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Comment by fks | Hacker News Reader

...huh?

If you fill out the form on the page, we'll submit a request to your local police department, asking for policies, invoices, etc. that will detail if and how they're using cell phone scanning technology (including Stingrays), and even what vendors have unsuccessfully pitched them on the technology.

Reading this post made it seem like muckrock is more of a ideologically driven site than a neutral data dump. Which is totally OK, but I was thinking maybe it be nice to just to have a place to get data regardless of the topic or how it fits in with a particular set of opinions.

So I'm all for using FOIA to make public data accessible for the greater good, but I'm not sure if what you're doing is the right approach.

Anyone can sign up for and file any request through the site, and the request pages are about as neutral as can be (http://j.mp/UG3TMB). We also publish news, analysis and commentary on select documents, but that's handled fairly separately, so if you just want the raw docs, that's very easy; if you want to better understand why they're important, we try to make that easy, too.

We don't typically take too many ideological stances except that agencies should probably follow the public records laws that they're subject to, which generally isn't too controversial an opinion. We're looking for other ways to allow more analysis and context, but keeping the data clean and easily accessible will always be a part of what we do.

You might say that there is an implicit ideology in what kinds of government activities people find interesting or concerning. For example, the Sacramento Bee has made great use of CPRA to find out about things that went wrong in the construction of the new Bay Bridge. Other people are concerned about government surveillance and send a lot of requests to try to expose information about it. Not everyone finds it intuitive that the ability of police to know your cell phone's location is a concern on par with the quality of the welding in the Bay Bridge.

I don't drive over the bay bridge. Nobody I know regularly drives over the bay bridge. Nothing I buy is likely to be transported over the bay bridge. I don't even live in the same state as the bay bridge anymore. By and large, the bay bridge just doesn't have any significance to me.

I, like every other person in America, do live within the jurisdiction of a law enforcement agency that may be buying/using this technology.

It seems strange to suggest that an entity must be ideologically driven because it's focusing on something that affects an entire country instead of a distinctly local issue.

I guess I meant to compare concerns about the Bay Bridge with concerns over whether SFPD or OPD has IMSI catchers (or drones), rather than over whether any law enforcement agency anywhere has them.

A very significant fraction of public records requests relate to something that the requester is concerned about or objects to or fears is being mishandled in some way. Deciding where to focus one's concerns and questions could be viewed as ideological, or at least ideological concerns help make particular topics more salient and interesting to people.

By way of analogy, take a look at the series of questions that these journalists decide to pose to Victoria Nuland, then spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of State, about the activities of European election observers in Texas during the 2012 elections there:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2012/10/199824.htm

Obviously journalists have the right to ask Ms. Nuland about anything that interests them, and supporting that right isn't (very) ideological (within the U.S. political context). But it seems pretty clear that the line of questioning that they were pursuing was inspired by a concern or belief that Ms. Nuland herself didn't share: that there was something improper or disturbing about European international institutions observing an election in Texas.

If you share that belief, you might find the questioning pretty natural and obvious and even wish that it had been pursued a bit further and uncovered more information about the relationship between the U.S. and OSCE. If you don't share that belief, you might find the questioning perplexing or annoying, and be bewildered that the journalists didn't accept Ms. Nuland's perfectly reasonable replies.

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