Re:U.S. Senator Questions Attorney General about Aaron Swartz
by anigbrowl on Friday January 18, 2013 @05:04PM
(#5081332)
In that case I can't figure out what your point was, but this is all sort of incidental anyway.
Re:U.S. Senator Questions Attorney General about Aaron Swartz
by danso on Friday January 18, 2013 @05:19PM
(#5081399)
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)
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.