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CT High Court Rules GIS Data Can Be Kept Secret [UPDATED]
kinema writes "A few days ago the Supreme Court of Connecticut ruled that the town of Greenwich's Department of Information Technology does not have to release the images and GIS data that the town keeps. The court found that mandatory disclosure of the data under the state's freedom of information statues is exempted under a recently passed state law that allows information to be kept secret 'when there are reasonable grounds to believe that their disclosure may result in a safety risk.' I'm sure I'm not the only one in the audience that has a hard time swallowing this. I am looking into filing a similar request to obtain the GIS data for the Portland Oregon metro area. As the data is currently available to anyone willing to shell out the nearly $900 per year, the local government isn't going to be able to argue that the data could be used by terrorists and should therefore be kept from the public which paid untold amounts for the data to be collected through their taxes." Update: 01/11 16:51 GMT by M : This story is incorrect. Although the case was just heard by the court, there has been no decision either for or against the disclosure of the GIS information.
Somebody think of the GIS!
Security Schmurity...if there is not a very, very compelling reason to keep people's noses out of such information...EVERYTHING should be released. I, for one, would like the rule to be if you want to come in and get it, it's TAXPAYER OWNED/FUNDED and you can do so. Short of plans for nuclear silos or locations of CIA monitoring stations, what compelling reason is there for not letting people know the location of water/gas services? Terrorists don't want to cause a water main break, they want to kill 1000's of people in spectacular attacks. In my opinion, it's just a cop-out so they don't have to do any extra work to provide it to the public.
Here's the actual link to the Wikipedia article about GIS. Editors, or button-pushers?
I kinda understand where they are coming from. Stuff like water facilities, power grid info, etc, probably should be kept secret. Some of the stuff is above groud, but just giving away high-quality maps of underground facilities is leaving yourself open, and failure analysis and worst-case-scenarios should definately be kept secret. I wouldnt see any reason why stuff like parcel data should be kept secret.
FWIW, I work in the GIS dept at a Water Company.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Why would they care who gets the Google Image Search data?
Gee I don't know, maybe you wanna dig a big ass hole in your backyard to store stuff and you wanna be sure not to hit a gas or water main. Jesus, that took me all of 5 seconds to think of a good reason. Oh, what's that? You think I should only be able to get the details for my specific property? Ok, what if it's my business to dig holes for people? Do I have to put in a request every single time I sign a contract with someone to dig a hole for em? Why should my work be delayed like that?
How we know is more important than what we know.
In europe, GIS data isn't free, and is only available with non-disclosure agreements and steep yearly license fees. It's considered as a valuable commercial resource that can be milked for years and years.
The US government is still refusing to release VMAP2 GIS data for european countries, because of partner deals with GIS agencies of those governments, even though the data was collected by american satellites with US taxpayer dollars.
They absolutely refuse to respond to FOIA requests.
First, you and I may not need the information, but others may. Second, the theoretical right to see the information is more important than the information itself. As the source of our government's legitimacy, we have the right to know of its activities.
Of course, this right must be curtailed in the interests of national security (this case is, however, ludicrous) and other citizens' privacy (as in your example of FBI files). But why shouldn't we have access to documents on the Kennedy assassination?
Y'know, I'd rather have the government hampered by FOIA requests. It keeps it from meddling with my life.
I'd be much more worried about the VERY detailed satelite images available at http://terraserver.microsoft.com/.
You can get sat images of ALMOST all of our military bases and probably every big city.
The City of Portland operates portlandmaps which provides free access to limited GIS data.
You can't just put out a shingle and start a hole-digging business. Seriously. The paperwork to get approval to start a business that entailed digging holes (ones large enough to support staying in business) is very painful. Ask any construction company. And part of this process entails getting access to the city planning files. So, in essence, your argument is moot because such information is already available to the digger, he has already shown his need for it.
If it is your property, you obviously have the right to the information. Do you have the right to your neighbor's? Not really, I'd guess.
is no security at all.
I can go down to the airport and pay someone to take me an hour long tour around town. I'll take my new Canon 8 megapixel camera along. If I wanted to do some damage, those pictures are going to work just as will as the GIS pictures. Might cost me a little more in short term, but what does that matter?
As an aside, Helena, Montana gives away GIS data to anyone who asks for it. The taxpayers of Helena payed for those pictures and that information in the first place. It's only right that we have free access to it. As a matter of fact, I have a hard drive around here with 10 gigs of photos and infrastructure maps of Helena and the surrounding area just for asking.
As long as the Government wants to use my money to do anything I feel that I should have the right to see how they're spending that money, in all but a very, very specific set of circumstances for the immediate moment, and ultimately in every aspect as soon as information isn't critical. I believe that I should be able to look up water main locations, power line information, sewage information, telephone line/pole leasing, and the like, because I might find some gross abuse somewhere that warrants public scrutiny.
The only exception that I could make at all would be for ongoing criminal investigations. Things where the court hasn't yet decided but is scheduled to decide, or where the police are investigating and releasing information could compromise the investigation.
The odds of terrorists attacking the water main that leads to my house are miniscule. My city so wide and low density that any terrorists would be foolish to attack here for the purposes of making a large number of kills. That doesn't mean that it's impossible, it just means that it's not something that I'm going to lose sleep over. If I were in San Francisco, New York, or any other really high density place I might have some kind of concern, but not here, even if I am in the fifth largest metro area.
Besides, this is just another attempt at security through obscurity, when it's possible (and even likely) that much of the information on infrastructure is already recorded elsewhere anyway, so claiming that they're protecting it for some actual reason is absurd.
Remember, if we all go paranoid, the terrorists really do win.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In the old soviet union they didn't have phone books because terrorists ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dissidents might use them.
It's only a matter of time.
Has anyone seen a good reference for the particulars of each state's "freedom of information" laws and process? I'm ready to stick to someone!
Why cut IT when your office space costs $3/sf? gibso
Please, show me a terrorist who would attack anything in Greenwich, CT over in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., or any other major metropolitan area in the US.
And have you checked out their website? They have such genuinely useful things as e-mail notification of town emergencies to any affected residents. Please tell me that some of you also think that to be a marginal waste of resources. And what's this crap on the front page about needing permission to reproduce the town seal? Apparently the fair use train doesn't make stops in Greenwich also.
