NII: The Dark Side in Washington State (fwd)

[Lucys]

  FYI: interesting article.

--
  Lucy S.                   lbs at aa.net  
  Seattle, Washington  USA

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 19:02:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: Phil Agre <pagre at weber.ucsd.edu>
To: rre at weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: NII: The Dark Side in Washington State 

[Gordon Cook's report on the NII in Washington State is, so far as I am
aware, the only study of the full range of privacy-invasive technologies
in a specific region.  I have enclosed, with permission, the introduction
to this report.  The report's table of contents, along with information
on ordering and the like, is available at the URL listed below.  Gordon's
"Cook Report on Internet-NREN" is just about the best independent voice
on emerging directions of the Internet architecture and related topics.]

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[http://pobox.com/cook/washington.html]

The Cook Report on Internet-NREN
NII: The Dark Side in Washington State 

Introduction and Summary

This report is the result of two weeks of interviews in Washington State
in late May and early June.  It shows a very dark picture of our coming
technology "dystopia."

The COOK Report finds that the state of Washington leads the rest of
the nation in developing the building blocks of a statewide information
infrastructure. What is being "leveraged" there is the Clinton -- 
Gore push for National Information Infrastructure (NII). NII is touted
in commercials by AT&T and others as being kind of warm and friendly
communications utopia. But the essence of NII is often in the eye of the
beholder. In fact, there is no widely accepted definition of or goals
for NII. Instead, it is one of those terms with a definition specific to
whomever is talking about it at any given moment.

In the state of Washington what is being constructed is not a service for
video on demand; nor is it home shopping. It is a statewide web of state
agency networks and inter linked databases. While other states have some
NII related projects, we are not aware of any that have the number and
scope of those in Washington.

People with whom we talked generally agreed that the citizens of
Washington are facing a situation where their privacy is fast disappearing
and where the rights to information that they own and should effectively
control are being sold out from under them. In the opinion of many to 
whom we talked, the situation is volatile and may become more so. Even
George Lindamood, the outgoing Director of the Department of Information
Services, acknowledged that when the citizens of the state understand the
totality of what had happened to them, they will be angry.

In order to bring a "competitive environment" to the citizens of the
state, Washington State agencies are moving forward to implement new
information technology programs. But this information technology is
the new hucksterism of the second half of the '90s. With the Clinton
Administration pushing it in the first half of the decade, officials
from the various departments of state government are lined up at the
federal table to make sure they get the technology grants that will 
make their agencies stand out at home. They are very likely perfectly
well-intentioned civil servants - in a hurry to build now and
ask questions later. Policy issues, the big picture, privacy and
confidentiality concerns are given lip service, but usually put off as
being to difficult to deal with now. As these are put off, the web of
interconnected communications systems and databases grows and wraps more
firmly in place around Washington State residents.

There may be about a year to make meaningful changes before the average
citizen is irretrievably caught in the emerging state data web. The 
only hope that we see is for citizen groups to coalesce, get educated
and agree on the objectives for and definition of a state commission on
citizen information rights -- one that has legal power to slow down the
technocratic juggernaught -- until adequate legal safeguards to protect
privacy can be put in place. The citizen's lobby must then sell these
objectives to the legislature. If they don't succeed, Washington State
may be neither comfortable nor a good place in which to live. It will be
a combination of "Brave New World," "Blade Runner" and a digital Singapore
transplanted to the Pacific northwest by a seemingly well-intentioned
alliance between corporate and political technocratic elites.

One agency that is part of this Washington State web has a database
of at-risk four-year-olds that can be linked with databases of violent
juveniles, drug use incidence, trade and economic activity.  All this
information can be mapped matched with census tract and other economic
data through a Geographic Information System (GIS). A GIS Database allows
many different kinds of information to be overlaid on maps of differing
scales according to physical location. GIS was described to us by the
Assistant Director of Administrative Services of Community, Trade and
Economic Development (CTED), a relatively new state agency, as "the glue
that holds all the other disparate information together". The CTED system
is under construction.

