The State Department confirms it no longer operates the HRG, but says it is still receiving reports through other direct channels.
I couldn't find any requirement in the law that requires a public website.
NGOs can still submit information through established contacts or by email.
I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
Someone has to read through each email to determine the nature of the complaint, who was involved, how to classify it, etc.
If the web form was free text entry, the same effort is required by the receiving humans.
You can move the effort slider from the reviewer toward the web dev and the reporter by designing a UI to limit input and pre-classify the complaint.
So who has it “easier” now? I guess the server admin?
From Wikipedia: "Senator Leahy first introduced this law in 1997 as part of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act."
It is funny that only today they found it. Wikileaks was documenting American war crimes since some time.
When I send an email that isn’t bounced back, or better yet, get an auto reply with a ticket number, I’m a lot more certain it’s going to get read.
An "auto reply with a ticket number" is not a feature of email, it is something that someone built that could just as easily be attached to a webform. Plenty of webforms work that way, I have personally built some in my career.
> why
Because email is a well-honed tool with lots of excellent implementations. You've got formatting, attachments, a text-entry region bigger than a peephole, etc.
A "contact us" webform is a crappy tool, usually quickly thrown together, that probably just sends an email anyway.
I would not prefer email for multiple reasons:
- First, you always need an account to send one, and therefore have to decide which identity you want to attach to a communication. With a form, you sometimes can skip that decision. However, I suspect that in this case, this argument does not apply, because you probably have to attach an identity either way.
- However, email is one of the most unreliable protocols due to its poor solutions for handling spam. For example, if someone from outside my organisation tries to contact me, I can never be sure whether the email reaches me, due to various factors in spam detection. Sometimes an email is delivered to my mailbox, sometimes to the spam folder, and sometimes it just gets lost in transmission. I had even cases where I sent an email to two people in the same organization, and one would receive it and the other would not, even though they were using the same email server.