[Am-info] Re: Auditing the Public Response

[Erick Andrews]

On Fri, 08 Feb 2002 19:03:36 -0600, Glenn T. Livezey, Ph.D. wrote:

>> From: Sujal Shah <sujal@sujal.net>
>>>In re: what glenn wrote
>>>I think Sujal came closest to the salient point: the Bush DOJ has
>>> taken their leader's stance of claiming the right to ignore as much
>>> of the law and the public's voice as is necessary to draw their own
>>Whoa!  That's not what I meant.  I actually agree with the
>>categorization of comments that say things like "I hate Microsoft" and
>>nothing else as expressing no opinion on the settlement... does that
>>statement mention the settlement at all?
>
>That statement surely cannot be the entirely quoted message from over
>7,000 communications. Therefore you cannot accept at face value that
>the appearance of such a statement within any given response is 
>grounds for dismissing the whole of the message unless you accept
>that that statement is the sum and substance of all 7,000 dismissed.
>And further...
>
>> I don't think that this has any commentary on the Bush administration
>> (though feel free to believe that, it's just not my belief).  Besides, I
>> think they have to make all comments public, not just the "salient"
>> ones...
>
>That's what the beginning of the article said, however, at the end came
>======================================================================
>More than a thousand messages are said by Justice to have been 
>completely off-topic. Some of those were advertisements -- known as 
>"spam" -- and at least one e-mail contained pornography. 
>"The United States proposes not to publish such submissions or to 
>provide them as part of its filing to the court," Justice lawyers wrote.
>======================================================================

I have a bit of a problem with that, too.

If "Justice" is truly professional and in the public interest, who cares 
about such statements?  They still should go in the record, but, ah,
timing seems to be the game now.

With tens of thousands of replies, one must expect some "noise", and
some way beneath the serious issues, but part of the record nonetheless.
We will see if Kollar-Kotelly has enduring wisdom, yet more currently
I hope.

Really.  We all get porn, spam, blah blah...e-mail these days.  Quit
the side show I say and focus on the case.  Get above publicizing
"a big deal" about the mundane.

The DoJ intimates that these "noise" communications are topically
significant.  Yes?  Then, what is their purpose?  So why amplify 
them unless there's something beyond objectivity but more for their 
interest and less the public's?

>
>If all you have to say is "trust us, the 'missing' submissions are
>not appropriate to this forum" and then present a subset in the filing 
>to the court..... well, pardon me for being such a skeptic. But this 
>administration, in every department and office, has already provided 
>glaring examples to justify EXTREME suspicion in response to such
>assurances. Do you REALLY believe that Al Gore's DOJ would be busily
>dismantling the DOJvsM$ case? How can it NOT be a commentary on Bush?   

Unfortunately, history does not reveal its alternatives. ;-(

[...]

-- 
Erick Andrews