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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.
Yes, because government is accountable to the people, not the other way around.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
This isn't me wanting to spy on my neighbor, but not wanting my neighbor to spy on me. This is the relationship between a people and their government, which is by it's very nature, asymmetrical.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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
No, this is wanting governments to follow the laws they passed. Open government laws require that records are kept and trying to get around that is illegal.
What we need are stronger punishments for this activity as we already have decided that these acts are against the law.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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.
Exactly, the US government is expressly empowered by the people to act for the people, in specific ways. We don't have the Divine Right of Kings here.
The Constitution explicitly delegates certain specific powers to the federal government, and reserves all other powers to the states and the people. Powers are preserved with the people because that's where they come from. Washington politicians work for us, at our pleasure not the other way around.
Until we get public officials that don't believe Microsoft Support wants them to install VNC on their computer to resolve a virus issue, this will be continue to be done for us at no charge by benevolent third parties.
--- Mercutio was right.
I concur. Jail plus a lifetime ban on participating in politics or lobbying. I think that last bit would dissuade a lot of politicians planning to move to the lucrative lobbying sector after they get out of office.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Fear that it is being abused? Hasn't it been uncovered already?
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.
I agree, and I think the problem is that the public (media?) has knee-jerk responses to what looks like misuse of funds without really paying attention to the relative scale. I remember the complaints when a GSA conference had an expensive sushi dinner in Las Vegas - when the per-person cost wasn't actually out of line with typical conference food. Yet that got as much media attention as 10s of billions of overruns on a F35 project, and those got more attention that the question of whether a multi $100B fighter plane project made any sense in the first place.
The public / media will jump all over a government official who makes an unguarded comment that some find offensive, but not pay nearly so much attention to someone who always is careful to use the right words, but who's policies cause widespread harm to the same group.
It creates a difficult situation where there is good reason for complete government transparency, but where detailed public scrutiny can result in a wild misdirection of public concerns.
I fear that government officials are using the telephone and the USPS to cheat, lie, steal and otherwise abuse the system they are supposed to be supporting. I think messaging apps are just the latest tool in the hands of some of the worst crooks on the planet, our elected officials. I could of course be wrong, but I'd not bet my lunch money on it.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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.
everyone knew exactly how Hilary was corrupt. The emails didn't matter. Her corruption was right out in the open. We knew she gave Wallstreet speeches for money. We knew she sold access to the state department, we knew her foundation was sketchy and we knew she manipulated the DCC to stop Bernie. All the emails did was fill in a few blanks. The email servers we there not to hide corruption, there were to keep her opponents from knowing her strategies.
We know our public officials are corrupt because they're making no real effort to hide it. We need a litmus test for all politicians. If you take corporate & PAC money you don't get elected. You don't even make it past primary season. Nobody, and I mean nobody, can serve two masters.
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"People who enter public service must be held to a different standard"
;)
They are held to a different standard. Laws and regulations never apply to them!
Just my 2 cents
Half of the country voted for Hillary Clinton
No, about 20% of the country voted for Hillary Clinton - nearly 66 Million voters voted for HRC, but the population of the country is closer to 330 Million.
More voting-age Americans chose not to vote in 2016 than voted in the election.
Ken
Why does the Department of Education need a SWAT team?
Ken