From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 09:13:03 MDT
>
> --- Steve Davies <steve365@btinternet.com> wrote:
> > Just found out about the link below. This certainly hasn't been
> > getting publicity over here.
> >
> > http://www.againsttcpa.com/tcpa-faq-en.html
> >
> > How serious is this?
Mike Lorrey says
> It is serious, but the authors against tcpa don't seem to have the
> imagination to think up beneficial uses of it. For example, if a
> government document management system is entirely tcpa compliant, it
> will be VERY easy to do government-wide FOIA requests, such that, even
> if you may not get every document due to classifications, you will know
> how many such documents exist.
>
> To demonstrate: lets say I submit a FOIA request for all documents on
> UFOs in government archives. I can determine, for example, that while
> the USAF might have several hundred thousand documents on them, which
> you'd expect for a department that had defending our skies as its job,
> if, say, the Department of the Interior had a billion documents on the
> same topic, I'd see that as rather odd and deserving of greater
> investigation.
>
> A tcpa compliant system would not be able to conveniently 'lose'
> documents, as has happened so much in the past. They might not give you
> access to them, or access to unredacted versions, but you should be
> able to know that they exist.
>
> While my example is somewhat mirthful, there are plenty of rather
> serious and useful applications of the principle.
>
Interesting, that hadn't struck me (probably because as a Brit the idea of
the government here ever letting anyone *ever* get their hands on
information is just inconceivable). Does that mean you favour this or just
that you think it will have good results as well as bad ones?
Steve Davies
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