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Does Covert Government Information = Propaganda?
According to USA Today, 'Federal investigators probing the Education Department's public relations contracts have found a pattern of deals in which advocacy organizations received grants totaling nearly $4.7 million to promote Bush administration education priorities in newspaper columns and brochures, but didn't disclose that they received taxpayer funds, as required by law. The department's inspector general says he detected no "covert propaganda," but he told administration officials to consider asking for some of their money back.'
- Report: Education Dept.'s PR funds need oversight Advocacy groups too often failed to disclose grants By Greg Toppo, USA Today, September 5, 2005.
- Following the money for public relations efforts By Greg Toppo, USA Today, September 5, 2005.
The report is evidently this one:
Continue readingNew Report on Government Secrecy
According to a new report government agencies are expanding secrecy in many areas. The report finds that "secrecy in 2004 extended to more classified activity, more federal advisory meetings, more new patents deemed 'secret,' more domestic surveillance, and more new state laws restricting public access to information."
- Secrecy Report Card, 2005, (pdf, 12pp.) "Quantitative Indicators of Secrecy in the Federal Government" A Report by OpenTheGovernment.org Americans for Less Secrecy, More Democracy.
The report documents that more is being classified and kept secret and that fewer documents are being declassified. It also notes that the federal government "has greatly expanded its ability to control unclassified, public information through vague restrictions that give government officials wide latitude to declare information beyond the public's reach."
Continue readingWill GPO guarantee user privacy? Can it?
Will GPO guarantee the privacy of users? Will any guarantees it does make be implemented carefully and accurately? It is important to ask these questions if libraries do not have copies of digital government information and all users must retrieve copies from government managed web servers. If libraries had copies of digital government information, users could retrieve that information from libraries (which have a long tradition and policies of protecting privacy of users) rather than from the government.
I was thinking about these issues and GPO's commitment to data mining in its "Future Digital System" when I read a story this morning that sheds some light on current implementation of data mining in federal government agencies:
- GAO: Privacy issues remain in data mining programs By Patience Wait, Government Computer News (08/30/05).
The story quotes a new GAO report and says that "implementing privacy and security measures is haphazard.... Of five data mining programs at five different agencies, 'none followed all key procedures' for privacy and security measures." The GAO report:
- Data Mining: Agencies Have Taken Key Steps to Protect Privacy in Selected Efforts, but Significant Compliance Issues Remain, Government Accountability Office, "Report to the Ranking Minority Member, Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate." (GAO-05-866) August 2005.
GPO's commitment to data mining is spelled out in its Future Digital System requirements document in section 3.2.14.7, pages 92-95. This section specifies that the FDsys will log transactions and be able to extract, analyze and present data from Business Process Information, perform cross tabulations and "clusterization" and categorization, and perform association and link analyses. It will be able to "expose" sequential and temporal relationships and patterns and filter data at different levels of granularity and will have ability to create customizable reports for analysis of search terms. It will be able to send alerts or notifications to GPO users based on defined criteria.
Each of those functions could be used in ways that improved system performance and did not violate privacy. Indeed the system specifies that it must "provide the capability conform to GPO's privacy policy and Federal privacy laws and regulations."
Unfortunately, there are two problems with this. First, since the new system is "policy neutral" (see Policy, by Magan Fleetwood, August 29, 2005, Future Digital System (FDsys) Blog, and comments to that blog including: "Policy neutral" does not mean "neutral policies" by James A. Jacobs, 8/21/2005 or FGI copy of that comment), GPO provides no guarantee of user privacy. Instead, it only guarantees that it will conform to whatever policy is in place at any given point in time. And, it is developing a system flexible enough to conform to changing policies. Its system guarantees that it can implement a no-privacy policy. So, even though the system will, for example, be designed so that it has "the capability of maintaining Access privacy (e.g., Search, Request)," there is nothing that says it must implement that capability.
Second there is nothing in the system specification to prevent the kinds of problems found by the GAO. Having procedures and policies in place doesn't help if the agency doesn't follow them.
What is to be done? FDLP librarians and others should be demanding that GPO has a strong privacy policy, of course. But even more importantly, we should be insisting that GPO guarantee the availability of fully-functional digital content to the public and to libraries. To restate questions I've asked before:
- Will GPO guarantee that it will provide information products for free to the public and that those products will be fully-functional and not encumbered, disabled, controlled or otherwise non-optimal or locked-down versions?
- Will GPO guarantee that it will make available for deposit, without fee, into FDLP libraries that wish to receive them, all fully functional digital government information products within its purview?
UK government approach to browsers different from US government approach
While the Copyright Office is proposing a registration system that requires Internet Explorer (What the Copyright Office / Internet Explorer rule tells us about government information), "Great Britain's Department for Work & Pensions has pledged to make its Web sites compatible with as many browsers as possible, including the popular open-source browser Firefox" according to this story:
Firefox makes an inroad in the U.K., By Ingrid Marsonm CNET News.com (August 25, 2005).
Currently, the department's Jobcentre Plus web site "does work using non-IE browsers" but at least this UK agency recognizes this as a problem and "aims to fix this."
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GPO refuses to guarantee no-fee access
September 1, 2005 / Leave a comment
Last week, GPO had the opportunity to assure the library community that free public access is a GPO priority and it failed to do so.
Instead, in response to two questions that directly address the vague commitments to public access in its strategic vision for the 21st century, GPO chose to avoid the questions entirely and assure the library community that it is designing a system that will not be "constrained" by policies -- such as access without fees.
The two questions were posted to the Future Digital System (FDsys) Blog, "Question and Answer" page on August 21 ("Policy neutral" does not mean "neutral policies"):
Here is the complete text of the response:
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