Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, “In keeping with best practices for major Internet providers to issue periodic transparency reports, Public Resource would like to issue two reports.
“First, our National Security Letter canary is still alive. If we receive such a letter in the future, we will kill the canary and you will not see this report next year.
"Second, due to ongoing litigation in the case of American Society for Testing and Materials et al v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. currently pending in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, we have issued 4,063,455 HTTP 451 error messages for attempting to access standards from ASTM, NFPA, and ASHRAE. These documents are all incorporated into federal and state law and include such vital public safety documents as the National Electrical Code, which is the law in all 50 states. The HTTP 451 error message is issued when a document is Unavailable For Legal Reasons.
"During the term of the ongoing litigation over our right to post public safety standards that are part of the law, the Court has asked us to remove these documents from public view, so any attempts to access these documents will throw an HTTP 451 error and you are redirected to our access denied page. For example, if you try to read ASTM D3559: Standard Test Methods for Lead in Water – which is mandated by the authorities in the Code of Federal Regulations (40 CFR 136) and is applicable to the testing of water in communities such as Flint, Michigan—we will not allow you to view this document, neither as a scan of the original paper document, nor as an HTML document with SVG graphics which is accessible to people with visual impairements.
"We regret any inconvenience this may have caused and look forward to judicial resolution of the question ‘if a law isn’t public, is it a law?’”
If and when Republicans come out from hiding, enterprising journalists should ask them a series of questions:
If Trump continues to receive foreign monies in violation of the Constitution what will you do?
Republicans lambasted Hillary Clinton for coming to the State Department while her husband was getting paid for speeches and their foundation was accepting foreign money. Why are you not insisting on a similar standard for Trump?
Does it bother you that his children will be running businesses and he will be reaping the profits from all sorts of businesses that have matters before the federal government or are affected by laws and regulations? If Clinton attempted this wouldn’t you be calling for impeachment?
Do you favor hearings and/or legislation to address Trump’s conflicts?
Do you agree with the unanimous assessment of our intelligence agencies that Russia was behind the hacking? If so, are you concerned Trump and his aides are calling this “ridiculous”?
If the president does not act on intelligence that is factually beyond dispute in defense of U.S. interests is he fulfilling his constitutional obligations?
Donald Trump still has not released his tax returns so we do not know the extent of his financial ties, if any, to Russia. Does that concern you?
Trump’s pick for national security adviser traveled to Russia, gave a speech for which he was paid (how much we do not know), says Russia’s propaganda outlet RT is just like CNN and retweets attacks on all Muslims and “fake news” accounts. Should he be in the NSA position? Will you subpoena his financial records to determine his connections to Russia and whether those pose a national security concern?
