forcing transparency on the doj
using the amazing powers of cut-and-paste is apparently one way that the good folks at the memory hole may have unmasked a doj attorney workforce diversity study. with $2m in taxpayer funding (roughly the price of sending spam in california), the kpmg produced a 186-page document, about half of which was censored before its [delayed] public release.
where this becomes news (for the washington times, the register, the new york times and newsday at least), is that now we know what bothers the department of justice in this report. what they think we shouldn’t know.
and the secret is out, and no doubt being downloaded and archived by thousands of interested citizens.
sure, it may have been a technical glitch (and cut-and-paste is now at least as powerful as a shift key). you can blame microsoft, or you can blame the doj and kpmg people that censored this document without really understanding how the electronic format works, or you can blame adobe… but how it happened isn’t as interesting to me as the implications of what we’ve learned from this little screwup.
we know that the thing this government fears most is criticism, and now we have some 90 pages of “censored” evidence.
now we have to ask the harder questions. if this government is willing to censor reports that document its shortcomings on issues as broad as the diversity of its own staff, what other shortcomings have been hidden from the pubic?