FWIW, all of the terrorists who participated in the 9/11 hikackings had government issued IDs. This is why the whole "Show us your identity papers" bit is totally bogus...
And what Gilmore's argument truly turns on is the question of is our country still governed by the rule of law? Or, is it governed by arbitrary rules created and enforced by un-elected government employees, rules that no elected official has ever voted on nor that any citizen can read. Indeed, the incident with Sen. Kennedy is the most high-profile example of a situation where no elected representative can even write legislation to modify these SSI rules because even they are not allowed to read them.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that there is information regarding our transportation system that should be secret. However, I do NOT believe that any rule or law that intrudes on a person's body, privacy, or Constitutional rights can in any way meet any conceivable needs test for secrecy. In their own way, the Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged this by founding Camp X-Ray and finding other means of keeping those whom they classify as "suspected terrorists" off of American soil and, thereby, outside of the protection of American law.
To roughly quote Benjamin Franklin, "Anyone who would exchange liberty for security deserves neither"...and, I would add, gets neither.
North Korea:
Dictator: Check
Oppressed people: Check,BR>
No legitimate elections: Check
WMDs: Check
Threatening to the West: Check
Able to flatten the national capital of a major regional ally using conventional artillery within minutes of the start of any hostile action: Check. Send in the...Ooops, wait a minute, did anyone bother to count just how many THOUSANDS of conventional artillery pieces the NKs have pointed at Seoul?
Oh...THAT many, huh? Ummmm, never mind.
If "that other country" could have shelled Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Kuwait City, etc back to the stone age using only conventional artillery, then everyone's favorite deposed dictator would not have been found literally hiding in a hole in the ground.
OK, so maybe this is a little redundant. But it seems that only a few slashdotters can tell the difference between Bill, Microsoft, and the Gates Foundation...
Bill is the wealthiest man in the world. But what many people forget is that Bill comes from money, OLD MONEY. His family are the kind of people who sit on boards of directors and have dinner with US Senators kind of money. The kind who drop out of Harvard and not some state school. And they are also the kind of people who don't just phone it in to Jerry Lewis every year or give to the office United Way campaign to get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling, but who create friggin' foundations. Bill provided some serious seed money to create the foundation's endowment, which was then invested and grown and is gradually being given away to worthy causes. Its not like Bill's personal signature is at the bottom of each check the Gates Foundation hands out (at least, I wouldn't think that he is that hands on).
Yes, Microsoft is the evil empire blah blah blah...
And the Gates Foundation does good things in the world. Only a drooling idiot would argue that providing funding to fight AIDS or vaccinate children against common (and some not so common) diseases is somehow bad. Go take your dumb ass and your tinfoil hat and crawl back inside your parent's basement. If only more of the truly wealthy people in this country felt a similar responsibility to give something back to their communities, the nation, and the world instead of just buying another Ferrari or vacation home...maybe the world would be just a slightly better place...maybe.
It would be easier to call the utility location service for your state than to learn how to use GIS data. The services are supported by the utilities and is a free service. In most states, if you dig before calling and hit a utility line, then you are held legally and financially responsible.
As a GIS professional, I have mixed feelings on this. Mixed in the sense that I believe that there should be controls over data access, but I strongly feel that the argument that ALL data should be restricted on security grounds is completely bogus.
As others have pointed out, the data was developed at public expense. So I tend to strongly advocate that the public be given access to the bulk of it. For personal, educational, or non-profit use I believe that the data should also be available free of charge and in common data formats. At most, if at all, an individual should be required to prove that they are a local citizen (and taxpayer). A reasonable fee structure should apply for commercial use. However, the information should be clearly understood as being provided on an as-is, no support, no guaranty basis.
