I'm not talking about malfeasance and corruption. I'm talking about embarrassment and enablement of dubious practices. FOIA should rightly make that painful.
On one hand you have dubious practices. On the other hand you have political football / back-stabbing.
My point is that I believe the public interest is best served by a balance between "the public knows how this business was conducted" vs "any rival who wants my job can dig through everything I've done to find some dirt of me."
Politicians, functionaries, and executive staff are people too. And I think HN can be a bit schizophrenic decrying "people in government are so ineffectual and unwilling to take risks" while simultaneously designing a purity litmus test where only the most boring, unadventurous apparatchiks are able to keep their jobs.
> My point is that I believe the public interest is best served by a balance between "the public knows how this business was conducted" vs "any rival who wants my job can dig through everything I've done to find some dirt of me."
Was that ever a standard for exemption from FOIA? Much less the intent of anyone writing any part of FOIA? Stupidity should hurt.
Your original point was that "99.999% [of FOIA exemptions are] ass-coverage through secrecy" and that's a bad thing. I disagree for the reasons I specified.
If stupidity were cause for dismissal, we'd have a hard time staffing most of the jobs in the world.
