Comment by stuarto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuarto | Hacker News Reader

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House and Senate bills (H.R.482 and S.103) have been introduced to ban further federal funding or use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that disseminate data on racial discrimination in housing and other community issues.

The government created visualization site https://egis.hud.gov/affht/# specifically would be banned for further support, maintenance or use by members of the federal government.

Fortunately the raw data is still available for download.

To me, government-ordered public-interest website teardowns sound a lot like a 21st century version of book-burning.

Bill sponsors include Marco Rubio and Mike Lee in the Senate

Geographic scientists have taken notice http://news.aag.org/2017/01/creating-and-preserving-actionab...

Do you know where I can download the raw data? I'd like to keep a copy of it.

https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/4868/affh-raw-data/

A lot of it is just plain census data, with some additional housing details filled in! Adding maps makes it more accessible :)

Checked against where I live and it's surprisingly accurate, even on very micro level down to a couple streets.

> To me, government-ordered public-interest website teardowns sound a lot like a 21st century version of book-burning.

Fortunately that's not what this is. No longer operating a website is not the same as ordering other such websites to be torn down. No need to overstate the problem.

Burning a book isn't ordering all other books of its type be burned, but it sure sends a message -- let's destroy this representation of knowledge because it contains knowledge or thought I don't approve of. It's entirely analogous to book-burning, though not book-banning (which is analogous to making such data illegal -- though it's arguable that since the federal government is really the only body capable of collecting such data, banning the federal government from collecting it IS banning it.. an argument for another place and time, I think) but OP didn't claim it as such, so it isn't an overstatement.

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