[Infowarrior] - Government 2.0 Meets Catch 22

[Richard Forno]

March 17, 2009, 11:24 am
Government 2.0 Meets Catch 22
By Saul Hansell
Policy and Law

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/government-20-meets-catch-22/

“Do I need to P.I.A. Facebook?” said the perplexed bureaucrat squished  
into a narrow basement hotel conference room in Washington DC.

P.I.A. stands for Privacy Impact Assessment, a procedure that federal  
agencies must go through every time they create a new computer system.  
It was one of many questions about how the government can use the  
tools of Web 2.0 raised in a session of a privacy conference last week.

Organizations of all sorts have been trying to figure out how they can  
adapt social networks, blogs, wiki’s and other Web tools to their  
traditional operating methods in order to connect to customers and  
partners.

But it is tough. “We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the  
Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at  
Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this  
bizarre.”

There are many other procedures at government agencies that aren’t  
just tradition, they are the law.

For example, the mostly harmless feature of Facebook that allows users  
to specify their religious and political views, may run afoul of the  
Privacy Act. That law prevents the government from using the site  
because a provision in the Privacy Act bans it from keeping records  
related to how people exercise their first amendment rights.

“We are stodgier” than the private sector, said Alex Joel, the civil  
liberties protection officer for the Office of the Director of  
National Intelligence, who moderated the session at the annual meeting  
of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, the trade  
group for corporate and government privacy officers. “We have our own  
way of doing things.”

Speaking of the First Amendment, one person asked, does the government  
have the right to remove offensive comments on a blog or social  
network page? And if it does, must it keep copies of the deleted  
material under the Federal Records Act and provide them to people  
making Freedom of Information Act Requests? Yes, it can remove  
comments that violate posted policies about decency and so on, and  
yes, it must keep them for a specified time, other participants said.

Private companies are considering whether they should look at  
someone’s Facebook and MySpace profiles before deciding whether to  
hire them. Some government participants wondered if doing so would  
require that the government file a notice under a provision of the  
Privacy Act that requires it to disclose all of the “systems of  
records” it uses to keep track of information about people.

Peter Swire, a former government privacy official who now teaches law  
at Ohio State University, raised another question: anti-corruption law  
prevents federal officials from receiving gifts of goods and services.  
Does that prevent an agency from using software or services available  
free on the Web?

Mr. Swire also pointed to legal pitfalls: federal computer systems  
must be made accessible to the disabled. For example, they must have  
captions on videos. Many commercial sites don’t meet these standards.  
Moreover, the government generally isn’t allowed to endorse commercial  
products. Mr. Swire said this could be interpreted to mean it can’t  
use any sites that include advertising.

So far, these issues have not prevented at least some agencies from  
experimenting with many forms of social media, although some have had  
to ask sites to modify their formats. The Federal Trade Commission,  
for example, does not allow advertising on its YouTube channel. (Craig  
Newmark, founder of CraigsList, wrote Tuesday about government  
officials organizing to use social media.)

The Central Intelligence Agency uses Facebook to recruit employees.  
The State Department uses it as part of its “public diplomacy”  
efforts, such as a page for the embassy in Jakarta.

But there are at least as many pages created on Facebook that are  
about the agencies that are not officially sanctioned. “For every  
Facebook page that represents itself as an official State Department  
page, there is another unofficial page,” one participant said. The  
government already maintains a list of all federal blogs, and some  
wondered if it should do the same for social networking pages.

Officials at the session said they feel urgent pressure to get hip to  
social networks, Wikis and such because of the open government agenda  
of the Obama administration. But clearly there are a lot of rules and  
regulations that need to be adjusted for this to work.