Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan

Author:Thomas P. Keenan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781771641234
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2014-08-22T22:00:00+00:00

New York City was a pioneer in the Open Data arena. In October 2009, with considerable fanfare, they released a number of municipal data sets. The next day, they had to take one down because it contained private email addresses as well as secret questions and answers. Despite their fast corrective action, once a dataset is exposed, even for a day, it is impossible to get it back. In the absence of specific logging and tracking procedures, it is often impossible to know precisely who has accessed or copied the information.

Government databases that contain personal information are particularly sensitive. One of the most interesting is the one containing the legally-required disclosure of political campaign contributions.

If you donate to a U.S. federal political campaign you are required to provide information such as your address and occupation which will make its way to the database of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

This is to conform to what the Wall Street Journal’s Laura Saunders called “a crazy quilt of federal tax and election laws.”248 She also explains that “donations by individuals of $200 or more in a year must be publicly disclosed to the FEC within as little as 20 days.”

Rules differ for U.S. state and municipal elections, and, of course, in other countries. But the principle, that the public should know who’s contributing to a particular candidate, is a pretty fundamental and universal one.

Peeking at political contribution data wasn’t a big issue when you were required to make a specific written request to access this information. You often had to wait while bureaucrats handled your query manually; so only the highly motivated bothered to make a request.

Now, vast amounts of government data can be searched by anyone, anywhere, often anonymously. It can also be manipulated with the same data analysis tools that corporations and governments themselves use.

I settled on Philadelphia as the place to investigate the public disclosure of campaign contributions. Like New York, this city was making its government data broadly available. They were also attempting to provide free city-wide Wi-Fi Internet access. These records are online, so there was no need to physically go to Philadelphia. Everything you might want is right there at OpenDataPhilly.org.

Since this particular analysis was done several years ago, it is almost certain that some of the details about how the data is presented may have changed. However, unless the law changes, campaign finance data will always be available in some form.

It is important to understand the difference between accessing government data through a user query interface and downloading entire data sets. OpenDataPhilly allows both, at least for campaign finance data.

I plugged a particular name into the query interface. The system churned for several minutes (one of the disadvantages of using query apps as opposed to processing the data yourself) and it gave me my answer. Ronald Rivest of 41 A****** Street, Arlington, Massachusetts 02476 donated $200.00 on May 4, 2011 to Friends of Stephanie Singer. I have redacted part of the street name but the original database was completely forthcoming with the precise address.

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