Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

Ok, sure, it's against the spirit of transparency but I'd be willing to bet that in 90% of the cases that got sent upstairs, it actually was quite transparent scandal-fishing. Still, agree on the principle, you're right there.

But as for policy put in place by a given administration.. citation? Are you alleging with a straight face that the Bush administration wasn't doing this? Remember that whole "Department of Justice actually frickin prosecuting people on poltiical grounds" thing?

View on HN

Even if we accept your premise - Bush probably did it too - wasn't Obama elected to move away from Bush policies?

Umm... isn't the a large part of FOIA to enable scandal fishing? Scandals wouldn't need to be fished if DHS did their job and brought them to the public's attention.

"Are you alleging with a straight face that the Bush administration wasn't doing this?"

I just reread his post, and it doesn't look like it.

"Put in place" kinda implies that it wasn't happening before, no?

And if both administrations that have presided over a DHS practiced similar policies, then it's still a scandal but it's not about only one of them.

From the article: "But in July 2009, Homeland Security introduced a directive requiring a wide range of information to be vetted by political appointees for "awareness purposes," no matter who requested it."

So yes - the Obama administration "PUT IN PLACE" this policy. It's not a long article. Read it.

I think the Bush administration policy was simply to deny access early and often.

The article said this was done by Janet Napolitano's staff. Napolitano is the former Democratic governor of Arizona who was put in place by Obama, so I think it's fair to criticize him here.

Bush did have issues with FOIA, though, but they were quite different from investigating the politics of people making requests. Specifically, under Bush, agencies were supposed to deny as many requests as possible. I don't believe Bush ever had the DHS looking into who was requesting what (at least, not that we know of). After all, the DHS had no permanent leadership until Obama appointed Napolitano.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com