Someone has obviously decided there is a public purpose to be served in
creating a database of at-risk four-year- olds and another of violent
offenders. Missing from the Washington State scene is any widespread
public understanding either that these and other data bases exist. 
Also absent is any reasonable means of challenge by the public to state
agency use of them. For example, what if CTED were to decide that when 
a business had narrowed its choice to four potential locations, the final
step towards maximum competitiveness for that business would be to show 
it the population density of at-risk four-year-olds and violent offenders
in each of the sites? The business would surely choose to locate in an
area with as few undesirables as possible. The potential of information
technology to be used in building economic ghettos in Washington State is
not generally known let alone an item on the public policy agenda.

This report describes the all ensnaring data web that is being woven 
in Washington State. Since many of the programs being field tested in
Washington are federally backed, what happens there is likely to spread 
to other states unless we understand what is happening and insist that it
be stopped.

The spinning of the data web begins in kindergarten -- or even earlier --
when parents are asked to supply their children's Social Security Numbers
as identifiers. Goals 2000 and other school restructuring efforts have led
to increased data collection about individual students. Educators want to
know everything about today's students, even whether they arrive at school
"ready to learn."  With the help of national business groups and the
well-intentioned but perhaps naive support of the Annenberg Foundation,
Total Quality Management is the current Band-Aid being applied to a
education system that policy makers with the study A Nation at Risk, in
the early 1980s declared effectively "broken." Total Quality Management
demands that all "relevant" data be gleaned and applied to the process at
hand whether it involves manufacturing, or shaping our children's future.

To this end, the educational bureaucrats within the US Department of
Education have established a National Center for Education Statistics. 
The Center has come up with standards for state student record databases
and over 500 questions for states and local school districts to choose
from in constructing their own systems. Depending on how faithfully the
states follow the federal model, what could easily become the student's
life long dossier may start with questions like the date of the last
dental exam and the condition of soft tissue inside the student's mouth!

Indeed the federal student data handbooks contains fields for the phone
number of the students email provider, whether the student is a registered
voter and information about the student's post high school employment. If
the student moves between states, a national system called SPEEDE/ExPRESS
is being put into place to transfer his or her electronic record from one
jurisdiction to another. If federal planners have their way, electronic
tracking will continue throughout high school and from there into the
student's employment.

The product of this nationalized and homogenized school record system 
-- the graduate -- may ultimately submit electronic portfolios, including
teacher evaluations, to area employers via WORKLINK, a national program
developed by Educational Testing Service. Under the guise of making school
more relevant to the world of work, employers with desirable jobs will be
able to glean electronically, from among thousands of area graduates, the
few with the cleanest records.  Those who don't make the electronic cut
may walk their paper records to the nearest McDonalds.

The New Information Environment: Data Bases and Public-Private
Partnerships

As most politicians continue to stoke citizen anger against state and
national government, citizen and legislative tax revolt initiatives have
left government with inadequate revenues to do its job. As a result, an
alliance of politicians and some corporations has formed to promote public
-private partnerships. According to its critics, that alliance is simply
profiting from the disenchantment the politicians have created .

In 1993 the Washington State Legislature proposed such a partnership 
to improve the state's highways. Construction firms on a national level
were invited to bid on highway improvements to be paid for by tolls --
euphemistically known as user fees. In part encouraged by a federal
project calling for "smart highways" nationwide, the proposals include
toll tokens tied to individual citizens and their vehicles. Electronic
sensors will decrease the value of each token and, in so doing, provide
"information of commercial value" to entities like auto insurance
companies, the driver's employer and any others willing to purchase the
citizen's private data. This purchasing of citizen's data is promoted as
a new revenue source for government. Promoters say it will keep government
from having to raise taxes.

In 1993 the state legislature passed a law (which in the session just
ended was largely gutted) guaranteeing health insurance to all Washington
citizens. In yet another public-private partnership, the state undertook
to create a statewide database to share patient treatment referrals and
medical records among appropriate agencies and health care providers.
Missing from the legislation were adequate protection of patient privacy
and the right to correct medical records. Parts of the law were repealed
this year, but plans for a statewide medical database continue.

