The Bush Administration is not known for being forthcoming with information (even compared to the normal bureaucracy). This particular excuse, though, takes the cake.
The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department’s database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.
“Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating,” wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department’s office for information requests.
Wow. Hope Mr McIntyre is looking for another job pretty quickly.
“What they’re asking for is a lot, and it’s not something at this particular point in time we have the technical ability to do,” Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said Tuesday.
McIntyre explained in a May 24 letter that the computer system — operated in the counterespionage section of the Justice Department’s criminal division — “was not designed for mass export of all stored images” and said the system experiences “substantial problems.”
“It sounds like incredible negligence for an agency that is keeping public records to keep them in such a precarious condition,” said Stephen Doig, interim director at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. “I’ve never heard the excuse that making the equivalent of a backup copy would somehow cause steam to rise out of the computer.”
The government said an overhaul of the system should be finished by December and copies should be available then.
Well, there’s a difference between a backup copy and a full report of all the data in the database. That’s probably a heck of a lot of data.
Still, it all sounds pretty dubious to me.
Paper copies of records still are available for review four hours each day for people willing to travel to Washington, the Justice Department noted. Williams said the index available to researchers there is at least 12 months outdated, “which kind of renders it useless.”
Indeed. So the system is so precarious that even creating an index of just the last year is beyond its capability? Gimme a break.
(via Doyce)