Land Sales and GIS

Here's an article from the Imperial Republican I found of interest (the hook was an academic moving from ND to NE):

" The biggest factor was Nebraska’s full disclosure of ag land sales data. Shultz told participants at the Holdrege Water Conference in early February that in North Dakota, only county assessors have access to sale details.
Nebraska assessors must send detailed reports, including land prices and equipment sales, to a database for all sales that aren’t family to family. That data is used by UNO researchers to create Geographic Information Systems computer models that can sort and compare many variables.
One project involves mapping Republican Basin ag land sales and analyzing the value of water. Shultz said a goal is to identify the premium payments required to get landowners to retire parcels from irrigation."

My bureaucratic mind says there ought to be convergence of GIS layers and owners--why is everyone reinventing the wheel. But one obstacle is always the concept of private data. Until we get some community standards for what is acceptable use, the convergence can't happen.

Those Special Interests and Public Data

One of the things that's problematic these days is the line between public data and non-public data. Obama ran on transparent government, meaning government data should be freely available. But you run into problems, as is illustrated in the following, when private interests have found a way to exploit public data and sell it, or perhaps some farmers are trying to claim a privacy interest:

"If you are an FSA/NRCS/RD employee or have an E-Authentication account, go directly to the USDA Geospatial Data Gateway to order the Common Land Unit (CLU) data. Be sure to click on the Login menu item for the E-Authentication.

Please be advised that with the enactment of The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, Title I - Commodity Programs, Subtitle F - Administration, Section 1619 on May 22, 2008, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) is no longer allowed to make the geospatial data, including access to the Common Land Unit records, available to the public, even through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Section 1619 is an Exemption 3 statute that prohibits FSA from sharing this data with the public."

This isn't an "earmark", mandating the spending of taxpayer money on a particular project, but it works the same, because a narrow interest is being served without a proper debate.

Google Government

The Post has a piece by a man who tries to go 24 hours without Google. (He succeeds in not using Gmail, but he does contact pieces of Google.) He's suspicious of Google's accumulation of data. He concludes:

I went into this experiment fairly certain that it would require the cursory change of an odd habit or two. I learned that my dependence on Google runs deeper than that, encompassing not only my personal Internet use but the nested dependencies of the people and institutions surrounding me. This is perhaps less a celebration of Google's tenth birthday than it is the harrowing revelation of our tenth anniversary. So goodnight, dear Google -- congratulations, and sweet dreams.

It led me to some other thoughts. Googling yourself may be a reason Google isn't as fearsome as it might be. You're on a par with all other users of Google--it doesn't play favorites. And that's somewhat true with the historical stuff--you can see your own web history, at least for a while. Granted there's stuff Google stores I can't see, but they claim, at least, the data is depersonalized--no connection to my name and ID.

Moving on to government--why shouldn't government operate like Google. Why shouldn't it be a principle: you can see anything the government has on you.

Transparency

Government Executive reports on a growing movement for transparency in government, particularly in the field of government expenditures. As I commented there, I like it, mostly. EWG has done it to farmers for 12 years and they've mostly survived the experience.

Have I mentioned David Brin's Transparent Society recently? I like it.

I'd extend the idea to many areas. For example, Down to Earth has a post about McNuggets--how McDonald's has some housewives looking at their processes. Why shouldn't McDonalds stick video cameras hooked to the Internet in the places they want us to see, and the places we want to see (as mentioned in the post). Granted, very few people would ever want to watch 50,000 birds eating and sleeping, but PETA might check now and again.

If people can use cameras to watch pregnant cows and babysitters and somewhat senile oldsters, we can use them elsewhere.

Good Bureaucracy in the DC Government

I don't know who might be responsible, but I like the effort, as described in today's Post, to have one ID card that works for all functions of DC government. Apparently the ACLU doesn't have big problems with it.

Public Servants Publically Identified?

David Kopel at Volokh.com raises the question. As I've said before, I don't see a reason to keep this data private.

Transparent Society

I've always liked the ideas in David Brin's Transparent Society. Brad DeLOng participates in a discussion of it after 10 years. IMHO federal bureaucrats, especially SES, and to a lesser degree perhaps the GS, should lose most on the job privacy. Let's stick an Internet camera in the office of each Congress person and each Federal executive. Let's let everyone know when someone in the bureaucracy is looking at their data. (Yes, it will take forever to implement, but it's the way to go.)

