Privacy, Security and Accountability by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
ISBN: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2015-12-15T16:00:00+00:00

What do we mean by an informed public? Does everyone have to be informed?

What, precisely, are people being informed about? Is the information relevant and useable?

In order to answer these questions, we need to know what benefits we hope to achieve from transparency. I return to these questions in the final sections of the chapter. First, I describe OGD in more detail and consider the multiple benefits and costs of OGD that have been discussed in the literature.

Open Government Data

In 2008, a newly elected president Barack Obama pledged to work towards “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”[9] A key theme of this open government initiative was an increase in transparency, which the White House defined as “providing the public with information about their government’s activities . . . disclosure about, for example, what federal agencies have done or will do. Transparency’s premise is that citizens are entitled to know what, how, and why government does what it does.”[10] One component of this initiative was to make government data accessible online. Such “open government data” has been defined as “non-privacy-restricted and non-confidential data, which is produced with public money and is made available without any restrictions on its usage or distribution.”[11] Government data includes information about, produced by, and collected by government agencies, including “documents, databases of contracts, transcripts of hearings, and audio/visual recordings of events.”[12] The Obama administration defines open data as “publicly available data structured in a way that enables the data to be fully discoverable and usable by end users.”[13] Open government data platforms include http://www.data.gov, which provides access to data collected by government on topics ranging from climate to small business loans, and http://www.recovery.gov, which provides data on how the money dispersed as part of the 2009 Recovery Act was spent.

The Obama administration’s open-government initiative is guided by principles set down in a memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).[14] These principles express the common wisdom in open government circles about how transparency initiatives like OGD should be implemented. Indeed, the OMB guidelines largely mirror the recommendations in “Principles of Open Government Data” developed by a group of transparency scholars and openness advocates.[15] Thus, these principles will give the reader a good sense of the guiding ideas behind OGD proposals.

According to the OMB’s principles, government information should be:

Public. There is to be “a presumption in favor of openness,” consistent with valid reasons (e.g., privacy, security) for restricting access. The idea here is that all data should be shared unless there is a strong justification for not doing so.

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