Un-Disclosing Data is Hard

Un-Disclosing Data is Hard
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While I was out shoveling snow and trying to keep my snow-bound children entertained last week, Dartmouth undergraduate Harry Enten -- our Pollster.com intern-to-be for 2010 -- was busy blogging up a storm. One item he posted last week provides yet another epilogue to an epilogue on the story of Strategic Vision LLC.

My last installment on the odd twist in this story noted that after apparently blocking access to strategicvision.biz to our offices at the National Journal Group, the web masters at Strategic Vision also sought to block the Internet Archive from displaying content previously released on strategicvision.biz.

But Harry noticed something: "The web pages can still be accessed online right now even without the Internet Archive!" How?

Well, it turns out that, despite not having one single page to display the polling data from 2005-2007 (they do for 2008 and 2009), one can still retrieve the original individual pages the polling data was displayed upon. In what can only be deemed as one of the WORST coverups of all time, Strategic Vision, LLC left the individual polling pages on its servers.

All you need to access the data is the original link to any poll. Those links are easily available from polling aggregation sites such as RealClearPolitics.com, Pollster.com, and even Wikipedia.org.

He even provides a video to show, step-by-step, how the links can be found.

And just in case our friends at Strategic Vision, LLC decide to take those not-quite-removed-pages down, Harry "downloaded every single poll file from 2005-2009 and have uploaded it in a single zip file for anyone to download."

Thanks Harry!

PS: He has a new post today that catches a prominent blogger's oversight and teaches a lesson about putting too much trust in wikipedia.

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