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?

[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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.