Object Lesson in Non-Transparency At Energy.gov

Harperdog writes "Dawn Stover recounts her attempts to access information at energy.gov, the U.S. Energy Department's 'cutting-edge, interactive information platform,' which apparently isn't any of those things. Especially frustrating were her attempts to locate important documents related to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. An interesting read for anyone interested in true government transparency."

Comments

Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[icebike]

One wonders if accessing information about Coal or Natural gas production would be easier than information about Nuclear waste storage.
It might be she stepped into a Homeland Security issue, and managed to get herself on a watch list. All these documents were supposedly transferred in 2010. That would put it squarely in the Obama administration's Open Government time frame, but it was also during the height of the irrational security theater phase of locking up information about everything from Atomic weapons to Water supplies.

Google would have been more fruitful, as the article states.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[jazzboat]

Additionally, basing her conclusion on the search results for one document seems a bit rash. True, from her description, the document should have been found, but just because this one document was not found, it does not prove that this is either another example of an open governement project failing or some nefarious conspiracy.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I have tired using data.gov to try to get the GIS data for the trails in national parks, I also tried the national parks service without any luck. So it isn't just sensitive info that is impossible to get.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[Synerg1y]

But but but, let's back up a minute here. The government trying to purposefully obfuscate sensitive data on a website? Realize they wouldn't publish truly sensitive data here... also, when has the government ever made a user friendly, easy to navigate website? There are projects out there that scrape government websites into better websites to present data. It's more a testament to our IT fail than deliberate vagueness.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[hairyfeet]

Or it could be that the site just blows chunks just like their petition site. seriously how can you fuck up a registration input with captcha so damned badly? Please god tell me that was donated to the gov, i'd hate to think we paid for that shite on a crusty roll.

if there is anything one should have learned about interacting with the government by now it should be its frustrating, often insanely overcomplicated for even the simplest little thing, sucks time like mad, and if you aren't real careful you'll either end up going around in circles or in a catch 22 situation. Frankly most of the nitty gritty is a giant mess that only seems to help spawn more government workers. BTW did you know that government workers now outnumber fishermen,loggers,miners,and about a half a dozen other jobs combined? Blew my mind when i read that but it makes sense, red tape breeds pencil pushers like shit breeds mushrooms. BTW if anybody can find that list of how many jobs combined are less than government workers i never thought to save it and its a pretty damned long list.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[quacking duck]

Government-run healthcare is not awesome, but it is arguably necessary.

However, that's a moot point because that's not what the US is going to get. The US had a right-wing party yelling "socialists! Death panels!" at a less-right-wing party which put up self-imposed roadblocks to appease them, even though the latter controlled Congress, Senate and White House (until late 2010), until you got mandatory health insurance.

It is a giant clusterfuck that Republicans are secretly overjoyed to get, because when it collapses they will tout it as an example of why public health systems don't work, even though it's nothing like the public health or mixed public/private systems in other countries that DO work (though again, not awesomely).

They (and much of the American public) also ignore the fact that even before Obamacare, even during the Bush Jr. era, the US was already spending more tax dollars on healthcare per capita than all the other industrialized nations. If they'd only spend those *existing* health care tax dollars properly, the standard of care that the poor and lower-middle class would be AT LEAST as good as Canada's (which has plenty of flaws, don't get me wrong, but it's very unlikely to force people into bankruptcy or taking out a second mortgage), and the wealthier could still pay for better health services.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[hairyfish]

on the one hand, they can complain about DMV, Post Office, Social Security Services, etc and etc, and then turn around and say "Government Run Health Care is going to be AWESOME Woot!"

Boggles the mind.

By that the logic, the govt shouldn't be responsible for anything. The govt may be shithouse at certain things, but as far as distributing healthcare to everyone equally, is still the best model available.

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[Aquitaine]

This is nothing but FUD. Yucca Mountain has got next to nothing to do with nuclear weapons and you aren't going to get on a 'watch list' by asking about it. It's been studied and discussed and studied all over again dating back to 1978. The proposed storage facility is for spent fuel from nuclear reactors. You can't use this stuff to make nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean you want to hand it out at parties, but it's a basic radioactive storage problem first, and a security problem no more so than storing any other hazmat.