Congratulations, Greenwich, CT: you have successfully pissed me off.
I'm going to sleep now. Good morning, and good riddance.
The information is available on a fee basis. In fact, it is available as a subscription, if you would prefer the annual updates.
This is a fee, not unlike fees to use parks or fees to use roads (taxes).
The government already provides a means of obtaining this information but is not obligated to provide multiple ways of getting it.
For better or worse, the US's aggressive anti-terrorism foreign policy has had an effect. It's the invasion of Afghanistan that did it. The Taliban thought they were safe backing bin Laden - they'd beat the Russians, their country was landlocked and a long way from US allies, and the terrain favored them. Big mistake. Three months later the Taliban was out of power with its leaders dead, jailed, or on the run.
This made a big impression on dictators and warlords worldwide. Allowing terrorists to operate from your territory against the US is not survivable.
We'll probably have trouble again. But we have bigger problems. Compared to AIDS, hurricanes, and other problems, the death toll from terrorism is low.
First, the Greenwich "safety risk" thing is a crock when the information is already available to anyone who fills out a form and pays the fees. The form is right there on the Greenwich site.
But the real issue here is that the poster seems to be trying to obtain this information for free, rather the paying the fees/subscriptions required by the states for providing the data in a presentable, standardized format. It seems to me he wants the all taxpayers to bear the burden of costs rather than the end users of the data. I think the people who use the data should be the ones paying for it. Any township is going to incur significant costs collecting, sorting, organizing, formating, and duplicating this data. Giving all of that data away free means other services will suffer, or taxes will have to be raised.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
"There's data under them statues!"
chown -R us yourbase
if there is not a very, very compelling reason to keep people's noses out of such information
There is. If a bad person does something the town does not want to be the source of that person's information. There will be no shortage of ambulance chasing lawyers suing the town if something happened and the town had provided info of its own free will, as opposed to be compelled to by a court order.
In my opinion, it's just a cop-out so they don't have to do any extra work to provide it to the public.
It is naive to think that things are that simple. Things are far more complicated than most people around here realize.
Remember the recent fiasco about the National Weather Service wanting to give us access to our data, and people like Accuweather wanting to stop them? We screamed, and they listened.
Granted, it was under a completely different set of circumstances. The govt. agency *wanted* to give us the data, it was a relatively minor threat of us losing access to it, etc. However, the point remains that we still live in a democracy. If enough people make enough noise, some politician is bound to at least raise a minor stink about it, if for no other reason than to pander to some people for some votes.
So, having said that, write to your congressman and request that the data you paid for, and deserve to have, be made available to you.
bash: rtfm: command not found
How do you know what "most" FOIA requests return? No one tracks that sort of information. All you "know" is that crackpots online use the FOIA to further their conspiracies and you've spent so much time reading them that you project that onto everyone because you have no other real experience with it.
The FOIA grants any information requested to the requester, given that such information exists and isn't vital to national security
No, no it does not. That's just one of a long list of exceptions.
Requesting the FBI file on yourself is clearly a right, but requesting the file on someone else? Not a right, IMO.
Well, good, because you're right. It's not a right. Personnel, medical and similar files that would constitute a "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" are exempt from FOIA requests.
Trying to finagle documents regarding the Kennedy assassination? Not a right, IMO.
Why the hell not? For what possible reason should the official government proceedings regarding a very newsworthy event that happened over 40 years ago be hidden? Information relating to law enforcement proceedings are protected, when they have reason to be, but there's no conceivable reason for that.
Personally, I'd rather see the roads fixed and utilities made more efficient than see a bunch of fat, sweaty geeks get their jollies by harrassing the government.
Considering you need to pay for document research time and duplication for FOIA requests, no one except crackpots thinks it's a good way to "harrass" anyone.
You can find the full text of the relevant Act here. I suggest you at least skim it.
Portland on-line mapping sites, paid for by your taxes. 1. PortlandMaps http://www.portlandmaps.com/ 2. MetroMap http://topaz.metro-region.org/metromap/metromap.cf m
It's all property-based, not person-based. The only way to link the data to an individual is to know the specific characteristics of the land parcels they own beforehand (e.g., tax lot ID or street address)
Some things the "none of your bussiness" argument is missing...
Taxpayers paid for the data yet we can't spend a few bucks to freely publish it. If a "terrorist" has $900 (and acts like a white guy) he can get the data by buying a copy from the local council. It's none of the govternments bussiness what I want to use our data for.
I don't think you can get personal information from the FBI by waltzing in with an FOIA. If (in the case of JFK) they are a public official then "we the people" want to know how they are performing in thier job and do have the right to know who did what.
It might be justifiable to have "user pays" for roads etc, but information that we all paid for (including copyrighted media recordings of statements from officials) should be freely available over the web.
Your whole argument can be summarised by a quote from Yahoo Serious - "If you can't trust the government, who can you trust?"
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This must be how those folks in the airplanes knew where to find the World Trade Center...
Here's a thought worth throwing out there: So here in America we want information to be ubiquitous and free. We want the capability to know anything about everything. However, at the same time we are afraid of our neighbors and other people around us knowing too much about us. We want our personal space and blow up at the first person or entity that intrudes. In case of GIS data, sure, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have free access to map data and whatnot, but what about all those people who don't want images their property freely available for whatever reason? We've already considered the fact that certain information also needs to be protected (nuclear plants, certain government/military installations, etc). There must be some kind of balance that must be struck.
The fundamental issue here is not about map data, but whether we should allow ourselves to have less freedom because we fear terrorists.
Regarding this, it is valuable to educate ourselves about what we are fearing. Regarding that, it is valuable to know more about the activities of the U.S. government. Only a small percentage of U.S. citizens understand much about the involvement of the U.S. government with other countries. There is plenty of reliable information available, but learning more takes so much time most people haven't done it. Here is a small overview that I put together: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories. There may be other articles and books that are far more valuable to you, that article is just a contribution of mine.
Most U.S. citizens believe that the terrorists attacked without provocation. That is not true. The terrorists attacked after many decades of experiencing U.S. government violence. (Violence does not justify more violence, of course, but most people don't believe that, including the leaders of the U.S. Defense Department, and the terrorists.)
Am I saying that the U.S. government is a net evil force in the world? No. What has happened is that the government decided two things several decades ago. I'm sure those in power then did not understand that their decisions would eventually corrupt the entire government. At the time, the decisions seemed logical.
