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White House Deletes TSA Petition

281 points by shill 14y ago

tocomment 14y ago
Has anyone considered making a new petition to replace this one?
Karunamon 14y ago
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.
- zbowling 14y ago
  With the upcoming campaign, I think they may want to close any potential finger pointing with "proof" by the other side that they are not doing what the people want. The fact that it's on the President's site makes it an easy target for the opposition.
  - bpatrianakos 14y ago
    Anything on the presidents site is an easy target. Remember, in politics the facts don't matter. Perception does. All either side has to do is take any position, policy, or whatever and frame it any way they want. The opposition in this case isn't losing any sleep over this "ammunition" being taken from them (if they even noticed to begin with). Besides, the TSA was something dreamed up and put in place by the Republicans. It wouldn't be smart to go out and make a stink over a Democratic president ignoring a petition having anything to do with changing anyone about the TSA when Republicans would love to double down and try to convince people that the TSA is keeping the US terrorist-free. In fact, I'd argue that the Republicans would actually love for Obama to do something rational about the TSA so they can call him weak on security. It doesn't make sense for this to be a defense against Republicaj criticism. It most likely really was just a blooper.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  Thank you for being a voice of reason and rationality. This community among many others has a tendency to attribute things like this to malice or, more often, conspiracy. I can't tell you how many times I see people thinking along these lines and I just think to myself "Has anyone ever heard of Occam's Razor?". An online petition is meaningless to the government if they want to ignore it. We also forget that a petition is more like a very strong request or a demand but no one is obligated fulfill what the petition requests. So even if this petition got a million signatures all it means is that we presumably let whoever is in charge of watching these petitions know that x number of people feel this way. One last major point I want to make is that the government is far more inept than people give it credit for. It's funny how people see the government as either completely incompetent or as some all powerful entity that can exert power over anything and do anything. For example, we have people that believe the USPS is totally broken and the US government is too incompetent to fix it's own postal system. Then, by the same token we have others that believe 9/11 was a massive conspiracy that was masterfully executed. In both cases the problem comes down to the government being run by fallible humans who make mistakes. Very very last thing to think about: to some, the TSA petition was incredibly important and it's being taken down has been, in their minds, morphed into some kind of conspiracy to keep the people down. Now I ask you what about the other petitions on the site? To some people the TSA petition isn't important but some other random petition is. There are lots of petitions that are just as important to people that do make their signature goal. The point is, people will do gold medal worthy mental gymnastics to explain what they either don't understand or to justify something to themselves. Not everything is a conspiracy. Coincidence is real.
  - stretchwithme 14y ago
    Different parts of the government have different capabilities. For example, the CIA may have more resources than the post office. And perhaps even more highly trained employees. But many conspiracy theories are just silly... JERRY: Just give me some idea of what you think it could be. GEORGE: I don't know if you're ready for it. JERRY: Please. GEORGE: I believe that I am about to become the target of a systematic process of intimidation and manipulation, the likes of which you have never - JERRY: Hold it, hold it! You're right, I'm not ready for this.
- joshuahedlund 14y ago
  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-transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transporta...
  - kennywinker 14y ago
    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-use-its-monstrous-budget-fund-more-sophisticated-less-intrusive-counter-terrorism/c7L94bFB https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-us...). 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.
  - jlarocco 14y ago
    My understanding is that a lot of the "responses" to those petitions end up being, "We considered it. The answer is no." There's no requirement that they do anything. Given that, it seems unlikely there was some nefarious hidden agenda behind this TSA one being taken down.
Calamitous 14y ago
This kind of behavior is no longer surprising, from the least transparent White House in living memory.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 14y ago
  It is worse than under Bush Jr?
  - michaelt 14y ago
    Under Bush it didn't seem so bad because our expectations were so low.
  - gyardley 14y ago
    Objectively, perhaps slightly. It's not hard to find quotes describing this administration as the worst yet at responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. For example: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73606.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73606.html Subjectively, it feels much worse - because the administration ran on a platform of transparency and openness, which they failed to deliver on: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...
  - nateabele 14y ago
    By an objective tally of bullshit occurring under each administration's watch, I think we can safely say that, yes, it is. At least W didn't try to pretend he was something he wasn't.
  - civilunrest 14y ago
    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.
joering2 14y ago
"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 14y ago
  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.
ck2 14y ago
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 14y ago
  You can't get "signatures" with the 'like' button by using facebook or gmail connect.
  - direllama 14y ago
    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 14y ago
  You contradicting yourself, I believe. You wonder why it took so much time to get 25k signatures, but sentence later you question effectiveness of even being a part of such a petition. Petitions are extremely important, whether they are effective or not (I wish mass media would cite more results from petitions than words' games that White House plays in their official press conferences) they still are a vehicle for "we the people" to voice our opinion!
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Everyone seems to be ignoring the real reason why the petition didn't get 25,000 signatures, which is that it's hard to find 25,000 Americans who really give a rat's ass one way or the other. Spend some time in the TSA queue at any US airport, and see if you hear anything but "Baaaaa" from your neighbors in line. That's why the petition didn't reach the required threshold. Occam's Razor in action.
walexander 14y ago
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-and-not-support-any-international-harassment-related-issue-against-people-japan/FPfs7p0Q https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-monument-an...
- wilfra 14y ago
  You are aware that there are millions of Japanese and Korean Americans who would care about this issue, right?
  - walexander 14y ago
    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.
    - slurgfest 14y ago
      Americans don't automatically lose their citizenship if they visit or move to Tokyo.
    - jonhendry 14y ago
      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.
thoughtsimple 14y ago
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.
- deleted 14y ago
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DannyBee 14y ago
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 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've heard this site described as an "online activism honeypot".
jpxxx 14y ago
The governments of the world only respond to two things, statistical polls and bullets. You cannot Like Button your way to social justice.
deleted 14y ago
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saurik 14y ago
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-to-follow-the-law http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa... > 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-passes-20000 http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- thoughtsimple 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
tycho1 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Then they should extend the deadline.
cjoh 14y ago
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-transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transporta...
- rhizome 14y ago
  I'm sure a guy who worked on barackobama.com is going to be impartial on this issue.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    Let's not resort to ad hominem now.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Ad hominem doesn't mean that it's not a factor. Check the guy's page, he's works in the mainstream Democratic machine.
- runjake 14y ago
  The article clearly claims the White House removed it BEFORE its expiration time. On the other hand, the White House page looks like a boilerplate 404 with no mentions of start and end times.
- mapgrep 14y ago
  From the article: "The White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition." This is distinct, by the way, from a separate outage for maintenance: "The site ALSO went down for 'maintenance' following a Wired article that sought support for the campaign." (Emphasis added.)
- david_shaw 14y ago
dasht 14y ago
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.
smsm42 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    It's not worse, but it's also not better, since these petitions achieve nothing of consequence.
jentulman 14y ago
In the UK we've got http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ 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/ http://www.38degrees.org.uk/ which has been effective on a few campaigns now.
jmadsen 14y ago
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.
aggie 14y ago
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-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-listening/grQ9mNkN https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/actually-take-thes...