Yucca Mountain has been declared safe and a great site for exactly what the US wanted to do with it numerous times, but it suffers from a huge case of NIMBY. Nobody, state or Federal, wins votes by announcing that they've found a great spot to put all their spent nuclear reactor fuel. It doesn't matter if all the spent nuclear fuel in the country could fit in a football field and it doesn't matter if it's the best place in the entire country for it. The only thing that matters, like all political boondoggles, is whether anybody with clout is going to suspend cover-your-ass mode and actually try to solve the problem -- and Obama's answer, like most politicians, has been a resounding 'no.' This is usually followed up by some squirming and an admission to the effect of 'actually, all this stuff is fine where it is! We are so much smarter than we were in 1978. Those crazy kids back then thought we should bury this stuff in a mountain! Naaaaah.'

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[trevelyon]

You might want to read the article a bit more carefully. She states that there is a wealth of documents both in google and on the NRC (nuclear regulatory commission so it is rather unlikely this is a security issue or one of limited search for one document. She also lists several other search topics that provided similarly poor results. In particular presenting the information with no summary is not security it's poor implementation that will end up wasting the user's time, provider's bandwidth for little return. I would not ascribe to security what seems to clearly be incompetence. That argument should be left to the cable and telco companies when they transfer you to overseas support and ask you to provide all the information you just gave the last person "for security purposes".

Re:Perhaps a less sensitive subject?

[hairyfeet]

Hey i'll be happy to give you a great example of why the current system is bad, 100% true. my mom was a nurse for nearly 40 years and you know what one of the biggest procedures was for poor males? heart valve replacement. you know why? Because while the government wouldn't pay to get that tooth that had gone bad out of their head they WOULD pay for a full valve replacement. Cost of the tooth $1000 max if they needed an oral surgeon, cost of the valve replacement north of $150k.

The best argument i can make for free healthcare is simply the fact that now we are penny wise and shitloads of pound foolish, the example above being one of just dozens of stories i could tell of huge amounts blown because the government wouldn't help someone when the problem was small but would when the problem had blown out of control. I could give you horror stories on everything from bugs spreading like widlfire to cancer and in every damned case it could have been incredibly cheap to just nip that shit in the bud but because the current system rewards doing nothing on the little things instead of free clinics we have ERs packed with people that would have seen a family doc in decades past but now simply can't afford it or families buried under bills because mom or dad worked sick until they finally collapsed and ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks instead of being able to simply go to a doc and get it fixed when it would have cost a bottle of pills and a doctor's visit.

That is why i'm so proud of my oldest boy who took the loss of his mom and deciding it was a sign to make this world a better place is busting his ass in pre-med now, not to become some rich surgeon or have a fancy clinic, but because he wants to open a small town family practice and help the poor. I have no doubt he'll be the kind of doctor that'll barely keep his head above water because he'll be trading doctor visits for chicken dinners or even nothing at all and will be spending half his time hustling for the drugs his patients need but can't afford but you know what? There won't be a way in hell that I could be prouder of him for dedicating his life to making this world a better place to be for the poor.

Appearance Is Everything

[jasnw]

After working with a variety of US Government agencies over my 40+ year career I learned many lessons about how these agencies work. A major one was how mandated actions or behaviors were handled. It wasn't important that you actually did what the mandate called for, it just needed to APPEAR that you did. This website experience from TFA sounds very much like this behavior.

What a surprise

[Attila Dimedici]

What a surprise, the Administration that touts itself as the most transparent in history, isn't. As a matter of fact it is busy obfuscating as much information about the government as possible.

Re:What a surprise

[quintus_horatius]

It's like anything else in politics: perception is all that matters, not substance.

Non-transparency or a bad website?

[slimjim8094]

I read the article, and he's basically got problems with the search feature, the size of PDFs (or the quality of their previews?), and what happens to agency documents when an agency closes (they go to an agency that handles 'legacy' documents)

This is a very accusatory article and summary for the problems he's got. Non-transparency? Obfuscation? Or a work-in-progress? If new work is hidden away, or old work isn't made available in a straightforward and reasonable fashion, then complain... but this guy just comes off as complaining.

Re:Non-transparency or a bad website?

[acwnh]

You couldn't have read the article too closely since the author's first name, Dawn, is usually a woman's first name.
The article goes into a fair amount of detail regarding information that used to be available prior to the new-and-improved-and-consolidated website energy.gov. Based on the contents of the article, I personally would conclude that the author's complaints are valid.

Re:Non-transparency or a bad website?

[jklovanc]

Ever heard the phrase "one catches more flies with honey that with vinager". Instead of accusing the site of being "not transparent" maybe she could have stated that search engin needs fixing and suggesting exactly how to do it.

