That wasn't my point...and while Obama has opened some new doors, the thinking in the journalism community is that his administration is actually more closed when it comes to raw request numbers:

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/156227/obama-ad...

This is of course a quantitative measure...but given that Obama wrote a very direct order to officials to err on the side of openness, it's striking that that order is being ignored so casually...I don't think it's hard to make a case that the culture of the bureaucracy is not particularly mindful of openness.

In that case I can't figure out what your point was, but this is all sort of incidental anyway.

Yeah, I was just meandering. The parent post had argued that this was little more than a hypocritical political ploy. I was saying, 'probably', because there's not much to politically gain from it other than to give the DOJ a black eye and because, I guess I just see Swartz as still being a "niche" issue to most people outside of the tech/academic senator.

But I thought it was fair to point out that Cornyn is no fairweather public-records fan. But of course, Swartz's JSTOR incident was not just a case of open-access (as it was in the PACER case). There's enough nuance here that I would've just assumed that a senator of Conryn's level would leave it be as there are many other political shitstorms going on (gun control, debt ceiling, etc etc)