281 points by shill 14y ago

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

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.

zbowling 14y ago
With the upcoming campaign, I think they may want to close any potential finger pointing with "proof" by the other side that they are not doing what the people want. The fact that it's on the President's site makes it an easy target for the opposition.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  Anything on the presidents site is an easy target. Remember, in politics the facts don't matter. Perception does. All either side has to do is take any position, policy, or whatever and frame it any way they want. The opposition in this case isn't losing any sleep over this "ammunition" being taken from them (if they even noticed to begin with). Besides, the TSA was something dreamed up and put in place by the Republicans. It wouldn't be smart to go out and make a stink over a Democratic president ignoring a petition having anything to do with changing anyone about the TSA when Republicans would love to double down and try to convince people that the TSA is keeping the US terrorist-free. In fact, I'd argue that the Republicans would actually love for Obama to do something rational about the TSA so they can call him weak on security. It doesn't make sense for this to be a defense against Republicaj criticism. It most likely really was just a blooper.
bpatrianakos 14y ago
Thank you for being a voice of reason and rationality. This community among many others has a tendency to attribute things like this to malice or, more often, conspiracy. I can't tell you how many times I see people thinking along these lines and I just think to myself "Has anyone ever heard of Occam's Razor?". An online petition is meaningless to the government if they want to ignore it. We also forget that a petition is more like a very strong request or a demand but no one is obligated fulfill what the petition requests. So even if this petition got a million signatures all it means is that we presumably let whoever is in charge of watching these petitions know that x number of people feel this way. One last major point I want to make is that the government is far more inept than people give it credit for. It's funny how people see the government as either completely incompetent or as some all powerful entity that can exert power over anything and do anything. For example, we have people that believe the USPS is totally broken and the US government is too incompetent to fix it's own postal system. Then, by the same token we have others that believe 9/11 was a massive conspiracy that was masterfully executed. In both cases the problem comes down to the government being run by fallible humans who make mistakes. Very very last thing to think about: to some, the TSA petition was incredibly important and it's being taken down has been, in their minds, morphed into some kind of conspiracy to keep the people down. Now I ask you what about the other petitions on the site? To some people the TSA petition isn't important but some other random petition is. There are lots of petitions that are just as important to people that do make their signature goal. The point is, people will do gold medal worthy mental gymnastics to explain what they either don't understand or to justify something to themselves. Not everything is a conspiracy. Coincidence is real.
- stretchwithme 14y ago
  Different parts of the government have different capabilities. For example, the CIA may have more resources than the post office. And perhaps even more highly trained employees. But many conspiracy theories are just silly... JERRY: Just give me some idea of what you think it could be. GEORGE: I don't know if you're ready for it. JERRY: Please. GEORGE: I believe that I am about to become the target of a systematic process of intimidation and manipulation, the likes of which you have never - JERRY: Hold it, hold it! You're right, I'm not ready for this.
joshuahedlund 14y ago
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-transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transporta...
- kennywinker 14y ago
  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-use-its-monstrous-budget-fund-more-sophisticated-less-intrusive-counter-terrorism/c7L94bFB https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/abolish-tsa-and-us...). 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.
- jlarocco 14y ago
  My understanding is that a lot of the "responses" to those petitions end up being, "We considered it. The answer is no." There's no requirement that they do anything. Given that, it seems unlikely there was some nefarious hidden agenda behind this TSA one being taken down.

