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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
General Info
Satellite Mapping
With Property Lines
Elevation
Crime Stats
Well you get the idea.
In Nearly All Paradigms, Shift Happens.
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.
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.
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.
I do realise the difference - what you called a map is just a subset of layers (streets, topography). GIS can contain these layers and many more, including power grid capacity and the ability to combine them all for processing, display, tracking, etc. But seriously, the prices for GIS data are astronomical. And because they are astronomical, they destroy the unborn mass market for geo data. Joel writes about the same problem for software pricing. Of course, there are some data sets for which there is no conceivable mass market, but overall there definitely is one for geo data/systems. But since it costs $1000s, only those who absolutely need them and can afford to pay insane proces become the clients, perpetrating this vicious circle.
Personally I found out (when making a city map for PDAs) that it's several orders of magnitued cheaper to hire a student to scan a folded map and create a vector map manually than to buy digital data.
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