Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

If elected leaders want it, of course someone will build the fill-in-the-blank registry (if it doesn’t already exist).

Big news lately about how large numbers of programmers have pledged not to build a fill-in-the-blank registry. (It is pretty easy to make such a pledge when you are employed and have enough work stacked up to keep you employed over the horizon, but that is another blog post.) If our elected representatives want a fill-in-the-blank registry, it will be created.

One of the missing items in all this registry talk is that the fill-in-the-blank registry probably already exists. The persons in the fill-in-the-blank group built it and use it everyday. That is how they keep track of their fill-in-the-blank members for things like mailings and greetings and such. Fill-in-the-blankers want to know other fill-in-the-blankers.

Then there are those anti-fill-in-the-blankers. They have registries of other anti-fill-in-the-blankers. If they don’t have the registries already, they are building them now.

Silly? Am I poking fun at something very serious? Probably. Do these registries already exist? Yes, they do. One recent “registry” case is a government agency “refusing” to give the President-elect a “list of names” (Oh boy, here we go!) of their scientists who attended climate change conferences. Government employees who attend conferences do so on taxpayers’ dollars. Those expenses are public knowledge. A FOIA request provides the details. Let’s see, the next President files a FOIA request and… Silly? Yes. Reality? Yes. Of course the government agency will provide the names if requested. That is the law.

Now, back to these fill-in-the-blank registries. The information is out there. Those fill-in-the-blankers provided it. Sometimes they were required by law, but most of the time they did so voluntarily. We all provide our names voluntarily everyday. That is our lives in this 21st century world.