Say you’re a hopeful applicant for a job in the new Obama administration, and you’ve dutifully filled out the seven-page, 63-question disclosure questionnaire mandated by the transition office.
In it, you revealed the content of your Facebook page — after deleting those New Year's Eve photos from 2005! – that mole you had removed from your neck a couple of months ago and the details of your inheritance from Great Aunt Edna.
You hit the send button.
And then you think: Just who’s going to be reading this? And when similar information from all of the Obama applicants has been gathered, creating one of the largest treasure troves of personal secrets of powerful people in the world, exactly who will own that database?
Don’t ask the Obama team, it’s not saying.
A spokesman for the presidential transition declined to reveal the number of people who’ll have access to the disclosure information, where it will be kept and what will be done with it at the end of the transition. “I can’t comment at all on that,” said Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin.
Clearly, the database being built by the Obama team will be of enormous interest to people on the transition staff and beyond. It will be especially interesting to people the Obama team would least like to have access to it — hackers, political dirty tricksters and hostile foreign governments, among others.
“There may be 10,000 or 15,000 people who fill these things out, but I can think of 10 [million] or 15 million people who’d like to read them,” said Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University who wrote the textbook on government service.
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