Slashdot Mirror
NY Bill Would Require Online State Records
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Micah Kellner, the New York State assemblyman who last year submitted a bill to provide a tax credit to open source developers, has now proposed the 'Open New York Act,' a law that would make it mandatory for state agencies to put almost all of their public records on the Internet. According to Kellner's office, the law would 'revolutionize the relationship between New Yorkers and their state government, requiring all state agencies to make their records available through a central website — where the data can be used by activists, entrepreneurs, and others to create a host of applications useful in everyday life.' The Open Government Foundation, Citizens Union, and New York Public Interest Research Group all support the bill."
Sweet. This is the only positive YRO story I've ever seen in my life.
Boggle the mind. I guess it didn't occur to the people involved that just as many bad things can be done with this data as good things? I can see the headlines now. Don't like African Americans? I'll load up the "Negro avoider" app on my computer. And never have my commute disrupted again by the sight of people I don't like. Or what about the "victim finder" app for child molesters? Just take the data on family occupancies and compare to local crime statistics and police coverage and voila! Thanks Victim Finder! I hope I'm just crazy but this seems like a triumph of enthusiasm over common sense at first glance.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
We fund so-called 'sustainable energy' projects and other such things that aren't economically viable without government funding. Why not software too? And the return on investment is a lot better than a pile of wind mills, and no zoning laws or environmental impact studies to worry about.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Who's this crazy loon? I wanna send some campaign donation.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
What about the issue of privacy and the problem of identity theft?? If I were a stalker, an identity thieve, a rapist or even a vindictive ex , I would be salivating right now.
...until they have to pay for it.
Don't bother, he's a godless, hell-bound faggot.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. He just has to be bisexual! Now no matter what his politics and policies are, he'll never be able to accomplish much of anything.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
God damn chickenshit posting AC.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
NY doesn't have a lot of money right now. Every group that gets money from the state is botching and moaning that they are not getting enough. So let's spread the thinner to pay for a new project won't help.
There is the argument if you give people these jobs you will help the echonomy. However if this were to go across it would probably in Albany NY (you know the state capital that is about 200 miles from the city) where honestly has fared the recession rather well so these extra jobs won't have such a pronounced efffect in the echonomy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I only worry if records are not absolutely open to all with ease of computerised search. Things go wrong when some people or some businesses are allowed to hide some information while other peoples' lives are an open book.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. He just has to be bisexual! Now no matter what his politics and policies are, he'll never be able to accomplish much of anything.
Such bigotry demands a response, but as this is a geek website, I'll leave it as [ citation needed ].
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Harper's had an article on the NY Legislature in this month's issue which can shed some light on this. It turns out that New York has one of the worst and most corrupt legislatures in the nation. The leadership controls everything and ordinary members are free to introduce popular legislation knowing full well it has no chance of passing. New York introduces more legislation than any other state and passes them in the single digits percentage-wise.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/0082944
... a detailed accounting of Spitzer's expenditures would have been interesting reading.
Have gnu, will travel.
Such bigotry demands a response, but as this is a geek website, I'll leave it as [ citation needed ].
I have no problem with gays. I'm talking about the millions of voters who do.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
I have no problem with gays. I'm talking about the millions of voters who do.
Well they should know by now that republican gay senators get the job done just as well as their straight counterparts. You know, until they get busted in the bathroom. Then for some very strange reason, they become incompetent to hold public office. I wish someone would do a scientific study on the phenomenon -- it's a problem that potentially effects tens of millions of people. The reason for all this rampant stupidity in the country could be solved by simply posting signs saying "One occupant per stall". /tongue-in-cheek
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"Bill Nye Would Require Online State Records"
NY is running a 9 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT.... quit spending New Yorker's (my) tax money on useless bullshit.
Think about it.... the state was considering IOUs for tax returns..... we cannot afford this right now.
How about they just publish a list for each department, stating the number of tax dollars they collect (spend). Then a brief summary of the public benefit provided by those dollars and the address where you can go to see all the gory public record details.
I agree the privacy issues of public records is something to be considered before dumping it on the Internet, but there should be no reason for not publishing high-level meta data about public spending... except the spenders might not want thousands of arm-chair amateur investigative journalists stirring up "trouble".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You: I have a FOIA request for document FOO.
State agency: You can find it at http://www.ny.gov/opengov/123/sdoop1222233jj----/foo.2010.txt
You: I tried to access it, but I get a 404 error.
State agency: Sorry, we are fixing the server, please try again later.
Also, you have to look at the number of wealthy people who contribute huge sums to political campaigns, and wonder how many of them would support an openly bi-sexual man.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
As someone who works for a NY Government agency, I can see some pros and cons to this.
