Pointless government secrecy in NC

One of my fellow graduate students pointed me to a hilarious/disturbing local story about bizarre NC state government secrecy practices:

Here are some words the N.C. Department of Labor thinks the public shouldn't see: tomatoes, landlord, Mexicans, workers.

The department recently released to News & Observer staff writer Kristin Collins its files on Ag-Mart, the Florida-based tomato grower that last year incurred the N.C. Department of Agriculture's largest-ever fine for breaking pesticide rules.

The Labor Department blacked out so much information that its files were nearly unintelligible.

Included was a copy of a 2003 News & Observer story, written by Collins herself and another reporter, in which words or phrases were blacked out in 67 places.

References to virtually any human being, including public officials, Ag-Mart executives and workers -- even pronouns such as "their" -- were missing. In some cases, random words such as "tomatoes" were hidden.

If you click through, you can see a graphic of the article that's annotated with the blacked-out words -- it's truly bizarre...

Comments

[Alexander Wolfe]

Bizarre yet hilarious in it's absurdity. Of course, it's not quite as hilarious when you realize that those in power believe in keeping secret more than just published news stories...but what is there to do except laugh sometimes, right?

[Grumpy]

***Cheap shot alert***

That's odd -- somebody crossed out "Eurasia" and wrote "Eastasia" instead!