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Google Pushes To Open Public Records
AlHunt sends us an AP story on Google's push to help states open up their data to online searchers. Google is going about this in an evenhanded way, according to the story, and the results of its labors — initially in Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia — will be available to all search engines, not just theirs. The move is being hailed by groups such as OpenTheGovernment.org, but the Electronic Privacy Information Center expressed concerns, given what they call Google's "checkered past" with regard to privacy on the Internet.
Now not only are my stupid usenet posts from the early 1990s going to be available, so are my other "youthful indescretions". Great.
So when are Google, the Library of Congress and the CIA going to combine and be simply known as the CIC?
(Literary reference. Hope I didn't get first post.)
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If privacy advocates are concerned about public records becoming more easily accessible, they should get laws passed that limit the collection of such data by the government. It seems like Google gets the criticism because their search engine is too good at doing what it is designed to do.
Where our government claims copyright on court cases and findings and other public documents. If you want a document, you order it from Go Print. There's libraries in our court houses, like most the rest of the civilized world, but if you go in there in a pair of jeans the librarian will come over and ask if they can "help" and then ask you if you are a law student, and then ask you if you are a lawyer, and then ask you to leave.
Thankfully you can still read the laws without paying the government for a copy of them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Dear god, now anyone will be able to read public records. What is the world coming to?
New tags to search for, like Mother's maiden name, social security number, schools attended and the name of the first pet, of the first car. A Google spokesman said, "You dont have to click on the phishes any more, we provide all they need ourselves!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We've always maintained this weird security-through-obscurity dichotomy with public records. Technically the information is available to everyone by law, but it's such a pain to get it that nobody bothers
This has given people a false sense of security when it comes to government data collation. I don't think most people realize just how much public information this out there that anyone with a few bucks and who knows who to ask can see it. On the flip side, it means there's almost no public benefit from the government keeping the information because it can't be easily collated by a private citizen.
This is the best thing that could happen--let's dump it all out on the net and make it easy to see someone's entire public record. Let's go for complete transparency and let public information really be public information. If the government really is overreaching, the outrage should be enough to throttle them back. And maybe they aren't; maybe this really is in the public interest. Now we can find out. Either way, it's going to force a resolution.
On another positive side note, this'll also gut the cottage ripoff industry that's grown around public records research. You shouldn't have to pay some PI wannabe $$ to walk across the street and meet his records-room friend at the Capitol.
The Wisconsin Circuit Court Access (WCCA) ?
:-)
That site allows you to search any court case in WI. There are limitations - minors often aren't on there, and certain other cases are blocked from public access as well. But overall this has been a *good* thing.
Hell, I even once ran a girl I had started dating through there - and turned up three shoplifting convictions.
We always went to her place after that...
Do you think that models and actresses from the 1970s through mid-90s ever imagined their sex scenes would be available for FREE AND EASY download to ANYONE on the planet?
Talk about "youthful indiscretions". That's gotta hurt.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Maybe we should make a law that there can be no more laws.
You joke, but I could think of a good law that do almost that. How about a law that states that the number of words that can be used to create laws is now fixed at its current levels. So, pretend that you want to pass a law with 10,000 words in it. That would mean that you would need to either remove a law, or reword a current law such that you free up 10,000 words.
What would be the result? Well, I bet you would find government pork would drop like a rock and laws would become much simpler to understand. Shit, need some words to pass the new health care law? Let's axe an old law giving pig farmer subsidies to do anti-terror research. Trying to pass a new tax bill? If you try and make it archaic and full of loopholes you are going to have to go hack up some OTHER archaic and richly worded law... or just write a simple law that makes sense as a normal human can read.
I could see only good things coming out of this.
I'm sure there will be a steady stream of eager users for stalker.google.com long before it emerges from beta.
