
White House Deletes TSA Petition - shill
http://epic.org/2012/08/white-house-pulls-down-tsa-pet.html
======
cjoh
Nonsensical sensationalism. The petition expired, and didn't get 25,000
signitures. Should it have gotten special preference because it got on the
front page of Reddit and Hackernews? No. Should you have signed it 2 days ago
instead of upvoting this article hoping that somebody else would? Yes.

Here's where it says clearly what happened:
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-
transporta...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-
transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd)

~~~
david_shaw
Okay, here's my question:

Regardless of whether "the Administration" cut this petition short or not,
what is the benefit of keeping the TSA around?

No, no, I don't mean because they're ineffective or violating our rights or
anything like that (although those points are valid as well) -- my question is
what is the _political_ motivation for keeping the TSA intact?

Sure, you could argue that some conservatives (that hate everything Obama does
anyway) would get more riled up about "helping the terrorists," but those
people will never vote democrat anyway.

In fact, you could even argue that some die-hard conservatives would applaud
Obama for ending the violation of citizens' rights.

If the government knows how ineffective the TSA is (and always has been), and
how much most people dislike the organization, does it make sense to hold out
on the TSA until it gets closer an election, then dissolve it? Is the TSA
still active as an ace-up-the-sleeve of political clout?

If not, what is the political reason for keeping them around? I really can't
figure it out.

~~~
jey
Most people believe the TSA is effective and is keeping us safe from
terrorists. You'd need a way to convince everyone that it's not true to avoid
the backlash.

~~~
alextingle
Really?? I find that astonishing. Do you have a citation?

~~~
taligent
54% of people recently polled believe that the TSA is doing a Good or
Excellent job. Only 12% of people believe they are doing a bad job.

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/156491/Americans-Views-TSA-
Positi...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/156491/Americans-Views-TSA-Positive-
Negative.aspx)

~~~
ScottBurson
Downvoted? Yes, it's bad news, but let's not shoot the messenger, shall we?

------
Karunamon
Considering how much heed the administration pays to this web site (read:
none), somehow I don't think this was willful, nor do I think the enclosing
"maintenance" in scare quotes was necessary.

The implication is that the government was so terrified of having to answer
for the TSA's shenanigans that they deleted the petition. I suspect the real
answer is much more mundane.

~~~
joshuahedlund
_Considering how much heed the administration pays to this web site (read:
none)_

The Epic site doesn't explain this well, but the petition was actually on the
White House website, where the White House promises to respond, and has
responded, to any petition that gets 25,000 signatures. This one probably just
expired before meeting the requirements:
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-
transporta...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-
transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd)

~~~
kennywinker
And the amount of heed the administration pays to those petitions is still
none.

I've actually signed a previous TSA petition, and gotten a letter from the
white house brushing it off (available here:
[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-
us...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-use-its-
monstrous-budget-fund-more-sophisticated-less-intrusive-counter-
terrorism/c7L94bFB)). Same with the legalization of marijuana petition I
signed, and the support same-sex marriage one I signed (later they changed
their position on this one), and the... I forget now which other ones I
signed, but they have all gotten eventual responses from the white house that
are basically polite brush-offs.

------
DannyBee
Since they have literally _never_ answered a petition in any useful way (Read:
action was taken, or real explanations given, rather than talking points
repeated), i'm not sure why it even matters except so advocacy folks can say
they are doing something.

All that is happening is that people are pretending to give an air of
legitimacy to a process that has none.

~~~
kennywinker
I'm pretty sure I've heard this site described as an "online activism
honeypot".

------
smsm42
So this petition won't get boilerplate "We heard you, thanks for your
feedback, don't you know we are so awesome for responding to you? Please vote
for us and we'd consider reading your next petitions while continuing to do
absolutely what we want!" response from some White House intern? This is a
major setback for the cause of freedom. We all know how much impact other
petitions made, if only this one could have the same resounding success!

Seriously, if this petition didn't get 25K signatures in an hour, White House
has absolutely no reason to be so afraid as to try and hide it. There's no
revolution brewing. And calling your representative and letting him know you'd
base your next vote on this issue is more effective (provided that enough
people actually do it) than any of the internet petitions anyway.

~~~
slurgfest
I find it astonishing that people actually consider it worse to have this
petition website than not to have one, simply because the President will not
toe the line of every petition which gets a few thousand votes.