Making Acreage Report Data Public

I commented on this decision back in February, but this article gives a bit more detail from the FSA side. I remain confused over the lines being drawn between releasing FSA data on farmers and prohibiting the release of other data. As usual, our political/legal system doesn't produce the sort of logical results which would comfort a rigid personality like me.

Identity Checks and Government Blogging

Here's an article on changes being made by DHS in handling their no-fly list and here's the DHS blog's post on it . (If I understand, Ted Kennedy gets stopped all the time, because there's a suspected terrorist (or at least someone on the no-fly list) with a similar name, so they have to establish Ted isn't the same person. Now, under the proposal, if Ted allows his date of birth to be added to the airlines data, he can go right through.)


The proposal makes sense to me, but not to the first four comments on the blog. Maybe they aren't into genealogy, where you have to distinguish among multiple John Rippeys or even worse, William Smiths. Much less try to reconcile the data between ASCS and SCS to determine whether each agency was dealing with the same people. But then, I'm just a retired bureaucrat who tends to trust bureaucracies, at least in some instances.

ID Cards for Government

Government Executive reports on the latest progress report on giving government employees and contractors fancy ID cards. If I understand, we went backwards from last year. And we're still falling short of Bush's objective. [smile]

Like to point out this line: "Agencies had blamed technical challenges to issuing the cards. For example, agencies had to develop solutions for integrating the IDs with support systems that maintain the data and provide an interface with enrollment and issuance functions."

In other words, your card is only as good as the underlying personnel system. If you don't have a good personnel system, it can't support a good ID card system. That's a small detail that program managers, like Bush (or, to be fair, like Gore before him) don't understand.

I Quibble with Charlie Peters--Passport Flap

I've been reading Washington Monthly since it started, meaning I've been reading Charlie Peters, the founding editor. But today I disagree with him on the passport flap at State. Any long-time reader will not be surprised to see that I think the State passport system should send out an email anytime someone accesses a file. (If Abebooks can email me anytime some vendor offers a book I want, or Amazon do something similar, surely it's "technically feasible" (to use one of my favorite terms) to do so.

More on Privacy

MSNBC's Red Tape says looking at other's data goes on all the time while Government Executive finds someone to comment more generally on privacy and the problems in government agencies.

Meanwhile, innovators are ripping away the mask of privacy from government employees--the NYTimes reports on a website where you can post evaluations of police officers you encounter. (The president of the California police association isn't happy.) It's not unlike the site for rating your professor, which is now matched by a site for professors to respond, or your neighbor.

Soon everyone will rate everyone.

Snooping in Passport Files

Read somewhere that smart op-ed writers polish up their piece independent of the news, then wait for some event to happen that they can piggyback on, tweaking the piece slightly. As I said, smart.

But I'm not that smart, so the flap over passport files leaves me wishing I was.

From what little I know and have watched, it seems that the cable channels are misstating the facts when they mention "flags"--the State Department system was set up to flag when the files of certain persons were accessed, but it wasn't smart enough to know whether the access was inappropriate. I'm glad we've advanced that far, but sorry we haven't taken another step--set up the system to email the passport holder when someone accesses it. (That's one of my hobbyhorses.)

As for the immediate flap, I'd guess the instances are cases of curiosity gone astray. And it surprises me not at all that the accesses weren't reported up the line. It's just not the way things work. When State put in the system that would show accesses, I bet no one did a trial run to establish how the flags would be handled. At best, the high muckety-mucks were told--hey, remember that flap over Clinton's files in 92, well now we've got a new improved automated system that will flag such accesses. And the HMM's said: "great job", and went on to something more seemingly important.

Let's Nationalize an Industry

My reputation as a liberal might be shaky, given some of my posts (those I've posted, and even more the ones I drafted but didn't complete). So let me redeem it by proposing a good old-fashioned nationalization. (For those too young to remember, "nationalization" is when the government takes over a corporation or an industry. Britain just nationalized Northern Rock (a bank) rather than let it go under.)

