[chaps]

Well, for background, my background is in investigative journalism with a focus on policing, technology, and transparency. I've been the plaintiff in a bit over 10 FOIA lawsuits and have three ongoing suits now. "Our guys" was more meant to be a hand waived ideal of what each in-person thinks their out-person is.

My point can be read as a recognition that ratcheting happens within the boring minutia and work is rarely done to recover from those ratchetings. Things like continuation of prosecution policies, legislation changes, staff changes, etc. There's a very strong tendency to consider those sorts of ratcheting effects as "just how things are" rather than recognizing that no, it hasn't always been that way.

Like, progressive politicians love to talk a big game about transparency, but when it comes down to it, they themselves contribute to systemic transparency failures. See Chicago's past two mayors' campaign transparency promises. Both have done a complete 180 on those promises and use never-losing lawyers to enforce that sort of thing. Chicago's mayor's office once asked me to do analysis of parking tickets' effects on poor folk... then a few months later accused my wanting a data dictionary of the parking tickets system so that I could modify the parking ticket system's data. That led to bad case law at the IL supreme court.

It's shit like that. The small-but-not-really-small things.