~~~
smsm42
It's not worse, but it's also not better, since these petitions achieve
nothing of consequence.

------
saurik
This was posted at 11:30AM on the 9th; the deadline was the 9th (some
references below)... maybe the deadline was just "exactly X days from posting"
and expired in the middle of the day?

As in, this might be neither malice nor incompetence: this could very well
just be an implementation detail of the expiration system and how it displays
the deadline, causing some people to be confused.

> 10,477 signatures required by August 9th to require President Obama to
> respond.

[http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-
tsa...](http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa-to-
follow-the-law)

> If 25,000 people sign the petition before August 9, 2012, the White House
> will respond.

[http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-
petition...](http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition-
passes-20000)

~~~
thoughtsimple
I wonder what the actual website said. I checked the wayback machine but it
doesn't have the page archived. If it says "by August 9th" that is very
different than "before August 9th". One says it was removed early, the other
says it was removed on schedule. Big difference.

EDIT: The petition site says, "SIGNATURES NEEDED BY AUGUST 17, 2012 TO REACH
GOAL OF 25,000" for a current petition. So it is ambiguous. But I doubt any
malfeasance. As the parent poster says, it is likely just a function of the
website design.

~~~
saurik
The point I am making is that if a web site has a feature "post something for
30 days", it is fairly reasonable to implement that as "expires = now() + '30
days'::interval" in your database, and then to display a simplified timestamp
like "'expires on ' || date_trunc('day', expires)" when telling people about
the deadline.

Yes: it might be nice to say "expires at exactly 16:25:43.642109 UTC on Aug 9
2012", but for most use cases "expires on 8/9/2012" is considered fine. With
this interpretation, even if the website said "August 9th", you can still
argue that it was being fair and even correct, albeit confusing and bothersome
in a way that will certainly have caused some people to think there was more
time when there wasn't.

~~~
rhizome
Which raises the question of why to cut it off in that way. Why would that
kind of precision be necessary? Are we supposed to believe that the coder
doesn't know how to do anything but Time.now+30.days?

~~~
enjo
Is this a serious question? Anyone who has been around "professional" software
development for more than 30 minutes wouldn't be surprised by this at all.

~~~
rhizome
Anybody who has been around professional (without quotes) software development
wouldn't make as facile an analogy.

------
jpxxx
The governments of the world only respond to two things, statistical polls and
bullets. You cannot Like Button your way to social justice.

------
Calamitous
This kind of behavior is no longer surprising, from the least transparent
White House in living memory.

~~~
lostlogin
It is worse than under Bush Jr?

~~~
civilunrest
Bush turned us in a bad direction, Obama stepped on the gas.

The Bush policies that were most detrimental to the long-term health of the US
have been embraced and championed by Obama. Namely, the suspension of habeus
corpus. Obama and Bush both abduct people they don't like and ship them to
prisons in war zones and strip them of all their civil liberties.

Obama, in section 1012 of NDAA 2012, signed into law the right of the US
military to detain US citizens indefinitely, without trial.

Of course there are lawsuits and challenges to NDAA 2012, and states have
signed their own legislation into place that says, "no, really, the
constitution and bill of rights mean something still".

But that stuff isn't stopping the US from abducting and imprisoning its own
citizens.

I didn't say anything about the transparency, because I got worked up. Oh,
well.

~~~
jonmrodriguez
Section 1021, not 1012:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act_for_Fiscal_Year_2012#Indefinite_detention_without_trial:_Section_1021)

~~~
civilunrest
Thanks. I'm a notorious digit and letter swapper, and should have copy-pasted
that. (It's been the source of some of my hardest to chase bugs when I'm
programming in a dynamic language without strict compile time checks, they are
hard mistakes for me to see).

------
walexander
Are non-US citizens allowed to petition on the "We the People" site? The top
signed petition here is by some right-wing Japanese history revisionist to
remove monuments to Korean sex slaves abused during WWII [1]. Maybe it's a
good thing that the administration ignores this site.

[1][https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-monument-
an...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-monument-and-not-
support-any-international-harassment-related-issue-against-people-
japan/FPfs7p0Q)

~~~
wilfra
You are aware that there are millions of Japanese and Korean _Americans_ who
would care about this issue, right?

~~~
walexander
No, there are only a million Japanese in America. Also, I highly doubt any
Koreans would support removing a monument dedicated to Korean victims of WWII.

At 1.3Million, sure, it's possible, but I don't personally think there are
enough right-wing revisionist history Japanese-Americans to have generated
this much response.

Anyway, the facts support my assumption directly from the petititon. The vast
majority of Japanese names on the petition do not list their location, while a
handful directly report they are from Japan: Taizo H - Tokyo, Kuniko N -
Fukuoka.