First, the government decided that it could act in other countries in secret. Second, the U.S. government decided it could act in secret to protect U.S. businesses in other countries.
What probably no one realized then was how much that would come to be a corrupting influence on the government. What no one realized then was how much additional profit there was to be made by arranging, in secret, for U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security arrangements needed by U.S. multinational businesses.
Soon huge businesses were arguing that the U.S. government should subvert democratically elected leaders, as the government did in Iran. Soon U.S. businesses would arrange unfair contracts with corrupt leaders, and when there was a protest, call for U.S. government intervention in the name of patriotism.
That's partly how we got to the present situation, where two men, whose family and business associates and friends have extensive investments in global oil businesses, are president and vice-president of the entire U.S. government, even though there is conflict of interest in such an arrangement.
I was curious about this exact issue when the Terraserver first went online (I was working for the military at that time). When I tried to look up some military bases, I didn't have much success. I found that entire blocks of land around all the military bases I checked were missing.
I just checked, and those images are now there; that's new... but after looking at the dates on the pictures, I'd suggest to you that those images are old, and not current enough to be of serious value to a terrorist enemy.
Let's face it... Satellite photos are sexy, but terrorists are probably much more interested in the smaller, current details: How many jersey barricades are at the base gate? Do the guards have heavy enough weaponry to stop their vehicle if they take a run at it? Are they doing 100% ID check? How about contractors... can mail and pizza delivery drivers get on-base at will?
I can't see a lot of those 4 and 5 year-old satellite photos being that useful to your typical dumb-enough-to-drive-a-truck-bomb terrorists.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for mentioning that. I was hoping someone would when I saw the article on the front page.
While Portland is only a subsection of Metro's area, I don't know if I'd say that the site only has "limited data". While the amount of info is a little scarry, it was very intresting finding all about a tiny triangle of property that was in the paper.
Oh, and there's a news story in Real about the whole e-govt.
(I live just down in Salem) http://www.jasonmchuff.net/
Please, show me a terrorist who would attack anything in Greenwich, CT over in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., or any other major metropolitan area in the US.
The folks in the cities are stressed because they feel targetted. The folks in the suburbs and country feel safe. Naturally the later are a perfectly logical target. You naively assume that the purpose of terrorism is a large body count. It is not, it is to make everyone feel unsafe. Right now large chunks of the country feel safe. An attack in one suburban or small town shopping center would make the rest of the country as stressed out as those in the big cities.
Secondly, it is the job of the town officials in Greenwich to worry about Greenwich. The fact that an attack is highly likely to occur elsewhere, irregardless of whether it is big city, suburb, or country, does not mean they should not prepare locally.
I also wrote 'youreslf'. There's a bilingual education policy joke here somewhere, but I'm just too unlucky with the typing tonight to try.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
And for the rest of Texas, the Texas Natural Resources Information System makes various GIS data available for download.
A year or so ago I was running scripts to download all the aerial photographs from portlandmaps.com. Imagine my surprise when I got a phone call the next morning from the admin of the site, begging me to stop killing their servers! Turns out the GIS server really didn't like the particular requests I was sending it, and I'd actually crashed one of them.
Of course, they charge $900/seat for the "license" as mentioned in the article, and I questioned that on the spot saying that it was a city-acquired resource, and as someone paying taxes in the county I figured I had a right to the data. The admin (or someone I called later, I forget) explained that the "Corporate GIS" entity was set up in order to get the data to every city entity that needed it, and that the seat license were the way that all the various city agencies (no comment on our ludicrously overblown and retarded city government....) paid into the pot in order to manage the data. In other words, the only stated reason for the seat license was to implement the equivalent of back-door cost centers. GAH!
I got the shots I wanted (for some estimates of long-shot wireless potential between a few sites), but I really wouldn't mind having the whole dataset available. If the original poster has any luck getting the dataset under a viable license (FREE, as it should be for something I ALREADY PAID FOR ), I wouldn't mind arranging to get a copy via a USB hard drive or somesuch. Dunno how many DVDs it would take, but quite a few... One CD holds 1 foot aerial imagery centered on the Burnside bridge out just about to the Freddies on NE 30th. Try going to Gresham or Hillsboro and you're talking quite a few DVDs.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
If the GIS data in question is anything like the stuff I work with, there is absolutely no information that I can think of which a)is useful to terrorists b)couldn't be easily discovered with a quick drive around the neighborhood. Information about bridge architecture, maybe, but not much else.
This 'terrorism' straw man is getting ridiculous - it's encouraging government offices to keep things a secret just because they want to. Granted, if you're running a government office, this is probably a good idea. I won't name names, but I can say that there are states with D.O.T.s out there with records that are inexcusably inaccurate or horribly out of date (cue '40s radio drama organ because everyone is surprised). Being beauraucracies, the natural solution to this kind of situation is to keep anyone from finding the problem by limiting flow of information as much as possible rather than to simply fix the problem.
Of course, doing this requires that you start keeping as many secrets as possible - you see, if the American public ever found out how terrorists actually operate, they would realize that all of thse terrorism-related justifications for huge wastes of money, freedom, integrity, and time are just one huge bullshit excuse, and the whole thing would come tumbling down. We can't have that, because then every government official from the lowest county clerk all the way up to George "Paid Vacation" Bush would have to actually put time into carefully considering policy decisions and competently piloting the areas they govern rather than smoking rock and blaming hippies and muslims for their mistakes like they do now.
--
Politics: coming from the Latin roots 'poly', meaning many, and 'tics', meaning small blood sucking parasites.
Why does the town keep Google Image Search data, and how can they keep me from it? - can't I just do my own GIS to recover the data?
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I type this every time.
An earlier poster correctly states that any terrorist who wanted GIS data for nearly any part of the country could simply purchase the data on the open market, so lets move past that motive for secrecy and examine other possible motivations.
While most towns in Connectivut and across the country are striving to make GIS data available in the most convenient way possible, in order to stimulate development and growth of their tax base, Greenwich is one of those towns having the highest per capita income in the state, so their interest leans away from development and toward privacy. God forbid some poporatzi get ahold of a terrain map overlaid with a keyhole satelite photo of Mel Gibson's house. That would be outragous wouldnit it? Oh, wait, the Poporatzi could buy the data on the open market just as any terrorist could...
