For Electronic Publishing with Prof. Carlson
Believe it or not, this meeting photo is in the National Security Archives.
Some of these roadblocks are easily removable, given the proper allocation of resources - but the question becomes as to whether those resources can be allocated under the current budget situation; others are the result of rules and policies about how the government conducts its business, and may require some sort of legislative change. (Arguably, some of these policies may even be un-Constitutional, and could be eliminated by the judicial branch.) Still other roadblocks are the simple result of government being unable to keep up with a new technological era, and adapt itself to a changing society. Organizations like the EFF, CPSR, SEA, and FAS are determined to drag government kicking and screaming into 21st century realities.
Some of the things which are classified are the membership
and activities (especially covert operations and surveillance programs)
of intelligence agencies (NSA, CIA, DIA, etc.); "black projects" which
involve some R & D into technology (Stealth, automation, "nonlethal
warfare", etc.) which the government wants to keep clandestine; and even
entire divisions of the government (such as the National Reconnaissance
Office [NRO], which
coordinated the "Deep Black" spy
satellite program; Weather Mountain, which housed a underground facility
for enabling parts of the government to continue operating after a
nuclear attack; and the mysterious "Area 51" or "Dreamland," where
mysterious aerospace tests were caught by NBC cameras) which are
sometimes even kept off of government survey maps in an effort to
preserve their secrecy. Ostensibly, this secrecy helps to maintain our
nation's military, technological, and intelligence advantage, which keeps
us "secure" from all sorts of threats.
However, critics of these policies claim that in reality, the classification system helps hide technological failure (as with the SDI or "Star Wars" initiative), dangerous consequences for the public (as with nuclear waste produced by military facilities and research installations), bureaucratic incompetence and contractor cost overruns, political accountability for the executive branch from "secret wars" such as the ones in Laos or Nicaragua, and sometimes even violations of human rights that the public (such as secret tests of radioactive isotopes on human subjects in the 1950s) would never support if they knew about them. Today, numerous people believe that within the government an enormous "shadow apparatus" exists which is overseen by, accountable to, and controlled by no one in the "daylight" government. Some information released to the media is even "disinformation" planted for political objectives.
In the technological arena, critics such as the Federation of American Scientists claim that government secrecy prevents R & D in government facilities (such as Los Alamos) from being put to civilian applications, where they could often create a lot more public weal and a lot less public woe. The FAS has long pressured the government to follow through with "conversion" of its labs from secret military research to open ecological, health, energy, and other research. Further, it and other organizations have challenged the government for a long time to declassify and release documents in a timely manner. Because the secrecy of documents is supposed to be for only a finite time period (presumably because the threats they represent fade with time), the government is supposed to release them after several decades. But the FAS maintains that despite this ostensible commitment, the government continues to keep classified documents from as far back as World War I.
One example of an ongoing "declassification" effort is the government starting to turn over spy satellite images from earlier periods to people interested in using them in GIS applications to monitor climate change, development, ecological transitions, and so on. The CIA now also makes available its "World Factbook" online, which contains demographic, political, and other data on numerous countries. FAS staff member John Pike holds this up as a model of what he calls "open source" intelligence, where the government only keeps classified those things which are absolutely essential to national security, and releases other documents to the public. Pike argues that much of government secrecy helps shield the government from debate rather than from its enemies. When documents are released, large amounts of the text are blackened by a censor's pen, with often only irrelevant information remaining.
The FAS' argument is that in the information age, clandestine intelligence is an anachronism. Many things the government tries to keep secret (such as the NSA employees' manual or schematics for "black" Skunk Works aircraft) have circulated freely on the Internet. Some things hidden from the public were known about by the Russians and other countries for many years. SIGINT (signal intelligence) and remote sensing now produce more valuable security data than human espionage. While secrecy is necessary to protect the lives of espionage agents, people are beginning to question the necessity of excessive espionage, especially in the industrial sector. The government's habits die hard, however, and electronic publishers are likely to continue to deal with its censorial mentality in the information age. All that's likely to change are the techniques (encryption, 'sniffers', firewalls, etc.) to protect government military-intelligence information when it exists in an electronic form.
A flawed law, however, became even more problematic as government agencies went more and more toward the use of electronic databases and records. Many agencies claimed FOIA only obligated them to release "hard copy" or paper records, and that it did not extend to things like electronic mail or databases. There was little effort to archive, update, maintain, or check the integrity of databases to be sure that electronic records transferred to the public were proper and contained the most recent, relevant information. Many agencies denied that a "reasonable search" meant that they had to do any type of comparison, matching, cross-analysis, or compilation of two or more data bases for the public, or that when data files were released, that they were supposed to be labeled properly which would make them navigable and comprehensible to the public.
