"In 2011, Alon Peled, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, concluded in a paper that a top-down order by President Barack Obama to open up federal information caches to the public had generally failed to gain traction at least partly because “datasets are valuable assets which agencies labor hard to create, and use as bargaining chips in interagency trade, and are therefore reluctant to surrender these prized information assets for free.” When the FBI wanted to gather biometric data as part of its anti-terrorism efforts, Peled pointed out, the agency spent a full year trying to find someone inside the Defense Department willing to agree to share it with them."

For the full story, see here: https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/11/federal-data-individual...