Information which is available to anyone who is willing to pay for it, and is then purchased with tax dollars with the express purpose of making it available to those tax payers, sahould certainly be made available (obviously) so the question becomes, how should that information be made available? Why should non-Greenwich-tax-payers have access to it? While I would have a problem if the town planning commission purchased the data and made it available selectively to certain developers while denying access to the general Greenwich citizenry, I don't have nearly the problem with the town government denying access to those who do not pay Greenwich taxes. Most towns have their GIS data available online for all to see and use, but that's a choice, not a requirement. As long as the tax payers are benefiting from the town's purchase of the GIS data, it's difficult to make an effective argument that prefenting non-taxpayers from accessing the data, or even charging such non-taxpayers a fee for access would be unreasonable.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
They don't wana release their GIS images? But you can find Google Image Search images right there on Google! Simply outrageuous!
seriously...
Somebody needs to get a sense of humor.
------------------------------
Ray Raspberry
raspberry@b3l33t.org
General Info
Satellite Mapping
With Property Lines
Elevation
Crime Stats
Well you get the idea.
In Nearly All Paradigms, Shift Happens.
What does it matter whether or not they release the images? Can't a person just sign up or use something like Microsoft's Terraserver service to look up images for free anyways?
--Yoshiyahu ben Noach
That was a rather nonsensical decision by the court. So the city doesn't want to give out its parcel and assessor's data because then he could figure out where the rich people live. Oh noess!! You could drive around a city and get a pretty good idea of that anyway.
At work I have Ramsey County, Minnesota's full set of color orthophotos on my computer (I'm a GIS guy myself). They are of excellent resolution, to the point where a guy I know at the City of Roseville (who knew in advance what day the county was being flown) went out and put a 8.5x11 sheet of paper on the roof of his car in the City Hall parking lot. Sure enough, you can distinguish that piece of paper. Honestly though, there is very little you could learn from having this data that you couldn't piece together in other ways. I am racking my brain trying to come up with security risks and failing.
But the real issue here is that the poster seems to be trying to obtain this information for free, rather the paying the fees/subscriptions required by the states for providing the data in a presentable, standardized format.
Even the GPL lets you charge a fee. I don't have to make my source freely available on a website. I can require you to be a "customer" and I can require a "reasonable" fee.
One important reason is that just knowing that records will be available for public scrutiny removes temptation for bureaucrats to do a lot of things not in the public interest -- making sweetheart deals, sweeping nasty health risks under the carpet, and much more that you don't have to be an X-Files geek to appreciate. "Providing a valid reason" is just asking for a whole judicial apparatus to decide how "valid" the excuse is, wasting much more effort than simply providing the information requested, and allowing bureaucrats with something to hide a tool to keep it hidden. It's not just about trying to get the "real" Roswell/Grassy Knoll/Philadelpia Experiment files that are the stuff of your "sweaty geeks" fantasies.
portlandmaps.com
This is slightly offtopic from the Portland situation, but I have been trying to obtain SRTM (shuttle radar topography mission)data from the JPL for a project I am working on in Mexico. You can get the 1 arc second resolution data (approximately 30 m resolution) for the U.S. with no problem. However the best they will provide for outside of the U.S. is the 3 arc second data (approximately 90 m resolution). There is a "Memorandum of Understanding" between NASA and the NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) that the higher resolution data for outside of the U.S. is not to be released. http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/mou.html Pardon my stupidity, but how are you protecting our national security by allowing the release of more detailed topographic data for the United States, while not allowing the release of the same types of data for outside of the U.S.? This past week I filed a FOIA request with the NGA. All I want is a small block of data from a small patch of Sonoran desert in northern Mexico. Maybe I will get it, but I am not holding my breath.
How do you know what "most" FOIA requests return? No one tracks that sort of information.
Check out the username. He knows if you're sleeping. He knows if you're awake.
It's highly probable he knows what people are requesting via the FOIA. It seems like a pretty important piece of data to determine if someone's been bad or good. (So be good, for goodness sake!)
I'm posting this AC for obvious reasons. I know CT Chief Justice Sullivan (not a bad guy, really). His nickname is "Taco". You can take it from there and draw your own conclusions about his clue level.
...
OK, now that that's over with maybe I should read the decision to see if he even agreed with it
I hearby award you a prize
/* No Comment */
It appears that Greenwich Town provides access for A GIS map request from its site. It seems silly to me that the actual back-end data be obfuscated and off-limits, when the front-end data (e.g. the map) is available. Granted, I've not actually opened the PDF and seen if a fee exists, but it should be only nominally difficult to get a GIS map from these guys. I do not believe, then, that the orthophotography in use here is the issue. Then again, the map (link above) could just be a low-resolution version of the high-res back-end image captured by the plane.
Whatever the case, the decision mentions that
and I think this is more on-target with the decision against release of the information.My question, then, is this: how is this different than taking Census data and pairing it with Tiger to create fully data-minable maps of cities/counties/states? It would seem, to me anyway, that this information already exists out in the world, and withholding it is injurous and detrimental to the community, and damaging to support for local government.
Oh well.
DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, TOWN OF GREENWICH v. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION COMMISSION et al., SC 17262
Judicial District of New Britain
Freedom of Information Act; Whether Town's Geographic Information System Database is Exempt from Disclosure Under General Statutes 1-210.The defendant Stephen Whitaker requested from the department of information technology for the town of Greenwich (department) a copy of computer records from the town's geographic information system database. The records included orthophotography, consisting of photographic images of the town taken from an aircraft and corrected for spatial distortion and lens curve, and data depicting such things as building footprints, which could be overlaid on the orthophotography. He also sought computer server databases compiled by the town for use in creating its tax assessment databases, which included information on property ownership, value and street address. The department denied the request on the ground that Greenwich, as an affluent community, is susceptible to jewel thieves and kidnappers and that the records Whitaker sought could be helpful to potential criminals. The department also believed that release of the requested records could compromise the security of the town by facilitating terrorist activities. Whitaker then filed a complaint with the freedom of information commission alleging that the department had violated the freedom of information act when it denied his request. The commission found that the department's refusal to release the records was in violation of the act and ordered that the records be provided to Whitaker. The department appealed to Superior Court, which found that the department had failed to establish its claim that the records were exempt from disclosure because their release could create a legitimate public safety concern by assisting criminal or terrorist activities. The court further found that the department had failed to prove its claim that the records were exempt either under General Statutes 1-210 (b) (5) (A), which provides an exemption for "trade secrets," or under 1-210 (b) (2), which provides an exemption for "records of standards, procedures, processes, software and codes . . . the disclosure of which would compromise the security or integrity of an information technology system." The court, accordingly, dismissed the department's appeal. In this appeal to the Supreme Court, the department challenges the court's findings and additionally argues that the court improperly failed to consider Public Act 2002, No. 02-133, 1, which became effective shortly before the commission's decision. That public act amended 1-210 (b) (19), which provides an exemption for "records when there are reasonable grounds to believe that their disclosure may result in a safety risk," to include records of municipal agencies.
