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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if every email and report that you wrote at work was broadcast to the whole world and subject the vicious (yet shallow and unfair) scrutiny of the 24-hour news cycle. Can you see how that would hamper your ability to your job effectively?

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I can see how it would cause a problem if you weren't doing you job right or had no intention to.

Outside of that... not really.

"weren't doing your job right" and "had no intention to" are hugely subjective. Anyone with an axe to grind could go through your information and find whatever they need to twist the apparent meaning to prove that you weren't doing your job "right" and had no intention to. It's really easy to take information out of context and make it appear to mean something it doesn't.

I guess that means you don't want to be a public servant exposed to public scrutiny ?

That is part of the job.

Eh, maybe. Everyone with facebook has unfollowed that crazy relative that posts their political rants. I think the vast majority of people don't care about axe grinders. When something does come up, people can go see for themselves. There's also the issue of volume. Something like 1/3 of the us workforce is employed by government.

Sure, there are crazy people out there. But they're going to be crazy anyway. I think this would make people take the crazy people even less seriously.

Considering the government currently has the same power over citizens, I can't see how this argument holds up. Especially when the government is granted powers of total surveillance and mass hacking[1], there needs to be some accountability and balance of power.

[1] https://medium.com/@RonWyden/shaking-my-head-5c1b60db9086#.h...

Serious question; have you never written an inappropriate-for-publishing-in-a-newspaper email? I'm genuinely curious how many people filter 100% of their emails for printability (I know I've done the "ctrl+R wtf ctrl+enter" before).

Also, keep in mind that you won't see emails from a given person which don't match the FOIA search criteria. The likelihood of getting a nonrepresentative sample is therefore proportionally increased.

Anecdotally, I've heard Feds talk about how it's the actually spoken and posted (but never emailed, obviously) policy that you should never send an email that can't be printed on the front page of the Washington Post.

Do we really want our public servants spending all of their time thinking about whether using "whom" incorrectly will get them crucified by some blogger?

So wait a year or five before release. I understand that access to intermediate versions of documents while things are being hashed out can be a problem. Being able to reconstruct why a budget looks the way it does is really helpful.

There's also a volume issue.

There will always be loopholes, but given there's been countless examples of abuse and times where what happened will never been known because data was intentionally deleted, this needs to stop. In fact, currently, it's standard operating procedure to delete information; once deleted, it's impossible to know what the information was, why it was deleted, etc.

Doesn't sound too different from how gitlab or Mozilla share their 'internal' issue trackers publicly to me...

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