Saturday, August 2, 2008

Turn Out The Lights

Earlier this week I linked to the brand new SeeThroughNY website from the Empire Center. It collects thousands of pages of government documents and makes them available to the public, including records that include the salary of every public employee in the state. Predictably, the folks sucking at the public teat are horrified that taxpayers can actually see how much of that sweet, sweet milk they're slurping up:

Pushback, if not outright anger, against the Empire Center’s SeeThroughNY.net continued today on a number of fronts. At least one union was complaining that the site, which lists state employee salaries, may actually endanger some people as they can provide some idea of where people work, although addresses are not included.

And there seems to be lots of frustration about the fact that public employee salaries are public.

I got a call earlier in the day from a fellow at the State Education Department demanding that I take down any links to the dreaded site, or else I would be charged with harassment. When I replied that A) the site isn’t mine, and that b) the salaries are public information, this individual said that he and others were trying to launch a complaint campaign with Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to get the AG to look into the matter.
(Makes one wonder how much work is getting done over at the Education Department with people spending all this time filing complaints and calling to complain about the website.)


If you click through to the website you may notice it's running a little slow. That's because it's been inundated with traffic...primarily from computers owned by the state.