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Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

If an organization's purpose is to serve the general public, any and all information they create should have a reasonable timeline applied to it where it eventually becomes public information. Otherwise, it's simply information someone is using for their own purposes, and perhaps gain.

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I think it would be amazing if there was a constitutional amendment forcing all government information to be disclosed within an extremely short period. Someone sues the NYPD, the amendment gets incorporated, bada bing, bada boom, government transparency.

A lot of government information is tied up with individual privacy. For example, Census data isn't released for 70 years, for privacy reasons. I certainly wouldn't want the IRS to release my tax returns, or Medicare to release my medical records.

Of course it's easy to abuse the citizen privacy excuse to hide things that should not be private. But you can't just make everything public without causing significant problems, either.

I'm willing to give up my personal privacy if everyone else is. That's the catch now, isn't it?

Well it can't really be this black and white. Any information they create could be case data they are working on for murders etc and other information that needs to be kept secret, so there has to be some type of restrictions in place.

Thus the "eventually" caveat.

Don't we need to also ensure that the information isn't tempered as well?

Or tampered with.

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