http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm
The above article is about the US State Department deciding to no longer publish an annual report on international terrorism, "Patterns of Global Terrorism" after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
How can US citizens measure progress, or assess claims of results for an initiative to fight terrorism if you have no public means to quantify the subject of interest? How do you perform course corrections if you do not collect relevant data?
How do we assess the performance of our own government if no branch of the federal government is going to let us see what is going on?
In the name of fighting terrorism, our representatives seem to be trying to put us in a nice steel box with a lock on the outside that we can't operate. "We'll protect you!" they insist.
I can't understand why anyone finds this direction to be a good thing. The administration has been methodically and without relent taking away our means to perform oversight.
With regard to the specific document in question, the problem they're have in providing accurate information may be that they have to produce an annual document. Some data is always going to be too new to provide in sufficient detail at publication time.
We need to deprecate this mindset under some circumstances. If the state department converted from developing this information as part of an annual document to a web-based process that adds information as things happen, providing assessments and categorization as more information becomes available, then they would have the strong benefit of never having to completely revise a document all in one sitting. A dead tree copy of a document could be made at any time, or for that matter a hard copy of any addition be made automatically so that revisions could be easily tracked.
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