The datasets employed employed and maintained by municipalities (at least in my experiences, working for but not employed by) would be of little interest to terrorist types anyway. Public utilities (mainly, water and sewer; utilities such as gas and electric are commonly [though exceptions exist] provided by private entities and would not be maintained by a municipality), zoning data, tax/property ownership parcels/cadastral survey data, land survey reference points/markers, employment/housing/population densities, public transportation services (like bus routes), public safety services (particularly geocoded call locations), and so forth. I am not talking about the results of internal analyses or actual planning documents (like risk assessment, etc), only raw data. The potential problems posed by of simple mischief-makers or vandalism aside, which of these is a real "security risk"?
Even datasets that contain personal information (such as land ownership) can be edited server side and on the fly, depending on the access IP, to remove things like names. A complete file for internal use and a modified version for external distribtuion. Or, even more simply, strip out sensitive (in a privacy sense, like names) attributes before publishing it to the FTP or web server and put an "accurate as of..." disclaimer on it.
If someone really, really wants to know where utilities run, all they really need is a street map, a car, and a pencil. I have created datasets for small municipalities using this approach, digitizing off of 1-foot resolution aerial photos (though I did have as-built drawings for reference, the digitizing was largely a matter of playing connect-the-dots between manhole covers...it was scary how many mistakes were on the drawings). The same is true for more sensitive, privately provided utilities like gas and electric - a great deal of their infrastructure is above ground and on public display. This is the biggest reason that the "security risk" argument is totally false, even in large cities and especially for some small burg like Greenwich, CT. And in their particular case, the "security risk" argument is a complete straw man since they already SELL the data. How is making it available without charge to their own tax payers any less secure?
The real reasons that many local government agencies want to restrict access is a mix of control, funding, and FUD/paranoia. Government agencies and departments justify their own existences by the resources that they control. So they are going to hold on until their fingers bleed. This is related to the funding issue, where the additional monies generated by the sale of data add to that department's annual budget or perhaps to the city coffers in general. You think that Greenwich (or any other city) is going to willingly let go of what amounts to a hidden tax and a back-door profit center, especially in these days of stretched public budgets? I know of at least one local city that maintains their data in a proprietary projection and coordinate system for more-or-less this exact reason. The only way to see any of their data is to buy it...and for a significant fee. It's no coincidence that cities with this attitude also tend to not have a public map server for basic map display.
Slashdot Mirror
And what Gilmore's argument truly turns on is the question of is our country still governed by the rule of law? Or, is it governed by arbitrary rules created and enforced by un-elected government employees, rules that no elected official has ever voted on nor that any citizen can read. Indeed, the incident with Sen. Kennedy is the most high-profile example of a situation where no elected representative can even write legislation to modify these SSI rules because even they are not allowed to read them.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that there is information regarding our transportation system that should be secret. However, I do NOT believe that any rule or law that intrudes on a person's body, privacy, or Constitutional rights can in any way meet any conceivable needs test for secrecy. In their own way, the Bush administration has tacitly acknowledged this by founding Camp X-Ray and finding other means of keeping those whom they classify as "suspected terrorists" off of American soil and, thereby, outside of the protection of American law.
To roughly quote Benjamin Franklin, "Anyone who would exchange liberty for security deserves neither"...and, I would add, gets neither.
Dictator: Check
Oppressed people: Check,BR> No legitimate elections: Check
WMDs: Check
Threatening to the West: Check
Able to flatten the national capital of a major regional ally using conventional artillery within minutes of the start of any hostile action: Check.
Send in the...Ooops, wait a minute, did anyone bother to count just how many THOUSANDS of conventional artillery pieces the NKs have pointed at Seoul?
Oh...THAT many, huh? Ummmm, never mind.
If "that other country" could have shelled Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Kuwait City, etc back to the stone age using only conventional artillery, then everyone's favorite deposed dictator would not have been found literally hiding in a hole in the ground.
