text: more concrete over time is damage control. In a world that produces digital data without 
  
  interruption, uncontrolled and unpredictable data releases are facts of life that are very hard to 
  
  predict, practically impossible to avoid and increasingly common. Opening public government data, 
  
  that is providing plenty of officially verified information, becomes therefore also a damage control 
  
  solution, to prevent or at least minimize damages from such uncontrolled releases. Without official 
  
  Open Public Data, individual citizens, political parties or other organizations will start to process 
  
  and compare (if they already aren't...) data from unofficial sources anyway, maybe from different 
  
  countries. In such cases, it will be unavoidable not reach sometimes, even in good faith, wrong 
  
  conclusions. This is not some theoretical possibility far in the future, as this real world example 
  
  (from a comment to an Open Data discussion in an italian blog) proves: 
  
  "*on the*[non italian]*Geonames website you can download geo-referenced data*
  *about... 47000 Italian municipalities. That worries me, because there are only 8094 of*
  *them. Besides, I grabbed a few random data about population, and I can guarantee you*
  *that not one was right. What should be done in such cases?*