That doesn’t seem particularly convincing. Or at least I don’t see how this feeds into the privacy “conundrum”
If you need to drive to see a clerk it’s a lot harder to get access, and that’s a reasonable barrier. The clerk can also have reasonable limits on how many you can request and whether you can make a copy. Each of these rules do have an impact on how widely information is used or disseminated, and can limit data mining style use. Note that some of these limitations (like preventing a copy) can be more difficult when accessing from a website.
So yes, there are many useful limitations than can be placed on sharing of data that have a real practical impact on privacy.
This is really similar to the music industry and the problem of piracy. Bits are easy to copy and hard to prevent the copy of.
A cop calling in a suspect license plate is one thing, an automated system reading all license plates at all intersections and tracking every vehicle in a city is different, and should have regulatory or judicial oversight applied in light of the new access. The fact that any one of those plates could have been seen at each intersection by a cop who happened to be there does not mean that license plate readers don't change the nature of that information.
A lawyer asking a clerk for a transcript of a call regarding a pending case is one thing. Transcribing all calls and getting a text message when someone called 911 yesterday and mentioned your name is a big difference.
I still don’t understand the conceit.
If one were to say checking documents out from a central clerking office acts as a check or something against unauthorized and potentially unethical use of public records, well then yes absolutely I can see some merit.
As delivered presently, not as much.
But otherwise if a state has open records laws and you make a lawful request for a large body of publicly available records then I’m inclined to say by definition the clerk is required to provide them provided all requirements of the request are satisfied.
No, that's not true. If you have to physically go to the county clerk's office then you have to physically be in the country. That is a significant barrier.
An example that is even more salient than 911 records: if you make any political contribution in the U.S. you are require by law to give your home address which then becomes part of an FEC database that can be accessed by anyone on earth with an internet connection.
How you request it or where you are when you make the request doesn't change the legal status of the record itself if a data set has been made public by your state legislature.
If your local laws say you have to make the request in person, so be it. It's still an open record that can be queried and retrieved by members of the public.
If your local law say you may make your request online at a specific web address, so be it. It is still an open record that can be queried and retrieved by members of the public.
The mechanism or methodology of requesting a public record does not change a public record factually and legally being public unless local law says so (or FOIA if we're dealing with a federal agency, but since the context here is 911 calls, this is much more likely going to fall to a how a state legislature decides to protect/expose public records).
Adding a cost to get the information is one way to adjust this balance— it ensures that the person making the request values the information for some purpose, at a level higher than the imposed cost. Then, when you pass regulations about appropriate and inappropriate motivations for using this information, there’s a standard against which the judge and jury can compare the proffered reasons for accessing the data.
100% agreed. Monetary costs for records is a common approach to this, although many agencies allow for the costs to be waived at the request of the querying individual. It's entirely up to the queried agency to decide if they want to waive those costs or not, and it's a roll of the dice if that agency will bless you with waived fees.
Another way agencies have added "cost" to the requesting practice is through complicated and lengthy forms that are mailed to the local agency (and some agencies, I will offer, absolutely will NOT let you just walk in and hand over a form ABC-123, and require it to be mailed with a postmark). At least, complicated for the individual making the request. These forms though I think do a very good job of helping records divisions enumerate the type of requests that come in, the volume at which they are received and provides an excellent catalog for the types of data most commonly requested by the public to make searching and disseminating the requested records more expedient for clerks and court reporters.
But I absolutely agree, additional policy crafting is necessary to answer some key questions:
1) What should be released and how
2) What is the appropriate mechanism for making a request and what systems of work are engaged by jurisdictions in issuing a release
3) What are the conditions for a legally appropriate and publicly-interested release
I think this is as true for 911 calls as it is querying a comptroller for city budget items.
Fundamental changes to these, matter. Even small ones. Especially big ones.
Moving the needle a few percent (or fractions of a percent) can be game-changers in business or politics through threshold effects.
Moving the needle by orders of magnitude is effectively an entire new physics regime. And that's what we're seeing here.
Just because Y is "the same as X" doesn't mean that Y is X, if the rate of change is 10x, or 100x, or 1000x, or 1,000,000x greater. A 10x change gets you from walking speed to a car. 100x is an aircraft. 1,000x is an ICBM. The Tsar Bomba is Greek Fire ... at scale.
Infotech advances change costs by factors of millions to billions, far outside the scales above: ICBMs compunded, several times.
And such changes have massive unintended consequences.
