The importance of distributing true copies of government records | Hacker News Reader

The importance of distributing true copies of government records

cjr.org

107 pointshhs16 comments

related - UK government has destroyed documents of thousands of immigrants who later became citizens, then it deported them for not having documents. This became known as windrush scandal.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-who-destro...

I think that's a slightly different category, as those were personal records, not public. Much as I love the Internet Archive, I don't think I want e.g. my tax returns to be stored there, at least not for 100 years or something, like census data.

Am I right in saying that such records are public in Norway? Or that at least they can be accessed by anyone although a record is kept of who requested access?

More like a single result box of a big form is made public. Think of an old school phonebook where instead of a telephone number, it lists a monetary amount.

Ah, interesting. Does it report wealth or income? What kind of effects do you think it has on society? What do people actually do with the information?

Norway publishes total taxable income, tax paid, and taxable wealth. Sweden e.g. publishes salaries. This kind of thinking tends to e.g. help root out scammers, help investigative journalists looking into e.g. a politician's unstated motivations, eliminate gender pay disparity, keep the divide between rich and poor from growing massively, produce a more egalitarian society, and has created some of the least corrupt countries in the world.

This talks a bit about the larger mindset behind this particular decision: https://theculturetrip.com/norway/articles/norway-country-pu...

Yep they've ruined many lives just for the fuck of it and government morons who had concocted this whole thing got away with it. They should've been severely punished instead.

This type of action is worthy of some dictatorship, not "humane, freedom loving democracy". Yeah. Humane my ass.

> And, ‘How do you know that’s the version that was published, when it was published?’

That is just about the only valid purpose for using centralized blockchains (no matter what kind, even a git repository is a blockchain!).

A version label in the document, digital signatures and a halfway decent PKI scheme work fine for the "authenticity" part, but they have the downside that should the key material be compromised, no one can guarantee that authenticity any more.

Sales receipts, tax records (just off the top of my head) seem like good use cases for centralized blockchains.

It's unclear from the article whether the problem they are addressing is simply accessing these records in the first place, digitising them at scale, long-term storage/retention of the digitised versions, or ensuring they are not tampered with deleted by nefarious actors. Or maybe some combination of the above.

> many journalists have come around to the idea that while they are there to interpret the facts, being able to link and display the source materials is a service to their readers

Very odd that in the midst of the last decade+ of loudly lamenting the death of journalism, nobody realized this sooner--that what people just might be willing to sustain financially is not only the synthesis of someone who has researched the problem and then publishes that synthesis, but someone who also gives the reader something: the paper trail that all that research produced (or the trailhead, at least).

Too much of what passes for journalism (especially local news) is indistinguishable, if not in tone then at least in substantiation and credibility, from the rigorless, non-expert opinion of any arbitrary person on the Internet.

Sounds about as "radical" as regularly checking your kid's diaper, and doing a diaper change if it's wet or soiled.

And yet somehow nobody was bothering to check if this baby needed a diaper change. Maybe the idea isn't radical, but the execution is very different from the norm.

(Context: Previously, this item's title matched the article - "Archiving official documents as an act of radical journalism". Vs. the current title - "The importance of distributing true copies of government records" is far more descriptive of the article's contents.)

Yes, and yes (if you sufficiently restrict "norm" to very recent years) - but the article was published in Columbia Journalism Review - which is published by Columbia University. An institution which should bring a few scraps of sober historical perspective to the table. "Radical journalism" is stuff like being a party to New York Times Co. v. United States ( 1971, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S... ). Not doing something that most small-city newspapers were routinely doing back in the 1950's. (Because what reporter wanted to waste time dragging back & forth to City Hall, to consult their records, when he was writing a story about how this year's City Budget gave X% less money to the Roads Dept. and Y% more to the Fire Dept., and Councilman Smith voted twice against item Z?)

Papers have been archiving local records for some time, but they would keep such records under their control to give their paper an edge. Building the records internationally and then publishing them can be seen as radical.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0 guy discovered that xerox workstations (like the ones to scan in government archives) corrupted numbers. Thus falsifying documents on a massive scale. Obamas "birth certificate" went through this document shredder.

So distributing, non digital copies. Thats were the lasting value is.

Man: Tons of racists up today. Yes the posted document was altered, no, it was a bug. In dubio pro error..

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