Slashdot Mirror
Data Quality Act
The New York Times has a heads-up about a little-noticed add-on to a massive appropriations bill, signed into law by Clinton but taking effect in October. The amendment allows anyone to challenge data published by the Federal government and have it changed or deleted. The main proponents of the law are pro-business groups seeking to tie up environmental and similar regulations by challenging the government's data.
Libel law states that if someone publishes false and damaging statements about you, they can be forced to retract the statements and/or publish a correction. (If they published the false material deliberately, they can also be required to pay monetary damages.)
This is just the logical extension of that: Instead of having to prove that the statements caused harm to you, it is merely necessary to prove that the statements are false.
This is a Good Thing. Yes, it will result in less material being published... but the material which doesn't get published will be primarily the material which wasn't defensible in the first place.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I mean, it's a step in the right direction, but to the /. crowd, it should seem pretty darn obvious - if someone points out a mistake, you have to fix it. Oddly enough, since the government is there to serve the people, if the people point out that the government is a bozo, this is exactly what *should* happen.
The problem with this bill is just what the article says - no one is going to be challenging the data where a minor functionary has his phone number listed incorrectly. The *big* companies that probably want this sort of ability to challenge data would be the tobbaco companies. After all, those surgeon general warnings are technically government data.
Theoretically, it will depend on how this data can be used, once changed. A whole hell of a lot of court cases have been won and lost through government researched data. If some important stuff gets debunked, appeals will flood the system more than they do now, digging up old cases from as far back as human memory.
As an aside - remember the FOIA? It turns out that if the paper you're writing is a draft, it's not FOIA-able. Which is why, (and I'm in government service, sorry to say) that I spend so much time stamping draft on things.
As I read is, it is about changing or deleting incorrect data, not questionable conclusions drawn from correct data.
If moderated wisely, this is a Good Thing. It might be a way to deal with those "estimations of lost revenue" that keeps popping up as soon as we don't buy enough copyrighted stuff...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Good point, valentyn. With slightly different spin, the ability of anyone to challenge data would have been seen as a Good Thing. I have no idea why you were modded "Offtopic."
-- MarkusQ
The heart of this is democracy in its most purre form.
The problem is that the truth is not democratic. Just because some corporate fat cats - or even every member of the US Senate - finds a fact uncomfortable it does not mean it should be deleted or litagated against.
There are other freedoms at stake here too - the freedom to state the facts, no matter how inconvenient.
The above implies that "the government" in a democracy is something seperate from "us." What you have described is a closely monitored custodianship that can occur in any policical structure--democracy, communism, monarchy, etc, but is most closely associated with european-style socialist bureaucracies.
If a democracy is rule by the people, then the "most pure form" of democracy would be precisely the opposite--where you could not see the dividing line between "the people" and "the government." There would be no issue of whether you could "challenge the government figures"--it would just be sorta obvious that you could actively participate in any discussion and work on them.