Computers, Society, and Nature

When I originally heard about this court case, I thought it only concerned the aerials of people’s houses. (Greenwich, CT is one of the richest towns in the US so it’s no surprise that its citizens are a mite upset). Apparently it’s about the spatial digital data as well. And I thought that the citizens of Greenwich were trying to prevent access to the photos. But apparently, it’s citizens trying to gain access to the digital data, maps and aerials. Anyway, here are the results of the court case.

Also available at GISCafe.

Publicly releasing electronically formatted government maps has not been shown to pose a public safety risk or violate a trade secret, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

June 16, 2005

Electronically formatted maps, which allow journalists to plot geographically referenced statistical data in studying the adequacy of government programs and performance, must be released in electronic form to open records requesters in Connecticut, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday.

The maps, created from Geographic Information System data and showing city landmarks, including the location of “security-sensitive” sites such as schools, public utilities, and bridges, must be open because officials in Greenwich, Conn., did not show that their release will violate a trade secret or threaten public safety, the high court ruled.

Greenwich citizen Stephen Whitaker requested electronic access to the city’s GIS maps in December 2001 under the state open records law.

The town refused to give Whitaker electronic access to its GIS system, arguing that the records qualified for public safety and trade secret exemptions to the state’s public records law. Whitaker sued and obtained rulings in favor of release from the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission in 2002 and the Connecticut Superior Court in 2004. Greenwich appealed to the Connecticut Appellate Court, but the Supreme Court stepped in and transferred the case onto its own docket before the intermediate appellate court could rule.

Justice Christine S. Vertefeuille, writing for the court, rejected the argument that the trade secret exemption could apply to the electronic GIS maps. All of the information contained in the maps is available piecemeal from other town departments, so there is nothing secret about them, she wrote. [emphasis added]

Vertefeuille found the town’s asserted public safety exemption equally unconvincing. Although witnesses — among them the Greenwich police chief — had testified that public safety would be jeopardized if the GIS data were released, little concrete evidence of that was presented. “Generalized claims of a possible safety risk” are not enough to satisfy the government’s burden of proof on an exemption claim, Vertefeuille wrote.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, joined by the Society of Environmental Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in November urging the high court to order the GIS data’s release. In addition to its legal arguments, the brief highlighted the issue’s relevance to the news media by compiling stories that would not have been written without electronic mapping.

Greenwich has 10 days to ask all seven supreme court justices to reconsider the decision, which was decided by a five-member panel.

(Director, Dep’t of Information Technology of the Town of Greenwich v. Freedom of Information Communication; Access Counsel: Clifton A. Leonhardt, Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission; Hartford, Conn.)

I added the emphasis above because that is the primary argument used to gain access to spatial data. It doesn’t seem to stop the counter argument of local governments that the digitization of data changes the very nature of the data and fails to compensate for the effort needed to create digital data. These–the value added character and the sweat of the brow–are the essence of arguments made for Canadian copyright of spatial data.

Here’s another article on the same court case. Notice this, more local, story is less enthusiastic. Also notice that the profit motive and the freedom of information motive are drowned out by the protection from terrorism motive. The security concerns mentioned by residents are exclusively connected to the privacy concerns of the wealthy. (Think we’ll see a similar lawsuit around the security concerns of the have-nots? I think not.)

Court Rules Public Has Right to GIS Information in Greenwich

June 16, 2005

In a case watched closely by Westport and other towns upgrading technology, the Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that the public has a right to see aerial photos and other records of Greenwich despite concerns about privacy, crime and terrorism.

The high court ruled unanimously Wednesday that Greenwich must release its computer database of aerial photographs and maps known as a geographic information system. The court said the town failed to show the records are exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act because of security concerns.

“Such generalized claims of a possible safety risk do not satisfy the plaintiff’s burden of proving the applicability of an exemption from disclosure under the act,” the high court said.

Attorneys involved in the case said the ruling sets a precedent.

“This is the first appellate level decision on the issue of security and access to government geographic information systems in the country that we’re aware of,” said Mitchell Pearlman, executive director of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.

Greenwich officials have said that the uncontrolled release of detailed information on infrastructure, public safety facilities, schools and celebrities’ homes in electronic form could lead to breaches in security and privacy. The town has been reluctant to disclose the records to the public since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Westport’s Representative Town Meeting earlier this month approved spending $420,000 on a Web-based Geographic Information System. During the debate on the appropriation at the RTM and Board of Finance, several residents expressed security concerns related to making the information easily available to the public.

There’s a new article on privacy vis-a-viz Google maps, this time from a journal for security professionals. The issue is four-fold: the amount of georeferenced data on the web allows your name to be attached to your house; the increased scale of the maps, through the satellite images, gives the viewer enormous spatial detail; that viewer isn’t necessarily you; and finally the non-linear function of the search facility may lead to unanticipated additional violations of privacy (e.g., to the work location of someone with a similar name). The main concern of the author is national security–zooming in to see the details of dams and nuclear power plants–but the concerns for the individual are more tangible.

The same week sees this article on students from John Hopkins University who, working on a course assignment, were able to gather enormous amounts of information on residents of the City of Baltimore, all from legal public sources and for practically no money. The article’s central premise is that, in the pursuit of convenience in terms of online access to information on their houses and cars, Americans have exposed themselves to invasions of privacy.

What are we to think of privacy of personal information? Some thoughts.

1. The rich will be able to protect their privacy. I’m reminded of the people in the upscale areas of NY who wanted to opt out of the book, “New York: The Photo Atlas” because it contains aerial photos of their homes, backyards, and pools. They weren’t able to remove their photos from that book. However, they have greater capacity than the less well-to-do to protect their privacy, perhaps by scrubbing unsavory details from the Internet with the help of lawyers. For an example of an early data scrubbing, see Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community.

2. The poor will continue to trade their privacy for access. They already fill in online surveys and allow cookies to accumulate for free email or affordable bandwidth. What else can we expect as access becomes the currency of the modern world? What’s craven is to conclude that there’s no down-side to this exchange.

3. The youth will have a very different view of privacy from adults. There are precedents since youth in some areas of the US already live with transparent backpacks and metal detectors. Youth also are creating enormous records of their lives on the Internet and with varied media such as blogs and webcams. I suspect that they’ll value far different kinds of privacy from us. For the implications of no privacy, read The Light of Other Days by the masters of a science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The book presents a new device called a “WormCam,” that allows the viewer to see anyone, anywhere, at any distance and at anytime. In a world where nothing is hidden, behavior becomes extreme. Conversely, people go to any lengths to hide themselves, even to the point of losing their individual identity.

To some extent this technology makes easier problems that have always existed (e.g., cyberstalking, identity theft) and increases the vulnerability of the already vulnerable. Society and the law will be slow to adapt. However, we shouldn’t forget that people will adapt to and adapt the technology that invades their privacy.

Here is an interesting article about the legal difference between traditional forms of media and new online media. Aparently the right to protect confidential sources is only legally protected in the print media. Apple Computer is trying to get online sites that publish rumours about Apple products to divulge their sources. So it’s not quite as important as protecting government sources but I still think it’s an iteresting illustration of the differences between media. This legal discrepancy will have to be remedied eventually.