Changes in Our Access To Information

After reading Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk, I had to find out more about Americans decreased access to information under the Trump administration.  The book is fascinating, describing in detail what went on during the transition period from Obama to Trump.  The last half of the book details the disappearance of data across the federal government.  Both the EPA and the Department of Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data.  The USDA removed inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse by the federal government.  Micck Mulvaney said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions.  The list goes on and on. Michael Lewis' information was only the tip of the iceberg in terms our diminished ability to statistics and information.  Here's a little bit of what I discovered.

Altering or removing links or moving entire web pages or altering or removing pertinent sections was one way the federal government decreased public access to important information.  The Fedstats website removed or relaunched websites under a different name to make access to information more difficult.  What used to be accessible became inaccessible and cannot be found anywhere.  Statistics on homeland security, agriculture, education, census, transportation, labor and justice are just some of the statistical information that has either been removed, altered, or renamed, so as to make finding the information more difficult.

Why is this so important, you might ask?  We are a free society, and citizens are entitled to information about society that may help or hurt them.  Changing, removing or altering information to make a particular agency look good is just wrong.  I highly recommend The Fifth Risk to anyone who wants to know the kind of people Trump chose to run important departments, and more specifically, how they profited from their positions.

Google has been asked to remove content from web sites for a variety of reasons.  The number of requests have sky rocketed in the past 2 1/2 years.  The probable answer is that the government does not want that information available to the public.  Below is a google statement on why content removals are requested.

Why governments request content removals

Governments ask us to remove or review content for many reasons. Some requests allege defamation, while others claim that content violates local laws prohibiting hate speech or adult content. The laws surrounding these issues vary by country. Our teams assign each request a category, such as hate speech, obscenity, and defamation. Note that we did not begin providing reason data about the reason for the request until the December 2010 reporting period.

Often times, government requests target political content and government criticism. Governments cite defamation, privacy, and even copyright laws in their attempts to remove political speech from our services. Our teams evaluate each request and review the content in context in order to determine whether or not content should be removed due to violation of local law or our content policies.