ATF Director Calls for Universal Background Checks, Assault Weapons Ban at Harvard IOP Forum [More]
Then there’s this:
And then we scan them, right? But as far as I know, we are the only customer of Adobe Acrobat that actually pays extra money to have search capability taken out of that software.
I see some influencers treating this like a newly admitted database violation “Gotcha.” I must not be grokking something because this has been out there for years:
How can a database be “non-searchable”? Trick question: The system can’t really be considered a database. (There is a reason the ATF uses the phrase “data systems” instead). There is no ability to search the text of a file, and no effort is made to tag files with identifiers that could later be used to sort and search. “We compare it to an electronic card catalog system, where records are digitally imaged, but not optimized for character recognition,” ATF spokesman Corey Ray says.
Am I completely missing a point?
[Via William T]
So…..
They can’t search the records.
Yet.
Any bets on whether or not they’re looking for a workaround?
Right but it’s not like this is new information. I’m been sent links to some videos acting like they’ve broken a major expose and it confused me that I may be missing the whole point.
“Not optimized for character recognition.”
As OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software improves, that will be less and less a problem. Just because it’s “not optimized” doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
I am a software developer with more than 20 years experience, including working for Microsoft and other big companies. In other words, I know what I am talking about.
On the point of the article:
Even if currently there is no search capabilities in the “database”, those records/files are stored somewhere, be it a real database or some kind of storage file system or whatever… it does not matter in the least.
It would (will?..) be a trivial task even for an imported third-world low-IQ software developer to create an automated process to programmatically re-scan/parse and index those documents using some off-the-shelf software, thus making the entire dataset searcheable.
Moreover:
Even if the files have not been parsed snd indexed yet, it is laughable when those liars and frauds claim that there is no way to search those records.
As long as they are saved somewhere, there IS an slways-available simple way to read and search them. All that the parsing and indexing does is just making the search much faster.
But it (the search) can be done ad-hoc, without any prior indexing. It would take a while, especially if the hardware those documents are stored on is old and slow, but it would work.
And I cannot emphasize this strongly enough: ANY developer who is not a complete imbecile, understands this.