Monday, November 2, 2009

The Meaning of 'Transparency' Was Lost in Translation

You know, when the Democrats (Which one was it? Obama about the White House or Pelosi about the House? Either way it doesn't matter.) promised to have the most transparent administration ever, I thought they meant that literally, like, oh, for example, with no sneaking around behind closed doors trying to hide what they're doing.

Well, this wasn't what I was thinking when I thought of transparency:

Transparency like you’ve never seen before

Today marks a major milestone in government transparency -- and an important lesson in the unintended consequences of such vigorous disclosure.

We previously announced that the White House in December of this year would -- for the first time in history -- begin posting all White House visitor records under the terms of our new voluntary disclosure policy. As part of that initiative, we also offered to look back at the records created before the announcement of the policy and answer specific requests for visitor records created earlier in the year.

So far we’ve processed 110 disclosure requests from September that yielded nearly 500 visitor records. All of these are now available on the White House website in accessible, searchable format for anyone to browse or download. Consistent with our earlier announcement that we will only release records 90 days or older, this first batch covers the period of time between January 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. Future batches will be posted on an ongoing basis.


This is what you mean by transparency? Posting visitor records on the Internet? Are you freaking kidding me? When you said 'the most transparent administration eva,' most of us thought you were going to honest about what you doing up there on the hill. Not that you would post White House visitor records online.

I guess the meaning of 'transparency was lost in translation.

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