Bill is the wealthiest man in the world. But what many people forget is that Bill comes from money, OLD MONEY. His family are the kind of people who sit on boards of directors and have dinner with US Senators kind of money. The kind who drop out of Harvard and not some state school. And they are also the kind of people who don't just phone it in to Jerry Lewis every year or give to the office United Way campaign to get that warm-and-fuzzy feeling, but who create friggin' foundations. Bill provided some serious seed money to create the foundation's endowment, which was then invested and grown and is gradually being given away to worthy causes. Its not like Bill's personal signature is at the bottom of each check the Gates Foundation hands out (at least, I wouldn't think that he is that hands on).
Yes, Microsoft is the evil empire blah blah blah ...
And the Gates Foundation does good things in the world. Only a drooling idiot would argue that providing funding to fight AIDS or vaccinate children against common (and some not so common) diseases is somehow bad. Go take your dumb ass and your tinfoil hat and crawl back inside your parent's basement. If only more of the truly wealthy people in this country felt a similar responsibility to give something back to their communities, the nation, and the world instead of just buying another Ferrari or vacation home...maybe the world would be just a slightly better place...maybe.
It would be easier to call the utility location service for your state than to learn how to use GIS data. The services are supported by the utilities and is a free service. In most states, if you dig before calling and hit a utility line, then you are held legally and financially responsible.
As others have pointed out, the data was developed at public expense. So I tend to strongly advocate that the public be given access to the bulk of it. For personal, educational, or non-profit use I believe that the data should also be available free of charge and in common data formats. At most, if at all, an individual should be required to prove that they are a local citizen (and taxpayer). A reasonable fee structure should apply for commercial use. However, the information should be clearly understood as being provided on an as-is, no support, no guaranty basis.
The datasets employed employed and maintained by municipalities (at least in my experiences, working for but not employed by) would be of little interest to terrorist types anyway. Public utilities (mainly, water and sewer; utilities such as gas and electric are commonly [though exceptions exist] provided by private entities and would not be maintained by a municipality), zoning data, tax/property ownership parcels/cadastral survey data, land survey reference points/markers, employment/housing/population densities, public transportation services (like bus routes), public safety services (particularly geocoded call locations), and so forth. I am not talking about the results of internal analyses or actual planning documents (like risk assessment, etc), only raw data. The potential problems posed by of simple mischief-makers or vandalism aside, which of these is a real "security risk"?
Even datasets that contain personal information (such as land ownership) can be edited server side and on the fly, depending on the access IP, to remove things like names. A complete file for internal use and a modified version for external distribtuion. Or, even more simply, strip out sensitive (in a privacy sense, like names) attributes before publishing it to the FTP or web server and put an "accurate as of..." disclaimer on it.
If someone really, really wants to know where utilities run, all they really need is a street map, a car, and a pencil. I have created datasets for small municipalities using this approach, digitizing off of 1-foot resolution aerial photos (though I did have as-built drawings for reference, the digitizing was largely a matter of playing connect-the-dots between manhole covers...it was scary how many mistakes were on the drawings). The same is true for more sensitive, privately provided utilities like gas and electric - a great deal of their infrastructure is above ground and on public display. This is the biggest reason that the "security risk" argument is totally false, even in large cities and especially for some small burg like Greenwich, CT. And in their particular case, the "security risk" argument is a complete straw man since they already SELL the data. How is making it available without charge to their own tax payers any less secure?
The real reasons that many local government agencies want to restrict access is a mix of control, funding, and FUD/paranoia. Government agencies and departments justify their own existences by the resources that they control. So they are going to hold on until their fingers bleed. This is related to the funding issue, where the additional monies generated by the sale of data add to that department's annual budget or perhaps to the city coffers in general. You think that Greenwich (or any other city) is going to willingly let go of what amounts to a hidden tax and a back-door profit center, especially in these days of stretched public budgets? I know of at least one local city that maintains their data in a proprietary projection and coordinate system for more-or-less this exact reason. The only way to see any of their data is to buy it...and for a significant fee. It's no coincidence that cities with this attitude also tend to not have a public map server for basic map display.