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Town Fights FOI Request for GIS Data and Images
dweyerma writes "The state's highest court will now decide a landmark public records case involving access to aerial reconnaissance photographs and maps of Greenwich, CT. The town maintains the images in a tightly kept database known as a geographic information system, which a judge declared to be public records last December. The Connecticut Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear the town's appeal of that ruling, expediting the case by leap-frogging the state Appellate Court. The move virtually coincides with the third anniversary of the initial complaint in the case, which Greenwich resident and computer consultant Stephen Whitaker filed with the state Freedom Information Commission after the town denied his request for an electronic copy of the entire database for security and privacy reasons."
wait, which side are we for?
We haven't seen that around here for far too long...
Uhhh those photos with me a betty the sheep on the farm uhh we were just playing leap frog
The government is a body of individuals most notably ungoverned - Shepard Book
We used to to be the most loved country in the world, now we are the one that catches the most shit. I think the government should stop spoon-feeding us what they think we should know and let us have what we think we should know.
There are always somethings that can not be revealed: Witness Protection, Undercover Officers, etc. But the maps are already available they are just not together in a nice electronic format. Maybe its time for the government of, for, and by the people to become that again.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Attorney General Ashcroft's October 12, 2001 memo instructing federal agencies to stall on FOIA requests.
The Greenwich case appears to be an extension of the precident set by General Ashcroft. If FOIA is curtailed, how will journalists and watchdog groups get their information they use to keep government honest?
Ok folks, if those bastards steal any more of our rights again, everybody aim your rifle into the sky.
We will shoot that fscking satelite down!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
There are aerial photos available RIGHT NOW on http://www.acme.com/mapper/
It's always been a thorn in my side, that (here in Canada, and no doubt elswhere) tax money pays for government agencies to collect map and aerial photography data (and land records), and do not make it properly accessible to the public.
Prior to the internet, you could buy the maps and aerial photographs for a fee, which was a bit high, I always thought, but reasonable considering the trouble and costs associated with the physical reproduction of the media.
Now in this age of the Internet and blank DVD's priced well under $1 (even our lame Cdn $), providing that "public data" far more cheaply (and allowing copying) should be allowed.
Instead the fees for getting large sets of map data are exorbitant. I just hope that more competitive privatized satellite photography concerns can provide a lot of this, far more economically.
This is especially annoying, since here in Canada, we are taxed quite heavily; if you make more than $50K Cdn [30K+-ish US], your incremental tax rate is something like 50c on the dollar. Plus in some provinces, you pay 15% GST on everything you purchase; booze and gas have taxes that are astronomical (more than 100%, I believe). (Not that we Canadians drink a lot, *cough* *cough*.)
In many cases, those tax dollars are put to great use, incredible and accessible health care (as much as we like to bitch about it, it's great), generally excellent and free highways (toll roads are fairly rare in Canada), and so forth. Granted, those are more critical than map data, but I still hope we come around on the mapping issue some day.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
If the database was paid for with tax money, then it should be available to the taxpayers. Besides, as others have pointed out, the same information is already available in a form that would be useful to terrorists.
I use USAPhotoMaps to access the terraserver. I have a database of aerial photos and topo maps of all the areas I work (nearly my whole state). The resolution of the photos is 1 meter per pixel and for the topo maps it's 4 meters per pixel. That info plus a program to show streets and roads makes my job much easier.
If you don't mind a slightly old copy, it's all online for your viewing: Greenwich, Connecticut, United Stetes 13 April 1992. Click away to your hearts content.
Of, if you prefer, the Greenwich, Connecticut Topological Map, 01 July 1986 USGS
First, we pay public servants to CREATE data,
then we have to pay them to USE it!
USA seemed to be better at this than we are.
I'm sure the headline makes sense to some people, but not many people are going to understand FOI or GIS. I can't be the only person who thought this was about Google image search data and images at first glance.
It's just kind of ridiculous when a native English speaker can't make sense of the headline. Please, at least explain these things in the submission.
From my reading of the article, he wants to use them for commercial reasons. He has asked for an entire copy of the GIS data and aerial photographical maps. That's a lot of data which would be expensive for anyone to generate. Has he offered to purchase the information, or is he expecting to kick start his business with free information paid for by the city?
Surely if he had a legitimate business idea, he would be willing to pay other data providers for the information he wants. There are several mapping, GIS and photographical companies that would no doubt love to supply him with the data he requires at a reasonable cost.
If this was a software company trying to use GPL'd software to build up a closed source business, people here would be up in arms.
as the above poster mentioned, why couldn't they give me a copy on CD - charge me $1.00 for the CD and send me on my way? It's because they are sneaking in a hidden tax (what else would it be when the government charges for the same service twice)
It is reasonable to me that I pay for the small amount of time it takes a government employee to make a copy, but in these days of auto feeding copy machines and CD's - the prices they charge are way out of line.
I say it again: HIDDEN TAX
What makes it worse is that you search for the court cases on OLD outdated IBM PS/2's running some form of outdated software that can barely do a two word search and return ANY results. Most of the time you have to have the EXACT spelling of the name to get results.
http://www.atlas.gc.ca
This is built on Chameleon, a GPL frontend for the GPL UMN mapserver whose development were partially funded by Canadian and American governments, respectively, for purely selfish reasons (reducing the costs of producing GIS servers, and being able to provide more information to more groups more cheaply.)
