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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.
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 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.