The Department of Information Services is the state agency that provides
telecommunications and computing infrastructure for the remainder of state
government. Under George Lindamood, who arrived as Director in February
1993 and departed June 1 1995, it branched out into its own money making
activities. These included a statewide compressed video network, Internet
training for other state agencies and a would-be statewide information
kiosk program.

The kiosks represented a public-private partnership between the state,
IBM and North Communications. The heaviest use of them was by job seekers
who could access new job openings posted through the State Division of
Employment Security. The Department of Information Services (DIS) would
like to see all state agencies using the kiosks to transact as much as
possible of their day-to-day business with citizens. However, it is a
pilot program. At the time of our visit there were only eleven kiosks
in operation. The program got negative press reviews when it found that
users of the employment database were asked to enter their social security
numbers. Critics maintain DIS had no legal justification for requiring the
numbers and did not comply with notification requirements in the federal
Privacy Act when requesting them.

The Politics of Divisiveness

Politics in Washington State has taken a hard turn to the right. One
example has been ESSB5466, an "anti-pornography bill," that did not become
law this spring only because of the courageous veto of Governor Lowry.
According to Al Huff, the Director of WEDnet, the Washington State K-12
network linked to the Internet, the bill would have effectively banned
the Internet from Washington K-12 schools. Why? Because it would have made
the system operators of digital networks liable for any "pornographic"
material found on their systems.

After the Governor's veto, the House agreed to eliminate depiction of
breast feeding from the obscenity statute while the Senate came back with
an exemption for the Internet. The House refused to accept the senate
exemption of the Internet and the bill died at the end of the legislative
session. This conclusion led one observer to conclude that such an extreme
right-wing agenda was not to protect children from pornography but to
censor the Internet. Since our return we have been told that the issue
will surface again in the legislature next year.

We have found no reason to believe that the web of connected databases
will be used only by the state agencies and their immediate private
partners. After all, these partners have come aboard expressly to market
the end product to others. Policy makers had better ponder what wide
spread use of the databases could lead to. Who will benefit from what they
have done? The people or the power brokers? For what is at stake is not
just a question of privacy but one of being able to use the information 
to manipulate people and events. Consider not only what full access to the
database information could mean to large corporations, but also what it
could do for any kind of extremist.

Consider whether the current direction leads inevitably to the further
empowerment of the already powerful? Does it give them superior
information and knowledge? Taking information that should be private and
making it publicly accessible cannot be condoned - no matter whether it be
school records, health data or smart highway reports on our travels. It is
also undeniable that aggregated information collected from the public by
its government at local, state, and national levels belongs to the public.
The public should always have access to that data at reasonable expense
which may normally be defined as the incremental cost of distribution. 
If the general public is denied such access, the question emerges as to
whether those in power should ever be allowed to engage in any form of
State sanctioned economic discrimination, let alone a targeted program
aimed directly against those citizens who not only unwittingly provided
the raw data being used, but also ironically funded the discriminatory
agencies.

We have here a convergence of technology trends that can either empower
individuals to affect positively their own lives and neighborhoods, or
can disenfranchise them and leave them at the mercy of the powerful should
they be able to monopolize the data used for decision making. It is this
very volatile mix of the middle class - afraid and on the way down - that
causes us to examine information infrastructure issues in Washington State
against the backdrop of broader economic and social issues.

Some members of Washington State government claim to be dealing with
the policy issues.  However, this study finds that the state's Public
Information Access Policy (PIAP) task force has failed to educate the
state's citizens about these issues. It is imperative that other's step in
to the vacuum left by the task force. Backed by an informed media, citizen
groups must come together, possibly under a state umbrella organization,
such as a Washington State Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Such an organization must undertake a serious public education campaign
about the privacy and social control implications of the Washington State
plans, both those already activated and those proposed. The organization
must be carefully crafted to keep citizens in control of the entire
process. It should design an information policy commission to exist
perhaps under the aegis of the judiciary. They and not the technocratic
managers of state agencies would carry out reviews of state agency
programs and intentions. The commission would need a process for hearings
and prompt studies to be completed. It must have its own funding.
Legislation to implement the commission should be promptly drafted and
made a top priority for action in the next legislative session.

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