I'm guessing that it's cluelessness on the part of Google management, but I hope someone there gives some thought to what will happen to their "do no evil" public image when the body count from their negligence first crests over three digits.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Google plays along with China in censoring but it lobbys in the US for opening government records? While at the same time its board is advising it's sharholders to not vote for proposals to bar any "proactive" censorship (and Google is censoring a lot)? Google is getting creepy and I already use another search engine to get unbiased results. Google's board objects to anticensorship proposal http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/googles-boar d-objects-anti-censorship-proposal/story.aspx?guid =%7BE4924442-BA3A-4F47-A5B8-DCA66F1A9CB0%7D
the difference though if you can search the records electronically is that it will be easier to mine the information. that will be very difficult with printed records limiting the scope of malicious activities.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
...is universality. Sort of the same reason some Democrats were pushing for a military draft without as many exemptions--if it applies to everyone, a lot fewer people are willing to go down that road. If everyone's information is available, with no exceptions for being a Senator or CEO of a fortune 500 company or a famous actor or famous conservative talk-show host, then enough important (i.e. rich) people will be opposed to scuttle it and inadvertently protect the privacy of us little people. But if your military record can magically become inaccessible, or the number of times you've been arrested for DUI can vanish, just because you're running for President, then we're screwed because the rest of us will still have no privacy. The only way to defeat the encroachment is to make the loss of privacy universal.
While the social security number issue is important, it barely scrapes the surface when it comes to the dangers of doing this.
Open government records exist to ensure government accountability.
For example, court records exist to prove that the operations of the courts are fair, impartial and proper.
However, when incorporated into private databases (in this I include search engine indices) the character of these records changes tremendously. For example, if you are sued by your landlord, future landlords will be able to search the records, using it as an intelligence database on you, not a record of the operation of the government. Likewise, if you had a disgruntled employee who files complaints about alleged violations of state regulations, then potential employees and investors could be deterred from doing business with you.
Placing public records in private datasets alters the nature of the records.
The problem is that in the US, the legal notion of privacy is broken. It was broken by technology.
In the US, we have a libertarian notion of privacy that is based on some simple dichotomies: public/private, disclosed/undisclosed. Information is either of a public nature, in which case it is fair game to ferret out and publish, or it is of a private nature, in which case you are protected from intrusion. It is either undisclosed, which means that if it is of a private nature it is safe, or it is disclosed, in which case anybody who has the data in hand is welcome to publish it to the world. The only exception are those who have a specially recognized duty of confidentiality, such as doctors and lawyers.
The reason that this is a libertarian notion is that it seeks to preserve the freedom of anybody who receives data to do whatever they please with it. That is why when you give your name and address to a vendor, that vendor can turn around and sell that information, as well as information about what you have purchased, to somebody else. While US law forbids using this information in a credit report, it does not clearly forbid using it for investigative purposes such as a background check. Even if you construe a usage of this information as a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, since it is not part of your credit report, you have no way of knowing that it is being used in a background check or by identity thieves or stalkers.
Our notions about privacy tend to be centered around the concepts of non-disclosure, but the issue of privacy is much deeper. Privacy, in my view, is the right of the individual to choose and act autonomously without unreasonable interference by outside parties. Limiting informational privacy to protection of non-disclosed facts falls far short of protecting what we expect privacy to secure, which is nothing less than individual liberty. Nowhere is the threat to individual liberty greater than in the use of government records for purposes other than ensuring the proper operation of government. As an individual, you are not free to avoid appearance in such records. If you are sued, your name, address, and information about your doings goes into a public record. This is true even if you are subpoenaed. What is worse, individual bits of data about you can be assembled from various public record sources to create a picture of your private life, even if no single fact in isolation reveals much.
In 1972, the US Department of Health Education and Welfare published a report called "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens". It was a very early look into the impact of computer record keeping on privacy. The report, started under Secretary Elliot Richardson, recognized the privacy dangers inherent in using data for purposes other than. Richardson, whose integrity and impartiality was widely admired on both sides of the isle, left his position in HEW to take over as Attorney General during the mushrooming Watergate scandal, and he was replaced by Caspar Weinberger, known to current generations as an early
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