If you showed up to the office personaly you could get the data you were intrested in for free. Its the handling of all the presonal requests that eat up time hence the charging of data.
In my department the issue was raised if we should limit access on the internet of our waterline maps. We in the department figured that was crap since you could go and get for a minial fee copies of the paper copies on file.
We in the utilites have figured we will give you data to a certain point for free until the request gets too big then we will make you go and pay for the information you need. We can handle a certain area for free if you looking at a block and print you out a map but the minute you want the entire system you are looking to do more with what we provide and will get charged for the time we have to deal with you.
A lot of this might also be with resellers and other people that use the public data do a little tweaking and then try to sell it off to someone else. Such things might be road center lines from like GDT which might ask for a towns roads then put it into their system then try to sell that back to people that are doing mapquest type applications with it. Course that doenst prevent cities from entering in contracts with such clearing houses for data sharing we give you our data and we expect a certain amount of data back.
Just asking......
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
As others have pointed out, the data was developed at public expense. So I tend to strongly advocate that the public be given access to the bulk of it. For personal, educational, or non-profit use I believe that the data should also be available free of charge and in common data formats. At most, if at all, an individual should be required to prove that they are a local citizen (and taxpayer). A reasonable fee structure should apply for commercial use. However, the information should be clearly understood as being provided on an as-is, no support, no guaranty basis.
The datasets employed employed and maintained by municipalities (at least in my experiences, working for but not employed by) would be of little interest to terrorist types anyway. Public utilities (mainly, water and sewer; utilities such as gas and electric are commonly [though exceptions exist] provided by private entities and would not be maintained by a municipality), zoning data, tax/property ownership parcels/cadastral survey data, land survey reference points/markers, employment/housing/population densities, public transportation services (like bus routes), public safety services (particularly geocoded call locations), and so forth. I am not talking about the results of internal analyses or actual planning documents (like risk assessment, etc), only raw data. The potential problems posed by of simple mischief-makers or vandalism aside, which of these is a real "security risk"?
Even datasets that contain personal information (such as land ownership) can be edited server side and on the fly, depending on the access IP, to remove things like names. A complete file for internal use and a modified version for external distribtuion. Or, even more simply, strip out sensitive (in a privacy sense, like names) attributes before publishing it to the FTP or web server and put an "accurate as of..." disclaimer on it.
If someone really, really wants to know where utilities run, all they really need is a street map, a car, and a pencil. I have created datasets for small municipalities using this approach, digitizing off of 1-foot resolution aerial photos (though I did have as-built drawings for reference, the digitizing was largely a matter of playing connect-the-dots between manhole covers...it was scary how many mistakes were on the drawings). The same is true for more sensitive, privately provided utilities like gas and electric - a great deal of their infrastructure is above ground and on public display. This is the biggest reason that the "security risk" argument is totally false, even in large cities and especially for some small burg like Greenwich, CT. And in their particular case, the "security risk" argument is a complete straw man since they already SELL the data. How is making it available without charge to their own tax payers any less secure?
The real reasons that many local government agencies want to restrict access is a mix of control, funding, and FUD/paranoia. Government agencies and departments justify their own existences by the resources that they control. So they are going to hold on until their fingers bleed. This is related to the funding issue, where the additional monies generated by the sale of data add to that department's annual budget or perhaps to the city coffers in general. You think that Greenwich (or any other city) is going to willingly let go of what amounts to a hidden tax and a back-door profit center, especially in these days of stretched public budgets? I know of at least one local city that maintains their data in a proprietary projection and coordinate system for more-or-less this exact reason. The only way to see any of their data is to buy it...and for a significant fee. It's no coincidence that cities with this attitude also tend to not have a public map server for basic map display.
But I can get this sort of thing: Where I live in London without any trouble.
Did he inhale?
It would be easier to call the utility location service for your state than to learn how to use GIS data. The services are supported by the utilities and is a free service. In most states, if you dig before calling and hit a utility line, then you are held legally and financially responsible.
Take this classic example -- left, August 7, 2004; right, August 21, 2004 -- of a missing safety sign from the RNC convention in NYC this summer. Cryptome republished public-domain maps of major high-pressure, high-volume gas distribution lines in manhattan. One went under the Hudson River, near West 75th Street. There was a huge sign posted for ships that went over this pipeline: "Warning: Do not anchor or dredge - Gas pipeline crossing". I wonder who's going to take responsibility when one of the zillion boats that cross this point drops its anchor onto the pipeline? I don't feel safer at all & consider this lack of signage a threat to public safety.
Here's the whole page that picture came from
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Havn't the terrorists won yet??
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Ok, here's another blatantly obvious use for this information. Say you've got a pipe that is dumping greasy smelly water into the drain out side your house. This water appears to be contaminated with some pretty nasty stuff and it's running into a storm water drain. You call the EPA but they are mysteriously not interested in testing the water. You get a student at a local university to come test the water and he tells you that it is a health risk and ecologically unfriendly. After contacting the EPA with this information your claim is mysteriously ignored once again. What to do? If you have access to publically available drainage information you can track back the flow of the pipe to exactly where it is that this mess is coming from. After a little digging (figuratively, not with shovels) you discover that the water is coming from an adjacent industrial estate where cloth is being treated, and the owner of the business happens to be the second cousin of your local EPA representative. Seems to be a bit of corruption in your district. After taking this evidence to the a state official your local EPA representative is fired and the clothing factory is shut down. Wow, it's almost like this information is available so the public can see the transparent working of government!