The main con results from the fact that State governments are by and large stocked with incompetents who don't have any clue regarding professional project planning, management, IT, budgeting, etc. So when the legislature passes a mandate, e.g. to put everything online, it will either be done in-house or contracted out, but neither option is good. In-house means it won't work, or it will work very badly, because the programmers are vastly underpaid compared to real IT workers, and generally come from the dregs of the computing world. Contracted ought to be better, but it usually isn't, because even in the miraculous event that the project isn't awarded to someone's brother-in-law's company, that is, even if the contract goes to a respected firm, the state will write up an indecipherable proposal or look to cut corners in ridiculous ways, such as buying overpriced off the shelf software that needs to be customized to work properly, but this step will fail because nobody will even know how to adequately explain what needs to be customized, so the software will never function adequately. Not to mention that the person who is in charge of the project will be rewarded for telling his superiors that everything is running smoothly, but would be taken off the project for pointing out mistakes, so officially things work perfectly even when they don't. That's true to an extent in private industry as well, but the crucial difference for the state is that nothing need ever be profitable or work competitively, so there is no incentive to finally iron out the bugs.
The main pro results from the fact that State governments are by and large stocked with incompetents. No matter how jaded you think you are, you would be shocked by the degree of decision making that is carried out by appointed bureaucrats in protected sinecures. Decisions that affect the daily lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people are done completely by fiat with no political accountability whatsoever. The more that this is exposed, the better for everyone.
Yeah, it's not like we have an openly gay chairman of a major congressional committee or anything...
The exception to the rule ;)
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
;(
It also depends on your politics. If you're a social conservative and you are outed, your political career is OVER. If you are a liberal, you have a lot more wiggle room.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
When open records laws were first conceived, it mostly applied to such records as people would have legal concerns about - birth/death, who owns a piece of property, etc.
Here's the thing.
All those records were primarily local, and were kept as paper - there were no computers. So if you wanted a record, you had to go to the place it was kept, wait in a line, and pay a document fee so a government clerk could go make you an Official Copy of whatever record you wanted. The fee covered the cost of the clerk's time and supplies, which, considering how manual this task is, was appropriate.
So if you wanted to know any of this "open" information, it amounted to a fair amount of trouble and expense. But if you had a good reason to need/want to know, you could know, and it wasn't a problem.
But today, with computers and intarwebs and such things, these records are free and pretty broadly available. So someone who, say, wants to letter bomb the residents and owners of every apartment in a tri-county area, can do it with virtually no effort or expense.
This is not good.
Privacy was maintained not by legislation, but by the simple difficulty of getting things done.
Now that these things are easy, we need a higher standard to limit access, not a lower one.
Keep vital records offline, please.
You think like a ReThuglican Jew
if this makes any part of the government more efficient i'm against it. there is little if anything the government does for me that i particularly enjoy or need. with that said. the less efficient they are, the less they can do to/for me and the more personal liberty i can enjoy. i fear what new and innovative ways this quicker manipulation of personal data the government will find to use against me.
It's not illegal for people to want to avoid blacks, whites or whatever, & it's not illegal for one to even make an attempt. Plus it's not the govt's role to stop people avoiding each other if that's their wish. Surely personal freedom trumps political correctness. It's only the govt's job to regulate personal freedoms where one person's act infringes on anothers' personal freedom, hence the existence of criminal statutes/laws.
After all I assume the criminal code was not designed to encourage or discourage integration, assimilation, multiculturalism, ghetto-ism or any whatever ism, of course many have tried but that leads down the road to Auschwitz & Stalin's genocide of Kulaks, etc, etc or on the opposite extreme backlashes, riots, revolts & mob rule.
Better to keep the statutes as minimal as possible, as in where persons/collectives committs act/s that infringes others' personal freedoms (mind you there's a bit of defining required here), plus of course to protect our enviroment. There is no society/community/civilisation if people are allowed to fuck with the air, water, topsoil & biodiversity.
Subsidies & govt intervention of the nascent oil industry were essential to the oil idustry as it exists today. For example you do know that BP was a creation of the Royal Navy.
Fossil fuel costs for defense and pollution easily rack up into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. As suggested in the book Brittle Power in 1982, renewable energy has been cheaper for decades than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you include *all* the externalities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
We just pay for fossil fuel use through our taxes and national debt for the military, and through health costs from mercury pollution and other forms of pollution that lead to health problems (even wonder why much fish is now unsafe to eat from mercury?), systemic risk like of economic disruption or global war over oil, and so on.
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
By the way, it takes more electricity and natural gas to refine a gallon of gasoline from oil than an electric car would need to go the same distance, so all that oil is completely wasted -- except it is profitable for some to fleece the public treasury.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
GE had a cost-competetive production ready electric vehicle built from off-the-shelf parts built in the late 1970s -- you can see it in the Schenectady, NY science museum.
That our elected officials have allowed this public fleecing using fossil fuels, including the destruction of the health of our rivers, oceans, and humanity through smog and mercury, to go on since the Reagan years is an unspeakable tragedy of widespread corruption and ignorance which wider access to pubic records might help some with.
For the cost of less than one half-year of US defense spending the USA could shift to all renewables, eliminating the need for much of the defense budget.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html
"""
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.