>Holman showed me how it works. You have to enter your name and address into a computer, and then you can search. But you have to know the name of the person you are searching for. If he or she has filed a financial disclosure form, it will come up as a PDF, which you can print at a cost of 10 cents a page.

>"The database itself is almost meaningless," says Holman. He says the only option for those who want to get a comprehensive look at what some 2,900 staffers have filed is to review the cases one by one. "And that's just too big a job for anybody to do."

>The STOCK Act was supposed to make this task significantly easier. Records for members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs were supposed to be posted online in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.

>If you wanted to see who traded health care stock just before a committee acted on a health care bill, it would be easy. No trips to the basement required.

Taking the database offline due to identity theft concerns is understandable.

What isn't defensible is making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite. SQL was 43 years old in 2013. It's perhaps unobvious to a nontechnical person, but the average reader of Hacker News should immediately recognize that it isn't normal to be unable to search a database of textual records, whose total size is probably less than 10 TB.

> making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite

I agree. But this doesn't apply to members of Congress. Their trades are available online [1].

[1] https://www.smartinsider.com/politicians/