When I was an active editor on Wikipedia, I rewrote the USA PATRIOT Act from scratch.
It wasn't easy, and I'm not talking about the law itself here (though at 10 title long, with title III literally an anti-money laundering bill they bunged into the Act and had passed, it is still n extremely complex bit of legislation). No, I'm talking about the ability to find information on certain laws - I'm an Australian, so it was a major challenge to find good quality sources. I was lucky in a way, as the Patriot Act is so controversial I did eventually manage to track down info. But it wasn't easy, and when I tried to find sources for some truly ancient and tangential legislation a few times I hit a brick wall entirely.
It makes me think: ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it... but with the current system you are often going to be ignorant of the law no matter what you do! Unless, of course, you have the money to pay for expensive legal searches.
How anyone could consider resyricted access to information about the law and the law itself to be anything but a violation of human rights is beyond me.
What sort of information and sources were you looking for? The Patriot Act text is available online, as are the (unclassified) notes from Congressional debates and voting records.
All primary sources, which are allowed. However, there are plenty of other primary sources that I can't get easy access to, including case law. In fact, there are old Acts I found I didn't have any access to at all.
It wasn't easy, and I'm not talking about the law itself here (though at 10 title long, with title III literally an anti-money laundering bill they bunged into the Act and had passed, it is still n extremely complex bit of legislation). No, I'm talking about the ability to find information on certain laws - I'm an Australian, so it was a major challenge to find good quality sources. I was lucky in a way, as the Patriot Act is so controversial I did eventually manage to track down info. But it wasn't easy, and when I tried to find sources for some truly ancient and tangential legislation a few times I hit a brick wall entirely.
It makes me think: ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking it... but with the current system you are often going to be ignorant of the law no matter what you do! Unless, of course, you have the money to pay for expensive legal searches.
How anyone could consider resyricted access to information about the law and the law itself to be anything but a violation of human rights is beyond me.