State and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2007
Analysis of e-Government from the Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University at www.insidepolitics.org/egovt07int.pdf.
Continue readingExpanded Use of Domestic Spy Satellite Data
The Department of Homeland Security will begin to share spy satellite data with domestic law enforcement agencies next year. The theory is that satellite images will assist in border security. The most interesting news resport I've read on this topic came from Fox News. While all the news reports pointed out concerns about oversight and the effect on privacy, only this article mentioned that *getting* data isn't the end of the story - to be meaningful, someone somewhere has to analyze it and that this kind of data would be likely be of low priority:
Analysts across the intelligence community are already swamped with incoming data from foreign surveillance, and they may have little time for lower-priority work.
In light of recent expansions on wiretapping, this is, well, unnerving.
Wikipedia Scanner and government information
There's a very interesting article in Wired about a data mining tool developed to discover instances of whitewashing (e.g. editing in one's self-interest; presumably inappropriately) of Wikipedia entries. As has been noted before, Wikipedia has no authority control over the entries and is therefore particularly subject to self-serving or highly partisan edits. Now a clever grad student has developed a tool to identify those instances based on the version tracking built into wikis. While it doesn't necessarily identify a particular person, just knowing that, as described in the article, someone at Diebold HQ removed negative information about Diebold voting machines is adequate because it forces Diebold to prove they weren't the ones to make the changes. In short, it provides accountability by making use of the Wikipedia equivalent of the historical record. I mention this story because I think that this kind of activity is going to be increasingly important in determining what constitutes a real and/or official government publication. Traditionally, you held a government accountable by getting offiical documentation of its activities and holding on it for comparison with other official documentation. However, government information published electronically has made this a lot harder because of the changable nature of digital files. A longstanding concern of government information librarians with respect to electronic govnernment information has been how to know when changes have been made, what the changes consisted of and who made them. In this respect, the surging popularity of web 2.0 -style tools may be a great boon for government information. These tools -- wikis, online collaborative software like Google Documents or Zoho and so on -- derive their value from their ability to be shared. Government agency personnel are no different from anyone else - they've got work to do, a limited patience with messing around with how to do it and a desire to take the path of least resistance. So, for government employees, i.e. the folks creating government information, there's just as much reason to use these kinds of software as there is for me right now writing this post. And that means that neither the historical record nor legal accountability is necessarily lost, although it will entail expanding the definition of preservation of the historical record to include methods of acting on databases (creating data mining software to run against databases) in addition to the collection of objects (finding that last copy of a Serial Set volume) and any other activities that may become necessary as technology evolves. As with everything, the possibilities are not limitless. The Wikipedia Scanner was developed in cooperation with Wikipedia and required a full download of the whole database. Allowing that level of access is an option that individual agencies could turn on or off and certainly some agencies would never allow those levels of access to their publications. However, the agencies unlikely to play well with others in this scenario probably already don't provide much access to their information. For agenices that would be amenable to this kind of datamining, a benefit would be not just automated archiving (which the version tracking amounts to), but no-cost-to-the-agency management of those archives since they'll be allowing others to do it for them. Continue reading
Freedom and Information: Assessing Publicly Available Data Regarding U.S. Transportation Infrastructure Security
Assessing Publicly Available Data From RAND website:
How much data regarding U.S. anti- and counterterrorism systems, countermeasures, and defenses is publicly available and how easily could it be found by individuals seeking to harm U.S. domestic interests? The authors developed a framework to guide assessments of the availability of such information for planning attacks on the U.S. air, rail, and sea transportation infrastructure, and applied the framework in an information-gathering exercise that used several attack scenarios. Overall, the framework was useful for assessing what kind of information would be easy or hard for potential attackers to find. For each of the attack scenarios, a team of “attackers†was unable to locate some of the information that a terrorist planner would need to gauge the likely success of a potential attack. The authors recommend that procedures for securing sensitive information be evaluated regularly and that information that can be obtained from easily accessible, off-site public information sources be included in vulnerability assessments.Continue reading
Data Sharing between Agencies: FDA/DOD and VA/DOD
Two stories today on agencies sharing data: 1. FDA, Defense Department Share Data to Enhance Medical Product Safety Reviews http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01675.html 2. DOD and VA open a new medical data spigot http://govhealthit.com/article103423-08-03-07-Web In both cases there are clear advantages to sharing the data. In the case of the FDA, they can get access to much larger pools of results on clinical trials and actual use of drugs and medical devices; in the case of the DOD/VA share, doctors will be able to get a better picture of their patients' overall health and care since the VA and DOD populations overlap substantially. One obvious advantage would be the ability to prevent bad drug interactions because doctors would know everything prescribed to their patients. Differences in the two sharing projects are that the first will be designed as a shared structure from the ground up while the DOD/VA project will work with pre-existing systems. Initially, the VA/DOD systems will not be fully compatible across software, but in time the Bidirectional Health Information Exchange (BHIE) program will evolve into Clinical Data Repository/Health Data Repository (CHDR) which will allow direct input/querying/reporting of health data. I think we can assume that breaches of patient data will occur, especially as the data is restructured and/or designed from the beginning to facilitate interoperability. After all, one of the agencies above is the VA. So, are the benefits (well-described data is also more easily published and potentially more easily located data) worth the risk of leaked patient data? Many, many people take multiple medications every day - some which interact, some which have detrimental effects that only become apparent after usage in groups far larger than those included in clinical trials. At the same time, data is lost on a regular basis by many agencies (see GAO's Personal Information: Data Breaches...). Yet, evidence of actual harm from data breaches is limited (although GAO notes that absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence). The GAO report on Personal Information says
For example, more than 570 data breaches were reported in the news media from January 2005 through December 2006, according to lists maintained by private groups that track reports of breaches. ... The extent to which data breaches have resulted in identity theft is not well known, largely because of the difficulty of determining the source of the data used to commit identity theft. However, available data and interviews with researchers, law enforcement officials, and industry representatives indicated that most breaches have not resulted in detected incidents of identity theft, particularly the unauthorized creation of new accounts. For example, in reviewing the 24 largest breaches reported in the media from January 2000 through June 2005, GAO found that 3 included evidence of resulting fraud on existing accounts and 1 included evidence of unauthorized creation of new accounts. For 18 of the breaches, no clear evidence had been uncovered linking them to identity theft; and for the remaining 2, there was not sufficient information to make a determination.Continue reading
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