This seems like the sort of thing our intelligence agencies should have been outsourcing to other countries to get around the law, rather than, you know, torture.
It's sort of amazing (but absolutely true) that having to search for information using methods that were the standard for searching for information when I was a kid is now the functional equivalent of hiding something.
Since the OP link is blocked here at work, does the article say if the "orderly arrangement" has to actually be ordered in some reasonable way? I.e., by serial number or name of buyer or anything sensible? Even ordering by date might help. If it isn't ordered by something useful, how could law enforcement determine the seller was actually complying with the law and recording all the sales?
2: It's a little different, because back when records were conventionally on paper, people were used to keeping them organized and going through them. Now, you very plausibly won't be able to get a human being to search the paper files reliably because it's not a normal thing to do anymore.
My first boss had her secretary keep a day book and a day file. If I hadn't have seen it, I would have barely believed it was something everybody who ran an office used to do.
4: also, as I read the article, they are prohibited from doing the normal sort of things people would have done with paper records, like cross-indexing them. An archivist faced with this task, without legal restrictions but with adequate resources and 19th century technology, would have started by saying something like "Right. We need all these 4473 forms indexed by purchaser name and personal details, by weapon type and serial number, by state and by year".
So you would be able to go straight from a weapon type to the purchaser (to answer the question 'who bought this gun?') or purchasers (to answer 'OK, and did he then re-sell it to anyone else?'), and also go the other way (to answer 'hey, we're looking at this guy for a shotgun murder; any record of him ever owning a twelve-bore shotgun?')
I wrote "19th century technology" because, of course, by the early 20th century your archivist would have said "this is a massive record searching job. Get hold of the International Business Machine Corporation on the electrical telephone apparatus and tell them we need a shitload of punched cards and readers".
But according to this article, they aren't even allowed to do that. Not even a manually searchable index.
There's a PD James mystery that must be from the eighties? Because by the nineties it would have been absurd. A major plot device is that a medical (psychological? can't remember) practice has information on all of its patients indexed in an elaborate manual punchcard file -- no machine, just boxes of cards that you search by poking wires through the box and then turning the box upside-down and seeing what falls out. I can't remember anything else at all about the book.
After the Iranian revolution all the American military contractors were kicked out. On their way they deleted all the inventories, so the Iranians were left with massive stocks of spares for their massive American-made arsenal, and no way to find anything.
Who isn't allowed to make a searchable database? Government agencies or anyone? And who is allowed to access the records? Some private outfit might try to make a searchable version.
6: In the movie "Day of the Jackal" (the good one with the French guy), there was a bunch of sorting through paper cards. Hotel registries for every place in Paris, records of who entered the country, the entire list of British passports, etc. Probably also in the book, but I don't recall exactly.
9: I'm pretty sure that just general laws about who the feds can release records to would stop that.
Some venture capitalist would pay for 9 if you billed it as data-mining for sales optimization.
Well, it's not all paper records now, they're moving to "unsearchable" PDFs. So if some idealistic contractor were to leak all the PDFs, then some unscrupulous person might use those to construct a searchable online database, hosted overseas. And then I suppose tracing centre employees might use their smartphones to search it, and use that result to go and find the paper record once they knew where it was.
To do that, they'd have to close Pokemon Go.
The trouble is that they all sound too ethical to do that. almost by definition, the people in the government who you actually want to circumvent the law in order to do their jobs better are the ones least likely to want to do it.
Another answer might be to require gun dealers to file these reports by email. Then the NSA would be able to break into their email providers and search them for a given serial number or whatever.
I like how they just drop in "Tracing the gun beyond the initial point of purchase is on the cops." That's almost certainly a bigger problem.
Speaking of unsearchable, in a recent class action settlement,the defendant corporation agreed to allow for an on-line claim form on the condition that the web site be completely unsearchable under the Company's name. I believe they used the unsearchable PDFs or something similar. The only way to find about the web site, at least in theory, is if you received the notice in the mail and type in the URL, which is six random letters.
And one that has its own gun-lobby inspired roadblocks. For example, not only is there no requirement to report lost or stolen guns in PA, as a matter of state law, a city cannot make an ordinance requiring such a report.
Is 18 even legal? Class action settlements have to be published as widely as possible, right?
19: I thought that was ruled unconstitutional? Bogus, though. Allentown and a few other cities back east repealed their laws out of fear of lawsuits.
I think a national requirement for liability insurance on firearms would put some useful data in private hands.
I don't know why that would be easier, politically, than a national registry.
Because it would have a wealth interest group behind it?
18: what happens if someone posts "Hey everyone the class action lawsuit for Cyberdyne is at www.adhrbf.com/classaction.pdf!"
This was specified in the settlement?
21, 31 etc: Yes, written into the settlement, just below the line about the number of dollars. The justification is that we had a mailing of everyone's name and address (over 1 million), so we could publicize to everyone actually affected without need for web searches. Also, the official rules about notification were written in 1936 and don't specifically require internet. The judge signed off.
28: Anyone can say anything, but if one of the lawyers in the case does it, he doesn't get paid. So I'm not talking.
Also, that kind of post won't much affect google ranking so they don't care.
In 1936, Alta Vista was the most sophisticated search engine.
I've been working on related technologies recently for work, including using NLP to extract names from images.
If the PDF is of typeset or typewritten text, I could do this in a matter of days. Handwritten is a bugger, though.
Handwritten on toilet paper?
Depends, how many people have used the toilet paper?
that kind of post won't much affect google ranking so they don't care.
Not even if a news org picks it up? I could see that happening just because of the ridiculousness.