How we know is more important than what we know.
pictures are not data.
Seeing an image, or map, and using an image or map are two different things in this context. For example as a GIS developer I would love to setup my own mapserver of the UK that lets me zoom in to a street level scale, or geocode addresses automatically, but both these tasks while free in the US are prohibitively expensive in the UK to all except large existing companies.
What this means is that it is very hard for a small GIS startup in the UK to get anywhere - so if you have an innovative GIS idea you go to the states or forget about it.
I don't know about the US but in Australia we have little yellow "dial before you dig" signs near major underground pipes/telecoms. If you didn't dial and cut through a 200pr coax in downtown Melbourne, you would quickly learn a new word, "bankrupt". Also excavators and the like are required to have "spotters", known to the untrained eye as "people leaning on shovels".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The whole GIS thing is a huge con. When I remember the famous explorers that were sent by the kings to map the unknown lands, I am filled with disgust for the greedy bastards that seem to occupy this business today. And because these companies are so greedy, they are killing the huge market before it's born. There are practically no useful applications of maps used in practice. There are a few ad-supported online services (MapQuest, Yahoo, etc.) that are used for the lack of a better alternatives, there are expensive car navigation systems and huge companies, who can afford it, use GIS. But if you compare it with the potential, the current state of affairs is appalling.
In most places it's easier and cheaper to buy a paper map and digitize it manually than to buy GIS data.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
because of partner deals with GIS agencies of those governments
I would guess it would be more akin to the security agencies in Europe would rather not risk release of data they can't screen, and consider it a security risk.
The GIS folks just milk it harder..
Besides, why worry about the Americans? You can buy the Russian's data on Europe on the cheap.
.sig: Now legally binding!
If I recall this from an earlier submission, the real issue isn't security at all, but economics, although the City of Greenwich has chosen the security issue to hide behind.
It is my recollection that the person requesting the data is a businessman who wants the data for some sort of real estate sales analysis and is leveraging the public availability of the data to his economic advantage.
This guy wants the full data set. I think the City will give him small chunks of it at a time with no problem, but sees giving out the full data set as essentially poor stewardship of tax payer resources.
Who wouldn't agree? If I'd shelled out $10,000,000.00 for something, I'd be a little testy with someone expecting to get it for free.
In short I question the motives of the person requesting the data, but more on grounds of economic exploitation that on grounds that he may be any sort of security risk.
Having said that, one thinks they could come up with a better argument. "Security" has become so overused as an excuse to cut off debate on things in the past four years that we seem to have lost any sense of descrimination at all.
There is a difference between a GIS user and a map user. A GIS user can relate different data sources to display it is a way that shows things you won't get on a street map. You can't tell me where the power grid is weak on a street map but I can with GIS. Don't confuse the ability of making maps with the ability to read them.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Uh, those are aerial photos taken from an airplane, not a satellite.
at the Houston Public Works site.
Judge also disallows sale of local maps at WalMart.
Judge closes down "call before your dig" program since paint markings may leak GIS information.
The last time a country was attempting to really stop the flow of GIS data was in the USSR. For example, no maps ever had the KGB office building shown. The streets just did some funny merging in that area --- looked like a small park should be there but going there was no picnic.
Nope, must control what everyone can see, know or even think about.
Might be used in a bad way.. Must protect citizens..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Why would you want to dig a big asshole in your back yard? Some kind of post modernist sculpture, perhaps?
I dunno, if it hasn't got a a vase of flowers in it, it ain't art, in my opinion.
The solution to all this is to produce "open-source maps". OpenStreetMap has made a start (although they don't appear to have got very far yet).
Mapping would seem to be the ideal open-source type application - it's inherently distributed, so lots of people can work on it in parallel. You don't have to worry about dividing up the workload - each contributor can simply map the area around themselves.
Unlike coding, which is a specialised skill (even more so for things like the Linux kernel), mapping is easy for anyone to do - just go and stand on street corners with a GPS and note the co-ordinates and the names of the streets.
The only thing holding back "open source mapping" is the need to have a GPS unit (you could do mapping by other methods, but realistically, GPS mapping is the most straightforward).
However, if mobile phone companies start to include GPS units in their handsets, then we could be all set for an open-source mapping revolution.
Yeah, the ongoing state of emergency (or war on terror) in the US is eerily similar to the way that Stalin or Hitler gained power.
1) Have national crisis, real or fabricated.
2) Use national crisis to extend political powers and reduce legal accountability for the duration of said crisis.
3) The state of emergency gets extended ad infinitum.
4) Go to step one.
For a similar comparison on another facet of America's changing face, we must look to the Roman Empire. After a century of brutal warfare with Carthage, they eventually razed the enemy cities to the ground and scattered their culture to the four winds (see USA vs USSR). Huzzah! Merry feasting and wenches for all.
And now, whoops, we are left with a massively powerful, highly trained military force. What to do? Disband them? An economy geared for war is dependant on war, so the financial consequences are not inconsiderable. And then where do all of these men find work? But most importantly, you can't just fire hundreds of thousands of trained killers. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out why.
So Rome used them to conquer and invade surrounding lands, in a cycle of ever expanding and increasing warfare, giving us the Roman Empire. I'll ask again a question I posed first in 2000...
How many peacekeeping missions do you need to keep a million men under arms occupied?
I guess we have the answer now.
By Christ
It almost ever state, it is illegal to dig even a small-ass hole on your own property without first calling 1-800-dig-safe (or some other similar #).
Sorry for the confusion (and for being off-topic), but where do you live where you have a president who could well be an idiot? I know I believe ours here in the US to be a bit sub-par, but where else is it percieved that you have this problem?
Which link supports this statement? This link states:
To me, that reads that the city lost and are appealing to the Supreme Court. Has the CT Supreme Court ruled on this? Am I missing something?Quoting from the story lead:
Why do you want this, when the City of Portland Oregon already provides free web access to this information?
With a simple interface, too: enter a street address and you get the plot map, links to aerial photos, utility maps, crime maps, tax and permit history, census data for the neighborhood, etc etc.
My gf and I have been using this a lot as we look for a new house. It is an excellent resource. I'm deliberately not providing a link since I don't want the site slashdotted. Those with sufficient motivation can easily google their way to the site (and hopefully will not provide a direct link on slashdot).
