) on cases involving other politically-loaded wedge issues -- whether economic ones like NAFTA, outsourcing, and Enron, or sociolopolitical ones like racism, sexism, abortion, homosexuality, and gun ownership -- you had political opinions.
This query wasn't designed to figure out what those opinions were, but it would be a very clear way listing all the times someone identified their political stance by using a political shibboleth within seven words of the name of either Presidential candidate:
"John Doe accused Al Gore of placing the interests of the spotted owl above the legitimate interests of the taxpayers" -> John Doe is almost certainly a Republican.
"Jane Doe suggested Al Gore wasn't doing enough to protect the spotted owl" -> Jane Doe is almost certainly a Democrat.
The spotted owl is a particularly effective shibboleth; most of us have opinions about gun ownership, NAFTA, or Enron that don't necessarily dermine how we vote. But the spotted owl was a manufactured controversy; outside of birdwatchers, very few people knew or cared about the spotted owl until it became the center of a political debate.
Modern-day shibboleths include "homicide bombers" or "the Democrat party" (phrases used only Republicans), or "big business / big health care / big pharma" or "multinational corporations", or "neocons" (which are phrases used almost exclusively by Democrats.)
The search requires that the candidate's full name is found, along with at least one of the following 'keywords' not more than 7 words (that's the "w/7") away from the name; so in most cases it would be a pretty small return.
Actually, the syntax used seems to be incorrect (I've never used LexisNexus, but just did an exhaustive 30 second search for information on the syntax).
The "pre/2" control assures that the word preceding and the word following are found, with a maximum of 2 words in between. I think the "and" before the "pre/2" is incorrect, or at least superfluous.
The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 does list it among the criteria (it is in fact in the very first of the 12 prohibited personnel practices):
Twelve prohibited personnel practices, including reprisal for whistleblowing, are defined by law at  2302(b) of title 5 of the United States Code (U.S.C.). A personnel action (such as an appointment, promotion, reassignment, or suspension) may need to be involved for a prohibited personnel practice to occur. Generally stated,  2302(b) provides that a federal employee authorized to take, direct others to take, recommend or approve any personnel action may not:
(1) discriminate against an employee or applicant based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, handicapping condition, marital status, or political affiliation;
Well, they taste REALLY delicious.
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx