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Open Gov't Advocates Fear that Private Messaging Apps Are Being Misused by Public Officials To Conduct Business in Secret (pbs.org)
The proliferation of digital tools that make text and email messages vanish may be welcome to Americans seeking to guard their privacy. But open government advocates fear they are being misused by public officials to conduct business in secret and evade transparency laws. From a report: Whether communications on those platforms should be part of the public record is a growing but unsettled debate in states across the country. Updates to transparency laws lag behind rapid technological advances, and the public and private personas of state officials overlap on private smartphones and social media accounts. "Those kind of technologies literally undermine, through the technology itself, state open government laws and policies," said Daniel Bevarly, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition. "And they come on top of the misuse of other technologies, like people using their own private email and cellphones to conduct business." Some government officials have argued that public employees should be free to communicate on private, non-governmental cellphones and social media platforms without triggering open records requirements.
We have the government saying encryption is thwarting their efforts to gather information on people, while at the same time (some) government folks are saying it's perfectly reasonable for them to use apps which thwart the public's effort to gather information on them.
But open government advocates fear they are being misused by public officials to conduct business in secret and evade transparency laws.
Before the digital age, the government employees would have meetings in person and just not write down what was said. That doesn't make restaurants and bars somehow complicit or instrumental in government officials' malfeasance.
Face it, there is generally a de facto expectation that private meetings and discussions in person are not automatically subject to transparency requirements. I mean, should a government official be required to record every single meal they have and with whom and what, if anything, was discussed?
Granted, there is a blurring of the lines with things like Twitter. Everyone wondered whether President Obama would blur that line, though he did a very good job separating himself from his personal social media presence once he became president. On the other hand, President Trump has not done the same and Hillary Clinton most definitely acted wrongly with her private email setup (she was not the only, but by far the most willful and egregious example). In any event, the discussion needs to be had because of the nature of social media and other technological means of communication.
Ever since the founding of the nation, everyone has had conflicting agendas.
Personal, business, family, religion, township, state, nation - they all have different optimal outcomes.
Folks become politicians because they think they can work out something that will work for most, if not all of those levels - and yeah, often, those motivations are corrupt.
Like in science though - the answer should be that matching up to reality should be the goalstick - and conflicting motivations should bow towards that.
The problem is that when we allow motivations to become too corrupt, reality itself becomes the enemy of those motivations.
Open government is an important motivation because it prevents folks from straying too far too long from being compared with reality.
That's the role of the press in recent centuries - to take conflicting biases, and hold them against reality, one story at a time. Even in the yellow journalism eras, and now in the Fox news and social media era - it made it difficult to operate too far away from reality as a politician.
But it's not an infinite effect - it can be washed away by enough motivation against reality.
And to folks that love science and honest study of reality, it's something of a disgusting transformation of a nation.
Especially in the sense of what's going to happen when reality reasserts itself after the current illusion wears thin.
Ryan Fenton
People who enter public service must be held to a different standard. They are being temporarily given a large amount of power over other citizens along with the opportunity to personally profit by that power. That requires trust, and the only way to assure trust is making all their communications and actions subject to public review.
If someone doesn't like that, fine. They don't have to be a public servant, they can be a private citizen like everyone else. Traditionally, going into politics was understood to be a sacrifice, rather than a lifelong career, so giving up certain things was expected.
Fear that it is being abused? Hasn't it been uncovered already?
politicians who refuse corporate PAC money
Including Hillary, Bernie, Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Mike Dukakis, etc and so on and so on.
If you're not condemning Democrats along with Republicans, you are a shill and liar.
Do you seriously think all of that?
You do realize the one tax return they got was from him. He leaked it. Turns out he pays more in taxes than all of the rest put together.
If anything we now have a president the media is willing to pay attention to. Instead of slurping his jizz. If you think 'your team' is any better *think* *again*. They are *all* corrupt with a very small handful not being so. The non-corrupt ones you can identify by how they do not always vote with the crowd. This 'corrupt admin' has shown exactly how corrupt it is top to bottom. You have ignored it because of your bias. Has it occurred to you that he now sits upon a mountain of 'classified' information? That shows exactly how corrupt it is and he is calling them out on it? Think your bias is not being manipulated? Think back to before he was elected. Then walk your memory forward on all of the manufactured scandals. How pretty much all of them have turned out to be false. How all of them use the same rhetoric. How all of them have the same nay-sayers saying nay? How at NO point have the democrats stepped up to the plate and said 'hey lets work with him'. Do you not find that interesting? Maybe you can 'resist' more.
Oh, I think public servants also need to be allowed the right of being private citizens when they don't work, except for the few positions that really are 24/7, like president.
But the lines between the two need to be fairly firm - a private encrypted e-mail to your cousin is one thing, and a "private" encrypted e-mail to your cousin who runs a company that bids on government business is a different thing.