Who wrote this CSKT Compact report? Why did DNRC SECURE it?
Updated, 27 February. The report’s cover page is a State of Montana letterhead bearing an impressive title: Proposed 2015 CSKT Compact: Analysis of Potential Impacts to Off-Reservation Water Users. Dated February, 2015, it’s a pretty good analysis of the practical impacts of the time immemorial instream flow rights the compact grants to the CSKT that have two of Flathead County’s commissioners so exercised.
Update. The author’s name has been added to the report, and some locks on the PDF, which were not intentional, were removed. But the PDF is still SECURED and its metadata cannot be accessed by search engines such as Google.
The PDF of the report had two serious problems, one of which remains:
- The names of the authors and their employers are omitted, and there is no table of contents. I doubt that information was omitted deliberately; if it was, there’s some serious explaining to be done. But omitted it was, and it should be inserted into the report pronto (update: it was)
- The PDF is still secured (see the screenshot below). Google cannot not index it. Readers can print it, and now they can copy and paste text or graphics into another document, such as a letter to a legislator. Prohibiting search engines from accessing the metadata makes absolutely no sense, especially given the state wants the report distributed and read as widely as possible. On a Mac, PDFs can be locked and unlocked using a $25 application, PDFKey Pro. And a multitude of similar applications exist for Windows machines. No possible beneficial public policy objective is met by the State Of Montana’s securing PDFs that are intended to be distributed to the farthest corners of Creation and beyond.
What SECURED means for a PDF