Another issue is that she is looking for a ten-year old document from an Office that was closed and all documents transferred to Legacy Management. If the documents were transferred in electronic form, as they should be, it is up to LM to put them up in searchable format. The OP's issue should be with LM and not Energy.gov.

By the way, just because one can not instantly download any document created in the last ten years does not mean the government is not transparent. It just means that they have not dealt with the millions of legacy documents.

Yucca Mountain is needed

[Squidlips]

I hardly blame them for not releasing information on Yucca Mountain to a potential muck-raking reporter. I know everyone hates the idea of Yucca Mountain, but do they realize the alternative? Nuclear waste is currently being stored on-site all over the country and piling up. The potential for disaster is growing unless that waste can be disposed of, and I am not aware of any better alternative than Yucca Mountain.

Re:Yucca Mountain is needed

[Brett Buck]

We don't need to poison our air and water to have a succesful society, and nucular is BAD. All we need is to go back to nature, get rid of all this awful progress and live simply. If I need energy I will just hitch a few unicorns to a plow! Simplify man!

Usability

[bwvandorn]

I didn't find the sites mentioned in the article any harder to navigate than the average commercial site. Author was incorrect about not being able to access documents online at the Office of Legacy Management site. I suggest she show a little more patience and perseverance if her object is to find information. If she just wanted to flame Obama's promises of transparency, any topic or government site would do.

Re:The Slashdot troll post investigation

[Score Whore]

Holy shit! Been a long time since this was first posted and managed to receive several hundred mods. Followed up by a temper tantrum from the slashdot management team banning anyone who moderated it from ever moderating again.

Do not attribute to malice...

[decsnake]

that which can be attributed to the government procurement process. IME, all federal govt web sites suck, esp. those used for internal purposes, for which conspiracy theories just don't even make any sense. What they do all have in common is that they are developed by contractors, under the competitive procurement process. Just ask anyone that has had to use fedtraveler.com.

Handy Link yields an additional 86 results.

[dthx1138]

Right after I went to energy.gov and searched for Yucca Mountain, I got the same 22 results. However, on that results page was a link right at the top entitled "search all of Energy.gov" which then yielded 108 results. It doesn't seem like the author was very thorough here, herself.

Considering that these are generally PDFs containing large quantities of information (not endless blog re-posts like you'd get with Google hits), it's pretty hard to believe that there's a deliberate attempt to obscure information.

Is their search system as intuitive and comprehensive as Google? No. Then again, nobody's is- if it was easy, everybody would be doing it, and Google wouldn't be Google.

Energy.gov shouldn't have a built-in search engine

[dwheeler]

The Energy department should not have wasted a dime of public money on a specialized search engine built into their website. Yet it looks like they did just that. Government agencies should focus on getting the documents posted in standard formats (e.g., PDF) and then let commercial engines do all the work. You get bonus points if you mark the documents with key metadata (title, authors, abstract, date), but even without that, most commercial search engines can find lots. I'm not the first to note that, several articles have noted this.

If an agency just HAVE to have a search engine on the page, they can just reuse a commercial one. For example, if you want to reuse Google, just follow the instructions here: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/ which just inserts a few lines of HTML. From then on, all done. You can see an example on my website front page at www.dwheeler.com. I don't actually do the searching... I just redirect to Google. And users don't have to use Google, they can use any search engine they find convenient.

Typical government operation.

[BobK65]

They have a crappy search engine. Do a google site search. site:energy.gov "yucca mountain" returns 2460 results.

Thoughts from Energy's Digital Director

[Cammie Croft]

We’re always looking for ways to improve Energy.gov and I appreciate hearing the concerns outlined in this article and comments.

In fact, after this article flagged concerns about searching the site, we started working to change the search functionality on the homepage of Energy.gov to default to global search. Currently, the search defaults to within the top-level Energy.gov pages and doesn’t include results from all the subsites within the platform unless you indicate as such. For example, when I search for "Hanford" on Energy.gov, I get 20 results. However, when I select “search all of Energy.gov” the results increase to 254 items.

While we are incredibly proud of the new Energy.gov platform, there are Energy Department program office websites and subsequent documents that just aren’t on the Energy.gov platform yet. In order to improve the availability and transparency of our information, we’re currently in the process of migrating the remaining program office content into the system (including the Office of Legacy Management’s website and documents) – but this process takes some time.

It’s no secret: the federal government has a pdf problem. And at Energy.gov, we’re striving each day to make it better. We’d love feedback on how to do so. Feel free to share your ideas here: Contact Us