Basing the argument on the government having paid for the collection is a iffy at best. The basis should rather be based on maximizing the public good,which is, in the general case, harder to figure out. One has to weigh: privacy concerns vs. defence (against Terrorists domestic and foreign) vs. public benefit. The answer will come out different depending on what the data is, what technology is in place/reasonable, and how much the organisation is willing to spend to make the information public. How soon to make it public is also going to have a big effect on how much it costs. folks on the internet want information upto the second.
You have a chemical spill in Seattle. You have a real-time information system for exchange among first responders who are doing their work. It hits the news and their site gets slashdotted. It's a dynamically built site, so caching by google is of no use whatever. The firemen and coast guard can no longer get information from aerial reconnaisance being done by a Canadian survey plane that happenned to be available. So they don't know where in the harbour the spill has gotten to.
Wall it off? OK, you need a separate network accessible by city, province, state, and many branches of two national governments, as well transportation (railways, airlines) in the area, and any specialized contractors that might be called in. And it has to be setup ahead of time, and managed and funded so that it is up when a crisis happens.
What is the cost of making that site public? Does the public need to know where there is a chemical spill? Of course they do! Should they get same information the government does on their first responder systems? Would be nice, but if the architecture/technology in place cannot answering that sort of demand, what do you do? Most people would accept as reasonable that you have a first responder system that is only available to a few, then have other systems which are used for public dissemination (aka. press conferences, other web sites, etc...)
now we are at around 75 US cents. so it has gone up about 18%. thirty years ago, as any beer drinking Canadian (closest analogy to "red-blooded American" I could think of
as for making goods cheaper... hmm... if they are natural resources, those are all costed in US$ anyways, makes no difference. if it manufactured goods, then most foreign components are going to be purchased in US$. so won't make much difference
either.
xchange rates are just trade friction. when rates change, prices slowly adjust to reflect the new cost structure. There is not really a long term benefit. the argument would make sense if high value items were manufactured directly from Canadian natural resources. I don't think that is too common a case.
my guess is that costs in Canada are lower because
there is a public health care system, which controls costs better than the american system, and many other sorts of organizations, like workman's compensation which reduce liabilities, so that insurance costs are lower across the board. The un-employment insurance programs reduce social diparity and unrest, and make the country cheaper to police, again reducing costs. That corporations use the same programs to smooth over low-demand periods by having workers on those programs then, and available when demand picks up.
So they don't have to spend as much on hiring, since the skilled people remain in the industry through the dips. Again, this reduces costs for industry.
Classified information, while not only not "public record," as the term is commonly used, is specifically exempted from the Freedom of Information Act and state sunshine laws.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
I work for Layton City in Utah, and we are preparing to release an interactive GIS database viewer client sometime in the next month.
The hardest part has been determining what data should be available to the public. Release of some of the data is controlled under a Utah state law called GRAMA, which stands for the Government Records Access and Management Act. It tells us what information about our citizens we are able to release, and why. Property ownership information, detailed floorplans, etc., could all be considered protected under GRAMA if read correctly.
To start with, we're going to be releasing a limited version of our "center line" file. The "center line" file is essentially a file of imaginary lines running down the center of a map. That file has addressing information, so we can use it for address location and pathfinding, but the full version of the file also includes police patrol areas, emergency response information, and lots of other easily abused information as associated metadata with each polyline.
One other issue here is space. Layton is a relatively small town, bound to the north and south by cities, to the east by a mountain, and to the west by the Great Salt Lake and another city. Even with that, our full GIS database (if exported to shape files) is several hundred gigabytes.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Attorney General Ashcroft's October 12, 2001 memo...
In other news, Reynolds Manufacturing, makers of leading aluminum foil products, announced record earnings on strong sales associated with the 2004 U.S. political season.
"Our foil sales are unprecedented," said Reynolds CEO Tom Lansky. "Between the MoveOn.org crowd, the Democratic National Committee members, the Kerry campaign, and all the loose nuts out there wrapping their heads to keep out the imaginary Ashcroft evil mind rays, we can't keep foil products on the shelf."
Lansky indicated the company would be launching a cobranded promotion with a yet announced pharmacutical manufacturer in the final weeks of the political season. The planned promotion will include a sample sized trial package of lithium, and would be promoted by spokespersons Al Gore and Howard "Screaming" Dean.
"Sanity is a serious matter for the left, as all this paranoia and irrationality eats away at their grips on reality," said Lansky. "We're pleased that the lithium package promotion will help keep our customers from going too far over the edge, and in fact are looking at other anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and attention deficit drugs for further product tie-ins right after the election. Should Bush win as expected in all the poles, we're going to have a heck of a time keeping product on the shelves."
Last week I called our town's Health Dep't. to ask to see records of permits for water-wells and septic-systems on 14 properties from the last 3 years.
At first they tried to brush me off by saying I needed to file an FOIA request.
In this case it wasn't security, merely civil-service laziness.
Wasn't Slashdot talking just recently about Arizona turning public access to GIS into a profit center...
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http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/27/225
I've dealt with local government GIS data before and no one has ever been as anal about it as these people. The newspaper I work for, our county's GIS department, the local planning board and board of elections have all used the data for things like maps of the flood plane, hog farms, proposed zoning changes, election districts, etc. And we are right next door to an USAF base, where you would almost expect people to be touchy about maps.
Other communities have shaved time off emergency response calls (fire, ambulance, cops, etc.):
http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/proc01/pro
Keeping GIS open also aids market transparency. Having this information available over the Internet -- instead of just at the Courthouse -- reduces friction in real estate transactions and makes it easier for people to make informed judgments about real estate. It helps encourage smarter capitalism through route planning and provisioning.
To me the terror argument is spurious -- this is a case of some information control freaks playing Dilbert's Mordac character.
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs