Minnesota OET Transparency Fail

PIM was able to get information about why OET can't just provide some sort of public data warehouse for citizens and groups to get data from, its just too hard. Instead of a how-can-we attitude, we've got a nice document of why we can't. The bill is pretty straightforward, instead of the horrible difficult-to-query system that doesn't let you do things easily (like select multiple vendors, etc) and does not seem to work with modern browsers. (I can't see any output in Safari 4.0)

Why would it be so hard to run a nightly query of information and transfer it to a data warehouse? This is done in many private and public sector entities and in this case a filter could be applied to filter out protected data. I did a quick search for 'public data warehouse' and found an impressive District of Columbia site that is likely closer to what people expect from our government. They've got a live feed of purchase orders, even. A citizen or entity could grab this data and reproduce it in a form more relevant to other citizens.

Speaking as a computer security professional, I do not appreciate the 'security' hammer used as a reason for government to avoid transparency. This can obviously be supplied in a secure manner by other governments, why not ours?