So again, since the city of Portland is providing all this detailed information on any specific address, what exactly do you want to do with free access to the entire database? Some kind of market research? I would oppose many of the possible uses you might make of the entire database, since I would be very aware that my city taxes would be subsidizing whatever scheme you are cooking up.
It seems to me that paying the city $900/year for access to this data is more than fair: you only need to convince three hundred of us Portlanders that what you are doing is worth a three bucks a year to each of us, and that cost would be covered. Certainly if what you intend has any kind of social value, that wouldn't be hard to do.
So THAT's why new episodes are so hard to come by
In NYC, the Technology committee of the NYC City Council (the legislature; directly represents the people by geographical district, like the House of Representatives) cannot get copies of GIS info controlled by the Department of Info Tech and Telecomm (DoITT), like maps of City-owned fiber loops. On the unsubstantiated grounds of "terrorist threat", the government oversight committee chair Councilmember cannot view the maps of which schools are connected, or nearly connected, by the fiber loops obtained at City cost to connect them - to protect them from "terrorists".
Imagine if the City stopped publishing maps of the subways and station entrances, because "terrorists" could use them to blow up trains, or execute a multiple simultaneous attack. Meanwhile, everyone knows where the Statue of Liberty is: 1Km across the harbor from the WTC site. During Christmas 2003, someone buzzed the Statue in their private plane for over 10 minutes before there was any response at all, let alone scrambling jets. This whole security through secrecy operation is a total sham that threatens our security in every way, while granting absolute power to a gang of technocrats - who aren't even geeks.
"Hello, baby, mm-hmm
Ah, yeah, you know we ain't, we ain't talkin' alone
Who's listening? Well I don't really know
But you better tell the SIS to keep out of sight
'Cause I know they takin' pictures on the ultraviolet light
Yes, uh huh, yeah, but these days it's all secrecy; no privacy
Shoot first, that' s right... you know
Bye bye.
Right now somebody is listening to...... you
Keeping their eyes peeled...... on you
Mmm, mmm, what a price, what a price to pay
All right. Good night, sleep tight"
- Fingerprint File by the Rolling Stones
--
make install -not war
The GIS vault keepers for New York City, the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT, or more appropriately, DoNOT) have a similar policy. All non City employees are treated as potential terrorists hell bent on devastating the City's infrastructure and bringing chaos to all. It's a shame. The layperson you ask on the street will likely have no idea this is the situation. Non City employees working in GIS have to fight these absurd policies. (I'm not bitter, btw.) The solution is to make some noise about this. I don't know about CT but New York City holds public forums concerning the use of technology. Contacting the Department and asking for the next appropriate venue to voice your opinion would be an excellent start. Prepare yourself for arrogant and dismissive City officials.
Most U.S. citizens believe that the terrorists attacked without provocation. That is not true. The terrorists attacked after many decades of experiencing U.S. government violence. (Violence does not justify more violence, of course, but most people don't believe that, including the leaders of the U.S. Defense Department, and the terrorists.)
The genesis of provocation is a poor way to frame a dicussion on terrorism. In fact I would call it irrelivent within the context of providing direction for public policy.
Catagorically, most terrorists today are using violence in an instrumental manner as a reaction to increasing globalization which they believe is a threat to either their cultural purity, their control over local populations, or both.
The vast majority of these terrorists have never experienced any interaction with the US on any level (although some view the reactions of their own authoritarian governments to being that of US control and influence - in some cases this is correct, but as a whole not the case). The US is a prime target because it represents globalization and global connectivity like no other nation on this planet. But it's not the only frequent target, as you can observe by watching any news servce.
All of these terrorist groups seek to maintain local populations which are disconnected from global influence. This is the only way in which they can maintain the powerbase that allows them to control the local population.
This holds true for both domestic enviromental terrorism and fundementalist terrorism (islamic/jewish and neo-nazi).
We as the more globally connected countries on the planet need to strive to bring connectivity to these lesser included countries. It is the only way to end the cycles of abuse and systemic complacency that makes it easy for the educated elite like Osama Bin Laden to manipulate the typically poor and under educated young men and women who end up following his ilk.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
I live in Greenwich, we have alot of money and McMansions here. I wouldn't be surprised if this has more to do with rich people wanting privacy than it has to do with security. But you also have to know that this town is a HUGE attraction for the worlds best thieves and I'm sure they would use this data if they had access to it.
Look, government passes laws. Laws only apply when government wants. Authority's rules DO NOT apply to authority. Why is this still such a surprise? You wouldn't walk up to Bin Laden and politely ask for his inside plans; what the heck drives people to think they can do so with a government?
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
It is not the acquisition of any single item of information or the information for any one town, but it is the mass consolidation of the information that holds the danger.
About a year after 9/11, I read an article that describe a graduate GIS student for their thesis that loaded up every bit of GIS information for the US that he could find - electrical, natural gas, oil, petroleum, telephone, water, sewage, fiber, railroads, roads, freeways, microwave relay, cell towers, storm drainage, chemical - you name it, he found it and loaded it up into his database.
For his thesis, he analyzed it and found a "number" of natural geographical clusters, that if taken out would do sever damage to the US. His professor brought it to the attention of the government. They in turn classified it, hired the student and professor, gave them clearances, so that the information would not leak out. Then they started asking the local governments to not hand out their local GIS information to everyone who might ask.
This post is interesting, because NIMA/NGA (the mapping arm of the Department of Defense) has just announced plans to remove a huge number of its aeronautical charts from public access, as announced in a Federal Register (PDF) message November 18. The restrictions would take effect October 1, 2005. This has been heavily announced on the FAA's mapping website.
To quote: NGA aims to protect the sources and integrity of its data, honor its bilateral agreements restricting nongovernmental use, avoid competition with commercial interests, and allow NGA to focus on its primary customers and mission, supporting the Department of Defense.
This is bad! Those great TPC charts (sample from U. Tex. Perry-Castaneda Library) that make excellent roadmaps and topographic charts are specifically marked for restriction. These charts are also seen in a lot of military-styled movies and films as backdrops on walls.
We aren't talking about weapons targeting charts, which are already classified. We're talking about basic topographic maps with foreign detail. Based on my minor involvement in GIS it looks like the Pentagon may be jockeying to eventually outsource its map production to commercial firms. But regardless, this will be a loss.
