Re: a couple of questions

[Carl Malamud <xxxx@media.org>]

On Oct 20, 2008, at 5:27 PM, Aaron Swartz wrote:

>  the data's a real mess -

That's ultimately my biggest defense in all of this.  But, I'm still  
*really* nervous when I hear the Superintendent of Documents talk  
about "security breach" and "investigation."

In terms of the data being a mess, I'm thinking of doing a disallow on  
google in my robots.txt on this or maybe even just releasing really  
big tarballs  ... I'm positive should be public, but I'm not  
necessarily convinced this stuff deserves to go live on random google  
searches until more volunteers have done more scrubbing.  There is  
some really bad crap I caught, which means there is a whole bunch I  
didn't catch.

It really sucks of course that all the commercial guys don't care and  
have all this live, but our biggest defense (again) is that we  
actually care.  My letter to Rosenthal will point out very clearly  
that her computer people and the commercial boys never told her any of  
this stuff nor did they redact the data ... by making the data public,  
ironically, we protect privacy much better.

What do you think if the initial release consists of:

1. scribd of all my letters to the judicial conference (with all the  
private information like the lists of hits and even the case numbers  
with hits redacted, of course)
2. a bunch of 50gbyte or so tarballs.

That lets us get the data out but not have to be in the end user  
business.

We should realize that if we put even just big tarballs, there will be  
some jerks that take all the data and slap google adwords on it and  
will not care if, for example, some really bad document is found and  
needs to be redacted.

Thoughts?

Carl