Montgomery County blackout of crime data continues (Photos)

For the fourth day in a row, crime data is unavailable on the Montgomery County Open Data website. Users landing from Google are instead presented with a login page. Even when logged in, access to the crime data is blocked, but users have previously not been required to register - another blow to so-called "open data." This is another high-profile fiasco for Councilmember Hans Riemer, the County Council's self-proclaimed tech guru and "Lead for Digital Government."

Type "crime" in the search box at
the upper right...

...and the site delivers no results

There is no "crime" tab on the left menu of the site. When you search, "crime," in the search box, no results are found. What's going on here, folks?

Never had to log in to use
the site before, and crime data
doesn't show even if you do log in

As further evidence of the blackout, other crime data sites that draw from the Montgomery County data feeds have no crime data for these last four days. Is it simply a glitch that bumbling Montgomery County can't figure out, or is there a political motivation in hiding the stats? Out of control gangs making the stats (and the County Council) look bad?

Best of all, there's not even a "Contact Webmaster" link like even a 1990s website would have, and nowhere to file a complaint or report about the outage. I guess this is what we can expect from "Helpless" Hans and a government caught still using Windows 2000 in 2014.