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Patriot Search
Patriot Search Philipp Lenssen has created a parody site called Patriot Search that makes fun of the government subpoenas of search engine records (see Should Search Engines Remember What You Search For?) by claiming to make "sure the government is informed should you search for something obscure, illegal, or unpatriotic." Part of its mission statement says:
Instead of letting the government waste tax money by going through complicated procedures to get user and search data from Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves or Google, users of Patriot Search make sure their queries end up right where they belong - in the databases of the government and its various agencies.This would be funnier if the current state of the FDLP didn't guarantee the same thing. By ensuring that the only way to get government information is from government controlled web-servers instead of from FDLP libraries, we ensure that the government has a record of every government report you search for and every one you view. Of course, there are some privacy policies in place that say that they would not do that, (see Will GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?), but can we believe that the government will ignore what it owns when it is willing to subpoena what it does not? Continue reading
Grants.gov is Windows-only
Here is another example of a government agency making a technical decision based on economic constraints and time constraints. The Washington Post reports that, when the government outsourced the building of the grants.gov system, the contract demanded full implementation within seven months and the result is a system that works only with the Windows operating system instead of conforming to open standards. While PCs are common and pervasive, as Gene Spafford says "Common does not mean 'standard.' That there are more Windows machines out there does not mean that Windows is the standard." Further, according to the report, "Macs constitute about one-third to one-half of the computers scientists and academicians use."
The new "Grants.gov" system, under development at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, aims to replace paper applications with electronic forms. It is being phased in at the National Institutes of Health, Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies. All 26 grant-giving agencies are supposed to have their application processes fully online by 2007. The problem: Although many U.S. scientists and others depend on graphics-friendly Macintosh computers, the software selected by the government is not Mac-compatible. And it is expected to remain so for at least a year.As I've said before (What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information) Technical decisions are usually driven by non-technical requirements and to keep government information freely available we must focus on policy first and technology second. By avoiding policy decisions and forging ahead with the technical matters of its Future Digital System, GPO is setting itself up to create a system that could be good technically while creating bad policies. (See also, "Policy neutral" does not mean "neutral policies".) Continue reading
Sprehe on FOIA Executive Order
A puzzling executive order "The Bush administration makes it harder to get information from the government," By J. Timothy Sprehe, Federal Computer Week, Jan. 23, 2006.
Sprehe, president of Sprehe Information Management Associates, has a long-time interest in government information. His latest column for FCW enumerates recent FOIA actions in light of the executive order, "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information" (Dec. 14, 2005). He concludes:
In light of the administration's record of excessive secrecy, what are we to make of the new executive order on FOIA? In my judgment, the executive order is window dressing. It is another ploy to distract attention from how the administration consistently denies the public the information it has a right to see.Continue reading
Vinton Cerf on Google, Government Information, Metadata, and more
The search continues, By Brad Grimes, Government Computer News (01/23/06) Vol. 25 No. 2.
This is an interview with Vinton Cerf, sometimes referred to as "the Father of the Internet" and who is now "Chief Internet Evangelist" for Google. In it, he says that Google has a "modest operation in the D.C. area" and that Google believes that a number of Google "enterprise program" services will be of interest to various government branches. He also says that Google is working with the Library of Congress to make portions of its holdings accessible and more easily searchable and that "it is possible that Google can assist in making more information accessible through cooperative programs with the [government]." With regard to recent discussion of "search" being able to replace metadata, he says:
Search has the remarkable property that it makes otherwise unstructured information discoverable. The addition of metadata can increase our ability to identify the most relevant information, relative to a given query and query context, so Google users will ultimately benefit from the availability of metadata. [Search and metadata] are not in conflict with each other.Continue reading
A bill that would give us more information
This bill puts public information at the forefront of the battle against corruption and influence peddling. It relies on new, more transparent disclosures of information to the public to make Congress more accountable. The press release about the bill (Obama Introduces CLEAN UP Act to Increase Transparency in Government, Decrease Lobbyists' Influence Monday, January 23, 2006) says that it would "require that all legislation introduced in the Senate, including conference reports, be posted on the Internet 72 hours before the legislation is voted on by the full Senate, including specific projects - or 'earmarks' - that under current law are anonymously attached to appropriations bills."
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