Teleidoscope

Tue, Mar 20, 2007

Enough Eyes...

Posted at 10:08 pm MDT to Current Events

There is a saying in the open source community (I think from Linus Torvalds originally): "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow."

Applications of this principle have begun to affect some areas such as court cases and patents, with the Groklaw community holding the SCO court case documents under a microscope and various groups rallying around via the web to help analyze the technical aspects of court cases or dig for prior art to fight some of the stupider patents that have been issued.

Now I read at MakingLight and Steinn Sigurðsson's science blog that the Justice Department has delivered 3000 paper documents to the House judiciary committee investigating the dismissal of federal US attorneys. This tactic is sometimes called a paper bomb: the object is to answer the subpoena or discovery order (technically) but bury the useful stuff in a mass of paper that the opposition cannot possibly analyze thoroughly in the time available. It isn't quite working this time.

The House committee staff are posting pdf files of the documents on the web, and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is organizing a swarm of volunteers to separate the wheat from the chaff. By the time the pages are all up on the web (probably some time tomorrow) people will have examined the documents and flagged bits that may be worth the committee's attention.

Of course various quirks and oddities that may turn up during the analysis will also be widely discussed on the web. Some are already beginning to show up at Daily Kos and elsewhere.

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