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Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

Previously-accumulated USDA data (that has already been paid for and is technically a public good) has been blacked out also. Source: https://sunlightfoundation.com/tracking-u-s-government-data-...

The USDA announced that public access to that information would now be mediated through Freedom of Information Act requests.

There was a dog food poisoning reported [earlier this week](http://patch.com/illinois/hydepark/s/g0ven/illinois-company-...) The "supplier" of the poison dog food is probably pretty happy the public can't figure out which other pet food manufacturers (Besides Evanger's) they vendor.

This move was likely designed to hide facts from the public and to make investigative journalism a lot more difficult. Public health and safety data needs to be public and squelching it is akin to public endangerment.

[edit: thx for grammar correction.]

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I've also noticed that USCIS has been making materials that were previously publicly available inaccessible, like immigration guidance documents. The links are still there on their homepage, but now they just point back to the host page.

Well, there's a (hopefully) easy way to solve this problem: submit a FOIA request for the missing data, and post it publicly.

Does anyone know of a place to post such things?

Edit: To be clear, I think there is no good reason for this to be hidden behind a FOIA wall. But, assuming that we're stuck with the FOIA wall...

It's not going to be easy or cheap and there will be a significant discovery problem for others. To be effective, we need to abandon the nonprofit silo model and switch towards an open unitary model, a wiki-web built on relationships rather than centered on ownership or exclusive curation content.

I understand the first half of your post, but not the second. Could you explain? (Or just drop a link to something I can read?)

MuckRock[0] is the go-to site for this. They took part in a panel run at HOPE X[1] with GovernmentAttic.com

[0] https://www.muckrock.com/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5rp3nJ62Nc

I don't disagreewith the overall point, but I'm not sure it's grammatically possible to be "calculated[ly] reckless"

Sure it is! You know that, due to the sort of thing you're doing, you ought to try to be careful. But you make the decision not to.

Think about driving. I can easily imagine making the conscious decision to simply not drive very carefully--whether for fun, because there's an emergency, because I want to hurt people, etc.

You might think of it as analogous to willful ignorance. You know that there is something you ought to know, but you make a decision to either not seek the knowledge out, or to insulate yourself from it.

>technically a public good

I don't think you know what public good means

You may think of yourself as a slave, but that doesn't mean you can't strive to be a better person and a productive member of society.

Not that wikipedia is a definitive source [1], but I think you could make the case by its definition that data gathered by the government on our behalf should be provided to us as easily as possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

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