I have to ask, but if the data is valuable to real estate agents, home developers, etc, why would you keep it away from people? Why not put it squarely in the public domain so that everyone can have a level playing field? Maybe there are underdeveloped regions which could provide additional housing in a crowded city. Maybe he just wants to put up a McDonalds where it will be most used, instead of peppering three or four around an area.
It's not like this data will let the person steal money from homeowners, just let him run his business more efficiently. What's wrong with that? While it is possible that he would be looking for dishevled houses to offer predatory loans to, we have laws against that kind of behavior anyway.
If I'd shelled out 10,000,000.00 for something, I'd want it to be used as much as possible.
Not to trot out a dead pony, but BSD was publically developed and is free to everyone, which means that many people and business are free to exploit the stability and power of that OS without paying. What is the difference between a software application and publically collected information? If Microsoft wants to run their e-mail service from BSD, they are free to do so with everyone's blessings. If Starbucks wants those maps to decide where to offer drive-through Lattes, they should be free to do so. If I want to use those maps to find a house in a low-crime neighborhood, I should be free to do so. In all cases, everyone benefits to some degree.
The ______ Agenda
Just a note from a GIS guy for his own local water utility. Calgary puts most of its map data on the net, please see (and enjoy):
The government is certainly entitled to put restrictions on other use of private property: libraries have hours they are closed. Rules for use of that public property known as data, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, are not inappropriate.
http://emaps.calgary.ca/asp/emaps. asp
We of course do the exercise of pondering whether anything on it could be used for public harm (no need to get melodramatic about terrorism, could it just be used by teenage vandals?) and came up dry. It's all available on paper maps or by walking around.
There IS data that would be useful for attacking public infrastructure (certain specs on the local dam, say) and we do regard it as our job to NOT release that (publicly-funded) information without good reason - but that's on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, each defensible in court (since we may have to).
The question about this story is whether the judge is handing the town total carte blanche to deny ANY request for GIS data without further challenge.
He didn't. Mr. Whitaker asked for the WHOLE DATABASE, everything the town had. The town pled a problem as much from jewel thieves able to find all the expensive houses using the property value database, as much as fear of terrorists.
What the people writing to say "publicly funded data must be given to any member of the public" are forgetting is that the City must act as custodian of that public property and use it for public benefit, not private. The government is certainly entitled to put restrictions on other use of private property: libraries have hours they are closed. Rules for use of that public property known as data, on a CASE-BY-CASE basis, are not inappropriate.
Would they say that an oil company must be allowed to drill in public parks because the stockholders are public members too and have a right to use the park? Uh-uh, the rights of OTHER public are in conflict.
Calgary doesn't give out the database of property values, though it is publicly funded. We believe that the whole database has basically no value to any one private citizen. However, it has HUGE value to real estate agents. So we sell it to them, on BEHALF of the public, pocketing the money to keep their taxes a little lower. If a citizen wants to know the property values of their street, they can come in and look at the map for free. If they want to take home the map of the whole neighbourhood, small charge. The whole city - we figure they must be a real estate agent and they'd better have brought a fat chequebook.
As you can see, the matter requires a lot of judgement, compromises, and case-by-case decisions. And there are always the courts to render a final (case-by-case) decision on individual requests.
The sad thing for me about this case is that it wasn't decided on its merits - the Supremes used the "security" reason for their decision and Mr. Whitaker is not a terrorist or jewel thief but an architect and a good one, IMHO. His motive in the request was economic. Basically, he feels his couple of thou a year in property taxes entitles him not only to a couple of thou a year in police, fire protection and road paving and park mowing and all that, but about $10 million worth of data that his fellow citizens paid for jointly, and has little value to them personally, but huge value to him, a few more architects and real estate agents, maybe 0.1% of the Greenwich population, tops.
When the government has to do something ANYWAY, just to run the town/state/nation, and it can also hugely benefit some businessmen, should they then get that benefit for free (lucky them!), or should the servants of the people who paid for it charge them all the traffic will bear, like any other steward of property or services would do? Please don't see
If a beurocrat can get a power-kick out of doing something (s)he will. "Security" is just the latest tool that the beurocrats can use. It's a hard one to argue against because you're instantly labelled a terrorist sympathiser.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You can ask the Government to show you the internals of an Apache Longbow helicopter, or a nuclear sub. However...just because your tax dollars paid for it, doesn't mean you can see it. Security will be the reason why this will stick. It is easy to make the public fear the unknown, rather than give them information.
What is the point of gathering GIS data with taxpayer money if it is not going to be made accessible to the public.
For example. Someone, or their contractor, is going to be digging somewhere. The city will check for water and gas lines before issuing a permit.
Here is a pretty nice case study on how useless the FOIA is.
"The U.S. government has a lot of work to do"
In the above case the government was apparently too busy practicing various forms of torture to be bothered with FOIA requests. In particular DOD interrogators were posing as FBI agents as they were torturing people presumably so the FBI would get blamed instead of the Pentagon if they got caught.
You see the problem is most governments have a tendency to corruption and abuse of power. The FOIA is just one little tool our enlightened society put in a while ago(though we've stopped being an enlightened society lately) so watch dog groups have a chance to catch them at abuse, expose it and reign it in. You are completely missing the point if you think FOIA requests have much to do with fixing roads. They are mostly a tool for preventing our government from becoming corrupt or abusing its power ot worst case becoming a corrupt police state though it appears the FOIA and the watch dog groups are losing that battle.
There have been attempts to use the FOIA to expose the incompetence and abuse behind the TSA's no fly list though the TSA/DOJ were more successful in censoring every important detail on that one. The end result is we have this super secret list of names of people who will get hassled when they fly or simply can no longer fly. Well its not real secret because if you have a name thats on it and try to fly its obvious that name is on the list. Ted Kennedy and Cat Stevens among others made the list. No one knows how names are added to the list or more importantly how to get yours off. You see it is just a list of names and even aliases of people that some anonymous bureaucrat decided might be the name of a terrorist. Unfortunately if you happen to have the same name you get to be treated like a terrorist even if you are a little old lady or gent who has never even had a parking ticket. If you are smart you just mutate your name slightly like throw in your middle initial and the list magically stops harrassing you. It is quite a magical exercise in bureaucratic incompetence and abuse of power.
All in all I think we need a little more FOIA and not less.
@de_machina