~~~
jonhendry
The people in Japan could be US expats.

More importantly, the site is utterly impotent. It's not like voting or
campaign donations by foreign nationals, so I'm not sure why it matters. If
some Japanese wingnuts want to embarrass themselves on the site, more power to
them.

------
jmadsen
Without commenting on any of the other aspects of this,

The petition couldn't get 25 THOUSAND signatures, although I think it was up
for at least a month (I tried to sign at one point before the Wired article
but it was also down)

In a country of 300 MILLION.

Do you really think this was some sort of conspiracy to silence the masses? Do
you really think this was going anywhere?

Go to Change.org & or the White House site again and start a new one if you
want. And actually SIGN it this time.

------
ck2
Why the heck in this day and age does it take longer than 24 hours to get 25k
signatures? There are a million americans on Facebook and Youtube every day?

That said, please stop pretending the petitions mean a darn thing. We don't
even have popular vote in this country. Representatives love to insulate
themselves behind that.

~~~
TheGateKeeper
You can't get "signatures" with the 'like' button by using facebook or gmail
connect.

~~~
direllama
Having to create a separate account, just to sign, probably discourages
people. If the petitions needed 25k likes/pluses/etc I think more would reach
the goal.

------
joering2
"the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition."

Any ideas what was expected time for such a petition? Lets hope the stir this
move caused will push a similar petition that hopeful won't be "down for
maintenance" this time.

~~~
briandear
C'mon, it's the Obama administration. They'd manipulate the wind if they could
get away with it. That White House is one of the most tightly-scripted
organizations in history. If something doesn't fit the narrative, it gets
buried. Notice there hasn't been much mention of Guantanamo Bay, though Obama
promised to close it as soon as he took office? That's not by accident.

------
dasht
Well, _organize_.

Suppose you hit the deadline with almost but not quite enough signatures. Now,
if all those signatures are disorganized -- just random individuals who
happened to sign -- that's the end of the game. But if many of those
signatures are a coordinated action by organized groups of people, then there
is less problem re-introducing the petition, starting off with a lot of votes
right of the bat, and then closing the gap before the next deadline.

------
aggie
I'm not sure why people expect these petitions would amount to any real policy
change; in fact it would be a disaster if they were true referenda. 25,000
signatures represents 0.0008% of the population and all they did was click a
button. If 10 million people signed one of these petitions, and there's no
reason that couldn't happen if it was a truly widespread will of "the people,"
there would be more serious consideration of policy change.

Relevant to this discussion is the petition to take the petitions
seriously[1]. The response is essentially that successful petitions bring the
topic to discussion at the White House. This might not seem like much, and it
isn't "much", but it's something. In the same way big donors do not (usually)
buy policy directly, but rather the ear of the administration, these petitions
give a small voice in the proces of governance. It's better than nothing and
discrediting it because of unreasonable expectations is not helping anything.

[1] [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/actually-take-
thes...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/actually-take-these-
petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-
listening/grQ9mNkN)

------
thoughtsimple
Anyone know how much time was supposed to be left? As Karunamon says, I don't
think they would be particularly worried to have to respond. Their responses
on other petitions have been pretty laughable. But it does seem odd that would
cut the time short.

------
tycho1
Seems like people may be jumping to conclusions here.

If this was an actual attempt at censorship it seems very heavy handed and
obvious. This seems like it could be legitimate technical issues.

~~~
briandear
Then they should extend the deadline.

------
jentulman
In the UK we've got <http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/> which is about as
effective as people are saying the White House petitions site is. But we've
also got the great <http://www.38degrees.org.uk/> which has been effective on
a few campaigns now.

------
tocomment
Has anyone considered making a new petition to replace this one?

