Democrats Upload Bill That Can't be Keyword Searched

Human Events brings us this article by Connie Hair in which we discover just how much the Democrats are really dedicated to the ideas of "openness" and "transparency." Because it seems that the Democrat staffers spent hours and hours last night working feverishly to upload a document to the internet that cannot be searched by anyone who downloads it.

The documents are in the form of PDF files, a format invented by Adobe to make formatted pages easy to share between people electronically and which, under ordinary circumstances, can be easily searched just like any word processing document. Of course, only the author can make changes since the original document can be made in just about any word processing or document layout program. But PDF files are now commonly used in most businesses because of their ease of use and their accuracy. And they are now a staple of the graphic arts and printing world.

But the Democrats spent a very great amount of time and energy last night to make sure that the documents could not be searched. They did so by changing the ordinary text into pictures of text. That's right: Pictures of Text. Which, or course, cannot be keyword searched.

I find this most revealing. Let me point out, for a moment, that I do this sort of thing for a living because I am a graphic artist. I work for the biggest graphics and printing company in the US and I can tell you from personal knowledge that it takes a lot of work to do this sort of thing, and it does not happen by accident.

You have to create the original document in a word processor or other page layout program. You have to export the individual pages as PDF files. Then you have to go into Photoshop, open up the original PDF files, convert them one by one into pixelated Photoshop files, save them back to your hard drive as a saved Photoshop PDF and then reassemble all of them in the correct order in Acrobat back into a multi-page PDF document.

If this had been a job for a client where I work, I can say with certainty that it would require the full attention of perhaps a dozen people working for a full day to put together a several hundred page document of this sort and to do the format conversions and the re-build. In short, it took a lot of deliberate work to do this.

That's a lot of work to prevent people from being able to search the document using keywords.

Remember, "Transparency, Openness, Hope, Change."

Yeah Right.

Democrats Delay Bill Release to Conceal Details
by Connie Hair
02/13/2009

Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 p.m. last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot “search” on their home computers.

Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document -- which people can search by “key words” and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into “pdf” files, which can be read but not searched.

Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bill’s provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article. (You can find the entire bill on the House Appropriations [http://appropriations.house.gov] website.)