When Public Records Become Really Public
When I took my first look at the data for our Massachusetts campaign finance maps this fall, I nearly jumped out of my seat.
According to the Massachusetts Office of Campaign & Political Finance, my mother had given more than the legal limit to Deval Patrick. It turned out that there had been a credit-card foul-up, the campaign had immediately recognized the error and her money had been returned.
Still, the incident gave me a sense of how some people feel when public records are … well, made public. More and more frequently, information that was nominally public but effectively unavailable is showing up on news sites and blogs.
In general, this growth of data publishing is fantastic. But all this newly accessible data is making some folks uncomfortable. It’s one thing to have your name, address and campaign contributions in a filing cabinet in a state office building. It’s another to have them pop up when you’re Googled.
Earlier this week Derek Willis pointed to a great example of this data-publishing backlash. The Journal-News in the Lower Hudson Valley published the list of permitted gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties. Permits are public record, but the owners weren’t used to them being that public, and they made a fuss.
Commenting on the situation, Derek argued that “every media organization has to weigh the benefit of making available public records that can identify individuals versus the potential backlash. Not the backlash against the paper itself … more meaningful for everyone is the backlash against public records laws.”
I’m not so sure. How can publishers make decisions about “making available public records”? Public records should be available.
Plus, media organizations are no longer the only ones making public data accessible. Public information that isn’t published on a news site will eventually show up on somebody’s blog.
As communities begin to understand that public now means really public, backlash is inevitable. Hopefully that backlash will grow into conversations about what should and shouldn’t be accessible to all.
Certainly, conversations could lead to less open data. But I doubt it. Call me quixotic, but I think momentum favors openness.
Derek Willis wrote:
I should add that I don’t mean that public records shouldn’t be public, but that a newspaper has to be smart about what it chooses to disseminate, and have good reasons for doing so. In this instance, I don’t think the publishing of the lists added much to the reporting, and pretty much only served to anger gun owners.
Public records exemptions are often added for the worst reasons - witness the exemption for autopsy photos in Florida after Dale Earnhardt’s death, simply because the family didn’t want them to be available - and the news media shouldn’t be careful about creating enemies of openness when it doesn’t serve a compelling news interest.
Posted 19 Dec 2006 at 9:27 pm ¶
Derek Willis wrote:
Uh, that’s *should be careful*, not shouldn’t.
Posted 19 Dec 2006 at 9:28 pm ¶
Rick wrote:
Derek, What you’re saying makes sense, but I think that if the News-Journal hadn’t published the lists, somebody else would have, eventually. To me, the backlash was inevitable.
I think the trick is to turn the backlash into a conversation about openness and convince people of its value. The Sunlight Foundation is doing an admirable job of this on the national level.
Posted 19 Dec 2006 at 9:56 pm ¶
Derek Willis wrote:
Someone may have, yes, but no one had up until this point. And the federal and state/local differences are tremendous - weakening federal FOIA laws requires convincing a couple of hundred congressmen or senators that it’s the right thing to do, and there are active lobbies that watch these activities closely in Congress.
Many states, to say nothing of localities, have real defenders of public records that can combat a stealthy drive by a small group of powerful people or to counter a campaign based on an emotional appeal, as in the Earnhardt case.
In a best-case scenario, I totally agree with you. But the reality is that once records are sealed it can be extremely difficult to get them reopened, and while news organizations should make the case of openness whenever they can, they should also be mindful of doing things that have little impact except to stir up opposition.
Posted 20 Dec 2006 at 10:25 am ¶