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DoJ Answers FOIA Request After Six Years With No Real Information
An anonymous reader writes "In response to a Freedom of Information Act request about Google's 2007 complaint against Windows Vista search interference, the Department of Justice has after six years released 114 partially redacted pages and 60 full pages of material. Yet these 'responsive documents' consist of public news articles and email boilerplate. All the substantive information has been blacked out."
You can see right through them.
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name.
When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God. Catch-22 required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name. Most letters he didn't read at all. On those he didn't read at all he wrote his own name. On those he did read he wrote, "Washington Irving." When that grew monotonous he wrote, "Irving Washington." Censoring the envelopes had serious repercussions, produced a ripple of anxiety on some ethereal military echelon that floated a C.I.D. man back into the ward posing as a patient. They all knew he was a C.I.D. man because he kept inquiring about an officer named Irving or Washington and because after his first day there he wouldn't censor letters. He found them too monotonous.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22*
It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta' do it.
News Flash:
"A recent study has determined that Democrat administrations in Washington are just as bad as their Republican counterparts. There's just as much lying, corruption, scandal, debt, malfeasance and general stupidity. In fact, other than their respective logos, there appears to be no difference at all.
Film at 11."
The only thing worst than government secrets is badly regulated government transparency so you can no longer legitimately complain about a lack of transparency but only about quality of service.
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"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." - Barack Obama
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
a pittance for the common man. much as cloistered monks of the dark ages, we the peasants arent meant to understand their knowledge. We merely consume their decrees and avoid asking questions.
in reality actual freedom of real information is virtually patented by the wikileaks group. the knowledge they provide is indispensable in tracking and understanding the policies and procedures of how our government works. this knowledge has sparked revolution, incited protest, and called for real policy and leadership change. it has become consequently forbidden and persecuted.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Unfortunately for us citizens of the U.S.A., the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) serves exactly the same purpose that the White House Petitions page "We the People" serves: no purpose other than to coddle the masses and trick them into believing that they are being listened to...
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Then they respond to us with "cute little children, we promise not to build any death stars,... really..." rather than even bother to answer substantively to any questions about real matters. It's just another bureaucratic layer they can point to and say: "look, the process is this, why don't you just follow the outlined process, and wait your time, and we'll get back to you. don't call us, we'll call you."
.
It's a damn shame that people really believe this is supposed to work rather than just to mollify, pacify, and distract while government's business as usual continues to happen away from our eyes and our heart's wishes.