The following petition has been received:
The Issue, in Brief:
Since 2006, the land scanner has been an instrumentality of the government of CDS ... because on the basis of this technology we know who is eligible to vote.
Reporting methods and/or Logs from the Land Scanner were altered for the months of June, July, August, September and October, 2014. The alterations, after careful inspection, appear to be the following:
All transactions involving land ownership changes in the sim of Alpine Meadows are omitted from the Logs identified as CDS logs with the exception of Alpine Meadows land ownership changes that involved Cleopatria Xigalia as one of the transacting parties.
Complete land transaction logs that include all five sims, including Alpine Meadows, are logged in a separate set of logs identified as Anzere logs.
These alterations were made outside the scope of any published ruling with no reason given. As I was a member of the Executive team at the time these alterations were made, I can assert with a high level of confidence that the Executive team had no part in the decision to make these alterations.
Since the Executive Branch had nothing to do with it, and no ruling was made by the RA to make these changes, I believe it falls to the SC to clarify for posterity who determined to make these alterations and why.
Expanded Thoughts:
The assurance over the years given to the citizens is that the land scanner logs are generated automatically by script, thus an objective and mostly comprehensive record of land transactions (if sometimes faulty due to technical irregularities). The alterations discussed in this petition were rather obviously done outside of "automatic generation," thus tainting the trust in objectivity and comprehensiveness.
As far as I know, the Land Scanner is under the control of Sudane and Timo. As far as I know, Timo wrote the scripts for the scanner, the scanner objects inworld are owned by Sudane and the results are posted on the webpage hosted by Sudane (tospitimou.com).
I was concerned about this while it was happening in 2014, making remarks about it on the forums at the time, but the situation continued through until October (coincidentally (?) when Ceasar Xigalia resigned as Chancellor) and remains unexplained to this day.
One of the things I wanted to verifiy before bringing this to the SC was if the Land Scanner was a convenience item owned by private parties or if it is actually part of the official toolkit of CDS government, so I did some research in the forums.
The Land Scanner (sometimes referred to as the "Citizen Scanner" or "scanner....Timo") is mentioned as far back as 2006 by Sudane as an invaluable tool and (if not sooner) became codified into the law passed March 17, 2012 as an integral part of the process to verify citizenship status.
Since it has been codified into law as part of the CDS government process, it becomes the business of the People and its logs are part of the official records....thus any changes, I believe, need to explained and documented.
In 2006, in the same forum thread where Sudane discussed the land scanner, Sudane also discussed the concern of "what happens" if a person in charge of these things suddenly leaves SL and the need for continuity without reliance on an individual.
In its current form, the "Land ownership changes" logs present a mystery to future citizens and governments.
The current form shows irregular recordkeeping that has been manipulated deliberately when the expectation is that the records are an automated process that will deliver errors based on SL technical hiccups but are otherwise objective records that can be relied on.
The purpose of this petition is to remove the mystery and get a published reason for future citizens and governments to refer to. Further, the purpose of this petition is to help restore trust in the CDS government by either explaining the mystery and/or identifying mistakes made so that they may be avoided in the future.
In addition, not knowing if this is the scope for this discussion, but related; it seems prudent to change the webpage that posts the log from one out of private ownership to one that is on the portal owned and paid for the the CDS government. Whether it is mirrored on private pages is no matter, but the official page, I believe, should be a page owned by the CDS government.