Calamitous 14y ago

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

deleted 14y ago
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lostlogin 14y ago
It is worse than under Bush Jr?
- michaelt 14y ago
  Under Bush it didn't seem so bad because our expectations were so low.
- gyardley 14y ago
  Objectively, perhaps slightly. It's not hard to find quotes describing this administration as the worst yet at responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. For example: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73606.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73606.html Subjectively, it feels much worse - because the administration ran on a platform of transparency and openness, which they failed to deliver on: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...
- nateabele 14y ago
  By an objective tally of bullshit occurring under each administration's watch, I think we can safely say that, yes, it is. At least W didn't try to pretend he was something he wasn't.
- civilunrest 14y ago
  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.

joering2 14y ago

"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 14y ago
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.

ck2 14y ago

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 14y ago
You can't get "signatures" with the 'like' button by using facebook or gmail connect.
- direllama 14y ago
  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 14y ago
You contradicting yourself, I believe. You wonder why it took so much time to get 25k signatures, but sentence later you question effectiveness of even being a part of such a petition. Petitions are extremely important, whether they are effective or not (I wish mass media would cite more results from petitions than words' games that White House plays in their official press conferences) they still are a vehicle for "we the people" to voice our opinion!
CamperBob2 14y ago
Everyone seems to be ignoring the real reason why the petition didn't get 25,000 signatures, which is that it's hard to find 25,000 Americans who really give a rat's ass one way or the other. Spend some time in the TSA queue at any US airport, and see if you hear anything but "Baaaaa" from your neighbors in line. That's why the petition didn't reach the required threshold. Occam's Razor in action.

walexander 14y ago

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

wilfra 14y ago
You are aware that there are millions of Japanese and Korean Americans who would care about this issue, right?
- walexander 14y ago
  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.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    Americans don't automatically lose their citizenship if they visit or move to Tokyo.
  - jonhendry 14y ago
    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.

thoughtsimple 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago
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DannyBee 14y ago

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 14y ago
I'm pretty sure I've heard this site described as an "online activism honeypot".

jpxxx 14y ago

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

deleted 14y ago

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saurik 14y ago

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-to-follow-the-law http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa... > 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-passes-20000 http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition...

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thoughtsimple 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.

tycho1 14y ago

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 14y ago
Then they should extend the deadline.

cjoh 14y ago

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-transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transporta...

rhizome 14y ago
I'm sure a guy who worked on barackobama.com is going to be impartial on this issue.
- duaneb 14y ago
  Let's not resort to ad hominem now.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Ad hominem doesn't mean that it's not a factor. Check the guy's page, he's works in the mainstream Democratic machine.
runjake 14y ago
The article clearly claims the White House removed it BEFORE its expiration time. On the other hand, the White House page looks like a boilerplate 404 with no mentions of start and end times.
mapgrep 14y ago
From the article: "The White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition." This is distinct, by the way, from a separate outage for maintenance: "The site ALSO went down for 'maintenance' following a Wired article that sought support for the campaign." (Emphasis added.)
david_shaw 14y ago

dasht 14y ago

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.

smsm42 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  It's not worse, but it's also not better, since these petitions achieve nothing of consequence.

jentulman 14y ago

In the UK we've got http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ 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/ http://www.38degrees.org.uk/ which has been effective on a few campaigns now.

jmadsen 14y ago

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.

aggie 14y ago

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