I'm prompted by this article, on loss of individual data. The reality is you won't have 100 percent compliance with any rule about protecting personal data, whether by government agencies or corporations. It just won't happen until the hard drive manufacturers and database vendors get together and use Moore's law (increasing efficiency of electronics) to deliver hardware/software packages that automatically encrypt all data. That is, until data protection becomes automatic and not something people have to decide to do.

So, what the government should do is nationalize Lifelock.com, and its competitors. See this post. Much of what lifelock.com does is to build on existing government stuff--FTC.gov mostly. Assuming the service works, I'd have the government provide the coverage to everyone. If it's the government's job to provide for national security, cushion the blows of unemployment, provide a currency, etc. etc., I'd also make it responsible for guaranteeing against financial loss due to identity thief of SSN, name and address.

What the Internet Is Missing

It's missing ads. No, not electronic ads, but the print ads which will be indispensable for social historians of the future. I say this because yesterday the Post ran a full page ad which I'd like to link to, but I can't.

Instead I'll link to the website--LifeLock, which is an identity protection service.

The service itself, LifeLock, appears to be consolidating a number of things you can do for yourself, requesting free credit reports, taking your name off junk mailing lists, etc. You aren't paying for a magic formula, you're paying for convenience. Is it a good deal--damn if I know, might be, particularly for someone with paranoid tendencies who simultaneously is willing to trust someone to guard their identity.

But what it does have is a great gimmick--the founder puts his social security number in the ad. It's a great example of what used to be called "eating your own dogfood" (I think that was it--anyway the idea is, when you're developing an IT system, the big test of its usefulness is whether its developers use it themselves. Sort of like Congress--if they come up with a new health care system, do they scrap their own current system and switch to the new one.

Privacy or Public's Right To Know?

USDA faced that question back in the 1990's. A public interest group, Environmental Working Group, had requested records from ASCS (now FSA) on the people getting payment. We initially denied the request based on the Privacy Act of 1974. (I well remember when that was enacted, the Act required that before someone could be required to give information, you had to describe the legal basis for the requirement, the uses to be made of the info, and estimate the amount of time required. In brief, all the fine print you can see on IRS 1040's. It was a major pain to figure out how to get that stuff in all the forms the agency used.)

But, we eventually lost the case in the Appeals Court. Turned out our assumptions back in 1974 were wrong--data wasn't covered by the Privacy Act (except Social Security numbers and a bit of other data) so our IT shop had to figure out how to give the data to EWG in a usable form while leaving out the SSN's--they succeeded, and the rest is history, as you can see in the EWG farm database.

Now USDA has lost another appeal on other data. I'm not clear on the files covered, but might be the basic acreage data--the location and acreage of farms and fields and the yearly report of planted acreages.

It's nice to know how realistically the courts view agriculture:

"The appeals court noted that disclosure of crop information may compromise an individual's privacy interest since not all farms are owned by large corporations. However, in this instance, the court found that this was not a valid concern.

"We conclude that the public interest in disclosure of the Compliance file and GIS database outweighs the personal privacy interest...

It's not EWG asking this time, but Multi Ag Media LLC, which seems to own some magazines for dairymen. The decision is here.

Cows as "Spimes"

Here via John Phipps. Here's an interesting talk by Bruce Sterling on "blobjects", spimes, and other entities.

And see this from the NO NAIS people (RFID chip that can be read at a distance, perhaps for bull riders).

And apropos of cows, here's a bit on the Taiwanese dairy industry.

National Animal ID System

I've great faith in the ability of people to be paranoid. So I can't wait for the opposition to the National Animal ID System (NAIS) to merge with the opposition to gun registration laws and to Real ID.

It's all the Mark of the Beast, isn't it?

Of course, logically they should all merge with the pro-choice forces in supporting a right of privacy in the Constitution for guns, animals, and people.

Losing Privacy--How Did We Win It?

William Saletan writes about how technology is depriving us of privacy here.

It's all true and interesting and worrisome, but:

how did we get all that privacy in the first place? I wait for a historian to write about the advance of privacy.

SS Number Problems

DHS is revising its plan for using SSA's database in enforcing immigration rules, according to this article. SSA's IG reported that there's a high inaccuracy level in the data, which undermines enforcing strict rules on employers.

This is a symptom of the problem, which is we're trying to use the Social security number system for work it was never designed to do. It would be much better to start over, setting up an accessible system with proper updating and quality checks, and privacy safeguards.