Further, since different agencies often used widely varied computer hardware, software, and systems, there was a "technojumble" of incompatible formats and media. Many agencies used large, cumbersome mainframes, and stored data on magnetic tape which was totally unusable by the public. Since they did not like the expense or inconvenience, many federal agencies did not want to have to convert data from one operating system, program, or hardware platform to another; and did not want to provide that data on floppy disks or other media that would be easily readable by personal computers. Almost all agencies balked at the idea of FOIA meaning they had to set up some type of BBS or other system for the direct download by the public of government records. They preferred the old FOIA system, where each and every request for the release of data could be carefully checked and considered.
Problems such as these led to some amendments to FOIA in the 1980s. There have now been legislative decisions on "electronic FOIA," and the most important element in these decisions have been rulings that government agencies a) are required to respond to all requests for electronic information and b) are required to provide that electronic information in a format that meets the needs of the requester. There are still a great number of problems with 'electronic FOIA', however, because not all government agencies have been properly "wired" so as to make electronic records freely available. And many activists making electronic requests find that a new kind of stonewalling has appeared: agencies insisting that their e-mail requests have mysteriously "vanished" or been lost on the Internet. Electronic "open government" exists in principle, but continues to fall short in numerous areas in practice.
Another gray area lies in the world of electronic messaging. Do these constitute official records? Recent rulings on the state of Florida's Government in the Sunshine Act suggests that the state now considers electronic mail to be a vital public record, and now requires government agencies to archive and preserve e-mail for up to three years. It's not clear, however, to what extent the federal government considers e-mail the same way. While White House e-mail records were subpoenaed for the Iran-Contra investigation (largely because so many paper records had been shredded), it was never officially decided what the status of the White House messaging system was vis-a-vis FOIA. Another problem lies in the volatility of electronic mail: because it's not in "hard copy" form, it can be quickly altered so as to change the nature of the message. There exists no absolute way yet to verify the authenticity and authorship of an email message. And with email, sentences can be deleted rather than blacked out by pen.
No one can deny that the federal government has taken numerous steps to making government "electronically open," including setting up the FedWorld BBS with access to the DOE, NIST, and EPA, and the Thomas legislative system which lets citizens track the progress of legislation. Federal economic, demographic, and ecological databases have been opened up to academic researchers. The problem, many electronic publishers complain, is that much of what passes "behind the scenes" is still not available. While the government allows electronic access to routine functions, its more controversial activities are kept from view. The things that the public is most concerned about, cannot be accessed by electronic (or usually even any other) means. FOIA has been updated for the information age, but its limitations still remain pretty solid roadblocks.
Unfortunately, while there is a social consensus concerning the right to privacy, government has never really legislated that it is a legal and official right. It isn't in the Constitution; many people feel personal privacy rights gained a legal foundation only from the Griswold ruling of the Supreme Court regarding the use birth control in the 1960s. Further, while the government attempted to protect electronic privacy through its EPIC Act of 1986, there remains a lack of specific legislation governing the assembling, consolidation, and propagation of people's private data (such as credit records) by corporations and private industry - data which could in turn be sold to or otherwise viewed by the federal government, even though it never collected it. The government has always maintained that some degree of electronic surveillance is necessary in order to protect people from crime, drugs, and terrorism.
Electronic publishers and other journalists often want to know what federal or state law enforcement knows about people (organized crime figures, etc.) even though such agencies are reluctant to release that information during an ongoing investigation. Unfortunately, the existence of police band scanners and the Internet has made keeping law enforcement activity secret a difficult thing to do. Other cases have come up regarding the release of the names of victims or witnesses to crimes. What has changed in the electronic era is the rapidity in which "leaks," once they occur, can be propagated. The investigation of Richard Jewell by the FBI, for example, rapidly became a media frenzy. In many cases, the media have not withheld information when they had a responsibility to do that; but in other cases, the government has used the right to privacy to withhold ridiculous things, such as prior accusations of sexual harassment of public figures.
The other area where the "right to know" runs head-on into other rights is with the right to intellectual property. Government is charged with protecting intellectual property through its offices of patent, trademark, and copyright. "Trade secrets" are a more difficult issue, because various firms want to conceal various aspects of their industrial process from competitors. Unfortunately, this type of information routinely is encountered during government antitrust investigations, and so the question often arises about how much access the public should have to this data. The need for confidentiality of private sector data - which is one of the obligations of the federal government which it must meet - often conflicts with the right of citizens to demand accountability of corporations and private industries.
