Is interesting that this has made itself on here and not been flagged yet.

I have noticed that HN normally has an aversion to issues that are directly to do with contemporary politics outside the realm of telecoms, patents and copyright and I wonder if this seems more of an acceptable discussion for the site, given the wider issues raised, purely because the material being discussed is up on Github.

There were similar substantial discussions a couple times in the last year or so:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=police%20milit#!/story/sort_by_dat...

(the articles from the New Yorker, Salon and the Economist)

I'd assume it's an XLSX simply because that's the format they received it in from the Defense Department.

Looking further at the metadata, the author is "Williams, John A DLA CIV DISPOSITION SERVICES" and the company is "Defense Logistics Agency"

Yes, the file is 1033-program-foia-may-2014.xlsx - just the fact that 'FOIA' is in there suggests that it's the original format.

Maybe they are hoping that it will attract more attention from hackers who might do something cool with the data. I'd like to make an app that plots all of the purchases on a map, or finds all the military gear ordered near you. But I don't have the time.

There is a CSV uploaded as an update.