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This Blog Is Republishing All the Animal Welfare Records the USDA Deleted (vice.com)
Last year, thousands of animal welfare records were removed from the web by the Department of Agriculture. Now, a government transparency blog is on a mission to recover and republish as many of these records as possible. From a report on Motherboard: "Whenever there are documents that were online, but got pulled offline, they're automatically important," said Russ Kick, who runs the blog The Memory Hole 2, where many of the documents have already been re-published. "Nobody's going to go through the trouble to delete something that doesn't matter." The documents, which were removed by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) late last week, included inspection records and annual reports made under the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act. The USDA indicated that removing the documents was in response to a court decision, but a spokesperson contacted by Motherboard would not specify what court case. The records were typically used by animal welfare groups to keep tabs on how well these laws were being enforced, but were also used by the general public to research the inspection records of everything from dog breeders to circuses and zoos. "I've learned that if I see something and think 'I'm really surprised the government posted this,' I need to download it," Kick told me. "So when I found these reports, I thought 'this is surprising,' and I downloaded them."
I work at a place that gets inspected by APHIS. APHIS also puts our material into quarantine.
We have permits for all kinds of things that sound icky and salacious. If someone read the reports they might think, "Wait, something bad is going on here- why are they doing this? Let's follow the trail and find out what they are doing!"
They would be very disappointed to find out what is really going on- that it is all part of 'normal' business. That the icky sounding stuff would be absolutely pedestrian if you understood it.
APHIS is a prettyboring place once you get over the idea of 'quarantine'. My guess is that these records would be boring at first glance, andpretty much just spreadsheet data regardingregular inspections once you have an understanding of what they are doing.
But...maybe that's all just a conspiracy...
No reason to lie.
BS, the reason most offices implement the shred everything rule is so that the employees don't have to make a decision about whether or not something meets the "Shred This" criteria. Better safe than sorry.