The intellectual property issue becomes more direct and more thorny when it comes to the matter of federally funded research, or researchers working at federally funded institutions. Many FOIA activists would argue that whenever scientific non-military R & D is funded by the federal government, that research is the property of the public. The researchers themselves would often disagree. This issue has come up with regard to NIH funding of the Human Genome Project, and with federal research on AIDS and cancer. ACT UP activists demanded, beginning in the 80s, that new AIDS drugs be speeded through FDA testing, and that new experimental findings on the virus should be rushed as soon as possible into the public domain, before publication and review. Some government scientists were not comfortable with this, and that battle continues today.
Conflicts between intellectual property and privacy, and the right to obtain information, seem inevitable. Although withholding certain kinds of information by the government puts citizens in jeopardy, with these kinds of situations, releasing information could put individuals in danger. Though everyone wants open government, most people can understand why certain kinds of government data (FBI files, tax records) should be seen only by appropriate governmental authorities (if they should even be collected at all, which is another argument.) How government resolves these conflicts in the information age remains to be seen, but in the meantime, it seems to invoke them frequently as barriers to citizen access to electronic government information. Even in clear-cut cases where the government is almost surely wrong, the legal haziness of these matters prevents resolving them quickly. Thus, they remain substantial roadblocks to electronic publishers.
While some government agencies are "outsourcing" electronic data, others are still making it available to the public themselves, but not without charging access fees. Their justification for these fees is typically that they are required in order for the agency to "upgrade" its equipment and to maintain the phone lines, modems, and whatever other hardware are necessary to accommodate electronic requests. Critics of user fees charge that the government actually saves money by 'going electronic,' because after the initial equipment investment, the costs of reproduction and distribution are virtually zero, and certainly a lot less than photocopying documents and paying employees to sift through paper files by hand. Government agencies who feel this is justified, respond that electronic access is a privilege for those with computers, on top of ordinary access to paper files, and thus they have every right to charge for it.
Whether in private or public hands, when government data costs money, this will inevitably be an access barrier for low-income people. Although electronic publishers might not normally be troubled by small access fees, some small-scale publishers could still find this a substantial drain on their income, especially if they are trying to produce, as an example, a nonprofit newsletter which reports on government policies or trends. Citizen activists basically want government electronic data to be free, or as close to free, as possible. If necessary, they claim, subsidies to the agencies (which comes from already collected taxpayer money) should offset whatever costs are incurred from switching over to electronic access.
While the government often wants to show people that it is extremely efficient through cutting costs, charging user fees becomes a strangely inefficient way to do that. The agencies usually claim that this saves the taxpayer money because only a small number of taxpayers ever request online information, and thus those individuals should shoulder the financial burden of maintaining the system. What these agencies fail to realize, however, is that the number of people online is growing, and this is the way they want to be able to access public information, because in many cases it's more convenient, more useful, and easier to analyze. Providing online information is a necessity, and not just a frill for a few cyber-junkies. The government, through electronic means, can announce meetings more quickly, and someday may be able to hold public hearings ("electronic town hall meetings") in cyberspace, without citizens even having to leave their homes.
Access fees are not the only expensive hurdle, however. While e-publishers already have the equipment they might need to access online government data, other low-income citizens might find computers, modems, and other hardware too expensive, for them to be able to make full use of government information. The solution promoted through local government Freenets and other online services is to install public access terminals in libraries and other civic buildings where anyone, even the homeless, could "plug in" to the system. Still, freenets are often shoestring operations, and are rarely allocated the resources to put terminals in locations all over urban areas. And the federal government only provides terminals in buildings in Washington, DC, which isn't very useful to people living elsewhere.
Ultimately, cost is likely to remain a big roadblock for electronic publishers and others in the near future. One of the elements of the NREN proposal seems to be a basic belief that having an informed society requires the government providing electronic information for free or as close to free as possible. Just as the government subsidizes university education in order to provide it to as many people as possible, so, some argue, it must do with freenets, toasternets, and other free community networks, and with the national public telenetworks. Still, this rhetoric collides with the reality of the federal budget deficit, which prevents any kind of large-scale projects of that kind. The majority of government BBSes are free, barring long-distance toll charges or ISP fees paid to one's access provider, but there are still several kinds of government databases out there which are not. It hasn't been decided yet how free it all should be.
One of the most forward-thinking agencies in this regard has been NASA, who has used the Internet to distribute space imagery, satellite data, mission briefings, and R & D on things such as virtual reality and robotics. It is a lesson from which a lot of other government agencies could learn. A truly open electronic government could raise levels of citizen awareness and participation, making our society closer to a participant democracy where each person gathers the information they need to understand, debate, and decide on the fundamental issues of the day. People would no longer feel alienated from their system of government, or that it's too big or complicated to understand. It's a model of society that the Founding Fathers would recognize and smile upon. But we won't get there unless we and our government work to remove the roadblocks.
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