ON THAT NOTE 47

 Some question the utility of the huge data centers we have yet to build but not me. I think I see a perfectly good and acceptable reason to build them and it is simple. We need them to store all the zillions of files that various bureaucrats and elected officials insist they have the right to hide from us. They do this by ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests, losing such requests, partially filling such requests after up to a decade of going back and forth on the merits and finally by redacting every single damned word in some 'files' they do turn over in response to public demand.

Now I don't see why any information that our bureaucrats have their hands on is somehow restricted. My brief on this is pretty straight forward. Classified materials related to national security are just that, classified. They get downgraded and released on a schedule we can all live with. Proprietary information is just that and nobody has a right to it unless it formed the basis for some expenditure of public funds. If my money was spent on it, I get to see it. All of it.

Other than that, there is no reason on earth for citizens to permit the bureaucratic state to hid the evidence of crimes, malfeasance, incompetence and crony dealing. None at all.

Therefore, the only way to move ahead on this is to simply mandate that every scrap of public records be placed on the servers at the data centers and allow anyone and everyone to call up whatever documents or information he wants. Note: this includes copyright materials. The point of copyright is not to hide things forever, it is to see that they are not exploited for profit by anyone except the legal owner.  And guess what? If people are bent and torqued over it, it is simple enough to have Congress exempt all materials in data centers from copyright and to mandate that all copyright materials covered by the law must still go into the data center.

We're going to need some good quantum decryption because there is no doubt at all that the people ordered to comply simply won't do it without resistance. You know who is going to hold themselves exempt anyway though, don't you? Yes, Congress will exempt itself and such bureaucracies as it likes and the Courts will exempt themselves.

Which is why we'll need offshore/off planet data centers to maintain those files online for retrieval as needed because there will be paid officers of the land who have the sole job of penetrating every electronic and physical storage file and copying and retrieving them for storage in the data centers.

What's going to make this so much more difficult though is that in about 3 months AI is going to be capable of generating infinite numbers of documents on every topic and flood the data centers with garbage.

Take the long view people, get the physical media and hold on to it. Pretty soon all the electronic media will be corrupted, disabled or disappeared. I really liked this schematic of the perfect home at A Large Regular. What this means though is that at some point we will have to alphabetize or file our stuff the way the military does or the libraries do and we used to make jokes about people who alphabetized their book or album collections.