Information technology is the perception and feedback system of society as a whole. Changing properties of information perceptibility, parsibility, storage, retrieval, processing, and distribution of information fundamentally changes entire social orders, and often not for the better. Lowering costs makes marginally "profitable" -- often in the rents-extracting sense -- applications more tractable. In that context, religious and political propaganda, yellow journalism, advertising, noise pollution, popular demagogues, urban legends, email spam, robocalls, stalking, harassment, pseudoscientific myths (flat earth, antivax, truthers, birthers), media (social or otherwise) smear tactics, and automaded extortion are entirely predictable outcomes.
Similarly, you could post 911 records with addresses if they were available with a simple request, and I can see how that could bring property prices down, depending on the kind of incident.
So the difference is automation?
Suppose someone used Microsoft Office to quickly template and print envelopes with the addresses of 10 different municipalities and stuffed them with boilerplate requests for public information, and then used the responses from those municipalities to carry out extortion.
Should the law act differently towards the individual who mails a lawful open records request than the one who queries for records via HTTP if they used the same records, provided by the same municipalities and jurisdictions to carry out unlawful activity post hoc?
Suppose I hire an investigator to conduct a (legitimate) investigation into a political opponent, high-level hire, etc. including past addresses, any arrests, mentions in newspapers or online, anything they've written, etc. They'll dig up a lot of information, some of which are public records and some of which is simply publicly available information.
Are you seriously trying to argue that there is no difference between an in-depth targeted investigation of an individual and that same information being available about everyone to anyone on the planet with a press of a few buttons?
Sure, you can argue that there is no privacy and people should just get over it. But there is a significant practical different between information that there's some friction to access and information that's indexed and freely available to everyone with a computer.
This would be pretty close to it however
Sure, you can argue that there is no privacy and people should just get over it
on the opposite side, no, this is absolutely not what I'm arguing.
If querying a public record online gives rise to a sufficient argument that public harm is being caused, legislatures are not ignorant of this, and they are certainly not deaf to it. At the Federal level, SCOTUS recently reversed a decision of how to answer that very question with regards to Food Stamp data and how it can be queried, and even if it should be queryable at all: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/food-marketing-i...
All of my comments here I am trying to make as objectively as possible without passing judgement on any concern or aspect of it, but simply remark on how open records laws are implemented and how laws affect those records and the ones who query them.
Any assertion that I am making an assessment or judgement about the people involved runs contrary to my motives in even bothering to comment here.
I think the bias should be in favor of transparency. Automated information gathering can be used to protect the public as well as for harm.
On the balance you will get one corrupt official fired for a whole bunch of people scammed, extorted or otherwise taken advantage of.
Think back to history of spam for example, I recall it reached huge percentages back in the day, before effective measures were introduced. Even now spam traffic is 45% of all email traffic.
Still not seeing the privacy implication of driving for records and clicking for them when discussing a public record that by definition, is in the public interest carried out by wards of public service (public service answering points).
If you don't see privacy implications to releasing recordings of e.g. people experiencing medical emergencies (medical records are otherwise clearly protected) then perhaps you need to reevaluate your understanding of what privacy means to different groups of people.
Yes. I work in a directly advisory position with various municipalities across the united States implementing online open records systems of engagement, among other systems of public accountability and answer these types of questions every day.
I had been intending to avoid appealing to job titles in discussing the matter but this is my profession and the question of legal access and barriers to access weighed against public interest is a topic that happens in every meeting I sit in.
When we're ostensibly talking about records that were made public by law, I think that focus is 100% warranted.
One last comment. Yes. But I'd argue (and I imagine you agree) that many of the tradeoffs considered when those laws were passed reflect, among other things, that "public record" didn't originally often equate to big publicly accessible database.
Sure. Fair. Valid.
Except it's really more nuanced than just saying "legality != morality", especially when the rubber meets the road, and when it comes time to actually implementing systems of recording (and potentially disseminating) the public's interaction with their local jurisdictions and municipalities, and I think those nuances get lost when sitting on the periphery of installing policy and reading about statecraft compared to being inside, operating the levers and pulleys and-as the phrase goes-"watching the sausage get made"..
That's why I'm being so willing to challenge some of the notions shared here today: I'm trying to be the voice of the insider and expose some of the reasons why certain things may be the way they are with regards to public data and open records.
You're right legal does not necessarily mean moral, but when it's time for measurable outcomes and results of human actions, and interactions between citizens and their local governments the legal framework does a much better job of delivering those outcomes and results on a consistent basis than most others, and is the framework we use of keeping the operators and participants equally consistently accountable (most of the time, anyway).
The focus, again, I say is warranted.
As an example, if hypothetically I were a victim of some embarrassing emergency, I wouldn't mind being part of anonymous aggregated statistics, but I definitely would object to anybody but myself and essential personnel having open access to the 911 recording, and I definitely wouldn't want my employer or neighbors to know any details or anything linking me to them without my permission or a substantiated court order, released under seal.