White House Deletes TSA Petition

Nonsensical sensationalism. The petition expired, and didn't get 25,000 signitures. Should it have gotten special preference because it got on the front page of Reddit and Hackernews? No. Should you have signed it 2 days ago instead of upvoting this article hoping that somebody else would? Yes.<p>Here's where it says clearly what happened: <a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transportation-security-administration-follow-law/tffCTwDd" rel="nofollow">https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-transporta...</a>

Considering how much heed the administration pays to this web site (read: none), somehow I don't think this was willful, nor do I think the enclosing "maintenance" in scare quotes was necessary.<p>The implication is that the government was so terrified of having to answer for the TSA's shenanigans that they deleted the petition. I suspect the real answer is much more mundane.

Since they have literally <i>never</i> answered a petition in any useful way (Read: action was taken, or real explanations given, rather than talking points repeated), i'm not sure why it even matters except so advocacy folks can say they are doing something.<p>All that is happening is that people are pretending to give an air of legitimacy to a process that has none.

So this petition won't get boilerplate "We heard you, thanks for your feedback, don't you know we are so awesome for responding to you? Please vote for us and we'd consider reading your next petitions while continuing to do absolutely what we want!" response from some White House intern? This is a major setback for the cause of freedom. We all know how much impact other petitions made, if only this one could have the same resounding success!<p>Seriously, if this petition didn't get 25K signatures in an hour, White House has absolutely no reason to be so afraid as to try and hide it. There's no revolution brewing. And calling your representative and letting him know you'd base your next vote on this issue is more effective (provided that enough people actually do it) than any of the internet petitions anyway.

This was posted at 11:30AM on the 9th; the deadline was the 9th (some references below)... maybe the deadline was just "exactly X days from posting" and expired in the middle of the day?<p>As in, this might be neither malice nor incompetence: this could very well just be an implementation detail of the expiration system and how it displays the deadline, causing some people to be confused.<p>&#62; 10,477 signatures required by August 9th to require President Obama to respond.<p><a href="http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa-to-follow-the-law" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailypaul.com/245374/sign-petition-to-require-tsa...</a><p>&#62; If 25,000 people sign the petition before August 9, 2012, the White House will respond.<p><a href="http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition-passes-20000" rel="nofollow">http://reason.com/24-7/2012/08/07/tsa-we-the-people-petition...</a>

The governments of the world only respond to two things, statistical polls and bullets. You cannot Like Button your way to social justice.

This kind of behavior is no longer surprising, from the least transparent White House in living memory.

Are non-US citizens allowed to petition on the "We the People" site? The top signed petition here is by some right-wing Japanese history revisionist to remove monuments to Korean sex slaves abused during WWII [1]. Maybe it's a good thing that the administration ignores this site.<p>[1]<a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-monument-and-not-support-any-international-harassment-related-issue-against-people-japan/FPfs7p0Q" rel="nofollow">https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-monument-an...</a>

Without commenting on any of the other aspects of this,<p>The petition couldn't get 25 THOUSAND signatures, although I think it was up for at least a month (I tried to sign at one point before the Wired article but it was also down)<p>In a country of 300 MILLION.<p>Do you really think this was some sort of conspiracy to silence the masses? Do you really think this was going anywhere?<p>Go to Change.org &#38; or the White House site again and start a new one if you want. And actually SIGN it this time.

Why the heck in this day and age does it take longer than 24 hours to get 25k signatures? There are a million americans on Facebook and Youtube every day?<p>That said, please stop pretending the petitions mean a darn thing. We don't even have popular vote in this country. Representatives love to insulate themselves behind that.

"the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition."<p>Any ideas what was expected time for such a petition? Lets hope the stir this move caused will push a similar petition that hopeful won't be "down for maintenance" this time.

Well, <i>organize</i>.<p>Suppose you hit the deadline with almost but not quite enough signatures. Now, if all those signatures are disorganized -- just random individuals who happened to sign -- that's the end of the game. But if many of those signatures are a coordinated action by organized groups of people, then there is less problem re-introducing the petition, starting off with a lot of votes right of the bat, and then closing the gap before the next deadline.

I'm not sure why people expect these petitions would amount to any real policy change; in fact it would be a disaster if they were true referenda. 25,000 signatures represents 0.0008% of the population and all they did was click a button. If 10 million people signed one of these petitions, and there's no reason that couldn't happen if it was a truly widespread will of "the people," there would be more serious consideration of policy change.<p>Relevant to this discussion is the petition to take the petitions seriously[1]. The response is essentially that successful petitions bring the topic to discussion at the White House. This might not seem like much, and it isn't "much", but it's something. In the same way big donors do not (usually) buy policy directly, but rather the ear of the administration, these petitions give a small voice in the proces of governance. It's better than nothing and discrediting it because of unreasonable expectations is not helping anything.<p>[1] <a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/actually-take-these-petitions-seriously-instead-just-using-them-excuse-pretend-you-are-listening/grQ9mNkN" rel="nofollow">https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/actually-take-thes...</a>

Anyone know how much time was supposed to be left? As Karunamon says, I don't think they would be particularly worried to have to respond. Their responses on other petitions have been pretty laughable. But it does seem odd that would cut the time short.

Seems like people may be jumping to conclusions here.<p>If this was an actual attempt at censorship it seems very heavy handed and obvious. This seems like it could be legitimate technical issues.

In the UK we've got <a href="http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/</a> which is about as effective as people are saying the White House petitions site is. But we've also got the great <a href="http://www.38degrees.org.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.38degrees.org.uk/</a> which has been effective on a few campaigns now.

Has anyone considered making a new petition to replace this one?