How Canada's Tories destroyed the country's memory, and its capacity to remember / Boing Boing

" ... Even as other countries are moving to 'open data' as a matter of course in government policy, Canada has embraced a deepening, suspicious secrecy. Data that used to be open is gone -- but ministers like the outgoing Tony Clement praise the openness of government with a straight face. Reading Anne Kingston's story in Macleans was like being on the receiving side of a boxer's speed-bag practice, one punch after another, one bad policy after another. I pasted in a very small sample below, but if there's one article you read in full this weekend -- whether or not you're in Canada -- this is the one. If you want to understand how a digital transition in government can be a stealth attack on the very idea of truth and knowledge, read this. Canada has a new underground of scientists and statisticians and wonks who've founded a movement called LOCKSS -- 'Lots of copies, keep stuff safe' -- who make their own archives of disappeared data, from the libraries of one-of-a-kind docs that have been literally incinerated or sent to dumpsters to the websites that vanish without notice. There's an election this October -- perhaps we can call on them then to restore the country's lost memory ..."