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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.
The City of Portland operates portlandmaps which provides free access to limited GIS data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Politics: coming from the Latin roots 'poly', meaning many, and 'tics', meaning small blood sucking parasites.
Raster data can be quite large, but don't underestimate the size of vector data tables. Thankfully DBFs compact extremely well, but uncompressed the tables for an entire county's parcel set or a multi-county street centerline file can be very big.
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.
Speaking of the pizza delivery guy.
I was a manager at a pizza delivery place when 9/11 happened (heard the news on my way to work).
A couple days later we got a delivery order from a nearby government building (mapping agency, coincidently) and the driver came back just a tad rattled. He had nearly overshot the FIRST white stop line (double gate system). The guard told him it was good he'd made the stop. When he joked back about getting arrested the guard simply said "that's not what would have happened" and pointed to the top of one of the buildings, there my driver saw a sniper and another on a different building. After he was done looking the guard then informed him "you can see those two because they want it known they mean bussiness, the others are well hidden, don't miss the second guard check". He didn't.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
If I were a terrorist, or even a run-of-the-mill foreign intelligence service, the first and most trivial thing I would do is an automated scan of Terraserver or any other similar system.
Any coordinates that turn up blank, or which can be detected as out of date, would immediately become a priority point of interest. Often the ABSENCE of information can be even more revealing than the information itself.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You don't seem to understand what Greenwich is. Many of the CEOs and financial leaders of New York live in Greenwich. It's probably the wealthiest suburb of New York City.
In one high profile event two years ago, Eddie Lampert, the famous investor and private equity dealmaker (same guy who led the buyout of KMart this year and was in the news for that) was kidnapped and held for ransom (before being released by his incompetent kidnappers).
As for terrorist events per se, I don't know that it seems terribly likely. Though there are several corporate headquarters, and many hedge funds and financial groups based out of Greenwich as well. Anyway, while unlikely compared to something in NYC, it's definitely not as utterly ridiculous as you are making it sound.