Dot Connecting: Citizens, Government and Technology

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Culture and Context:

Dot Connecting: Citizens, Government and Technology

By Susan Miller
Published on June 16, 2005 - 03:48 AM

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A handful of items in the news today caught my eye.

Forrester Research is reporting that â€œagency heads, CIOs, and program managers are faced with increasing obstacles to widespread adoption of the Web for government initiatives.â€¿ One of the more interesting obstacles is that citizens contact the government for personal, rather than business, reasons and rely on a phone call or a letter to express their opinion or ask a specific question. Perhaps old habits die hard. Perhaps technology-literate citizens whose inboxes are overflowing with spam realize that a handwritten letter will get more attention than an email. Will smarter filters change that? I doubt it. Assuming we can get past those cultural issues, we still need to work on the technology. Forrester lists five areas that government needs to focus on in order to move to real, effective e-government: management, security, enterprise architecture, records management and IT personnel shortages.

The Washington Post reports that the House voted to curtail the powers of the Patriot Act, voting yesterday to limit the FBI's ability to seize library and bookstore records for terrorism investigations. A separate story, â€œInformation Handling At TSA Under Scrutinyâ€¿ tells of a â€œreview of the government's testing of a new passenger screening program to determine whether it violated privacy rules in the handling of millions of airline reservation records.â€¿

U.S. airlines turned over millions of records last year to the TSA so that it could begin testing a smarter airport security system that seeks to know more about travelers before they arrive at the airport. The tests include comparing reservation records against commercial databases used by banking, home mortgage and credit card companies. The goal of the program, called Secure Flight, is to verify passengers' identities and reduce the number of false matches with the government's "no fly" list.

A long, but interesting report out from the Heritage Foundation this week looks at peopleâ€™s dependence on government. Though the report is called the Index of Dependency for 2005, it really indexes the growth of government programs:

This presentation of the Index of Dependency for 2005 is organized into four sections. Matthew Spalding leads with a discussion of how depenÂ¬dency has been viewed in American history. That analysis is followed by brief reviews of major policy changes in six areas important to the Index: housing, health care, welfare, retirement, education, and agriculture. These discussions of important policy changes are followed by a description of how the Index is constructed. The presentation concludes with some thoughts on the number of Americans who received support from the programs contained in the Index.

It will be no surprise to anyone that the programs are growing, the number of people enrolled in the programs is growing, the spending is growing. And those of us that watch IT use in government know these programs are becoming increasingly automated and integrated.

So three questions:

1. Are we crazy to worry about the books we check out at the library when weâ€™re willingly handing over our most personal (health and financial) data to the government?

2. Do we really want ALL government data to be integrated so that we can connect the dots? Connecting the Medicaid enrollment database to the sex offender database would flag the convicted sex offenders receiving Viagra, but do we want our purchases at the ABC store attached to our driverâ€™s licenses or electronic health records?

3. Do we really know what road weâ€™re traveling?

Whaddya think?

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