Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 20:37:34 -0700 From: Jim Warren Subject: GovAccess.083: Vote Smart, gov-acc down-side, library access, counties PROJECT VOTE SMART - A *SUPER* SYSTEM AND NONPARTISAN NATIONAL SERVICE! >From amcgee@netcom.com Sun Aug 14 21:46:31 1994 The information below came from the gopher at gopher.neu.edu, port 1112: FROM THE 35,000 MEMBERS OF PROJECT VOTE SMART ... Hundreds of citizens are volunteering to make Project Vote Smart possible. Month after month they labor to assemble an enormous system of factual information on over 2,000 candidates who want to represent you. This Voter's Self-Defense System arms millions of Americans with the power of democracy's most awesome political weapon. Shattering the candidates' ability to manipulate and abuse them, through Project Vote Smart a source of accurate information is being put directly into the hands of the people. This data is a small portion of that continuing effort. For more information on Project Vote Smart, call our toll free hotline at 1-800-622-SMART. PROJECT VOTE SMART COMPONENTS Voter's Research Hotline Our volunteer researchers can tell you what your representatives or candidates are doing for you or to you: * their voting record in over 20 key issue areas * biographical details of their service in Congress * performance evaluations by 70 liberal to conservative organizaions * who has paid for their campaigns * their telephone numbers and mailing addresses * their past campaign position statements * and much, much more! TOLL-FREE TO ALL CITIZENS! 1-800-622-SMART National Political Awareness Test Project Vote Smart interns and volunteers interview all candidates for federal office. These interviews, covering 14 key issue areas, can be used to compare what the candidates say during the elections with what they do if they are elected. This information is available through our Research Hotline (1-800-622-SMART). Computer Access Computer access to Project Vote Smart data through Internet and bulletin board. * Internet: gopher gopher.neu.edu, port 1112 * Bulletin board: 503-737-3777 (14.4K N81) Manuals Voter's Self-Defense Manual U.S. Government Owner's Manual These manuals contain key issue summaries along with you candidates' or elected officials': * biographical background * campaign finances * performance evaluations by 15 competing liberal to conservative special interest groups. * position statements * local election offices * addresses and phone numbers * committee assignments Research Services Reporter's Resource Center Reporter's Source Book Tomorrow's News Research services are provided for journalists to check the accuracy of claims made by elected officials or candidates. The Reporter's Source Book is published to refer journalists to issue experts who can check the credibility of politicians' claims. The Source Book is used by over 10,000 political journalists and is provided free to the media. Tmorrow's News is a quarterly newsletter featuring articles, awards, seminars, and upcoming events of interest to political journalists. Internship Program Hundreds of student interns from throughout the country work and study at Project Vote Smart. Students working on the project, often with our scholarship assistance, have a unique opportunity to exmine the often harsh realities of today's political arena. For information call: 503-737-3760. YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE A MEMBER TO USE OUR SERVICES, BUT PLEASE... JOIN US IF YOU CAN [stuff deleted] WE PROTECT OUR MEMBERS. Project Vote Smart does not sell or allow anyone to use our membership list. Please send to: Project Vote Smart 129 NW Fourth St. #240 Corvallis, OR 97330 (503) 754-2746 ------------------------------ WHAT'S THE DOWN-SIDE OF PUBLIC ACCESS TO GOVT INFORMATION? >From willis@rand.org Mon Apr 11 09:48:20 1994 Your discussion in [an April] GovAccess raise the relevant issues. It's the point that you probably heard me raise [before] -- when does enough public information put together in one database acquire a higher level of sensitivity. Put that way, it's hard to address and in the end would be a matter of judgement. In fact we don't really know whether widespread sales and use of massive public records information will lead to mischief and problems. Of course there will be incidents, but some of that always goes on anyway. For example, a local lawyer who had access to Info America used it to look up the senior partners in his firm; so he knew all about their house, debt structure, mortgage holders, etc. Not devestating to be sure, but it might have been used for embarrassment, perhaps blackmail, harrassment. If the senior partners had found out about this, there might have been a few less junior lawyers in the firm! More serious was the incident in which someone looked up the members of the Supreme Court, and found the home addresses of all of them that were owners of real property. Publishing such a list could have raised a real safety problem in that the kooks of the world could have targeted private homes. I have no idea whether publishing them would have broken any law, but a dissident group angry at the Court wouldn't worry about such a detail. The real solution, of course, is to put in place penalties for misuse. But even that is hard to police and enforce, even harder to foresee all the possible ill effects and guard against them a fortiori. For example, DMV didn't tumble to what it was doing until some nut shot Rebecca Schaeffer, having obtained her address from DMV. Then they closed the loophole. In the overall scheme of society, such an event is a ripple on a massive ocean of presumed progress; to a certain few such as close family and the victim, it was a disaster. So there is a delicate balance point to be achieved, and we can only make a best judgment of what restraining and penalty laws should be. More to the point, however, is getting any legislative process to put in a proactive law! Mostly, law about social behavior is reactive and put in place after the problem appears. You can imagine all the arguments and pressure groups that would be against any law that purported to give the citizen legal reddress (in the form of stipulated penalties) for using personal information in ways different from that originally collected. This latter principle of course is from the Fair Code, but some new innovative uses would be socially desirable and not cause trouble. How to handle such a dynamic thing? Now we're into the case for a Data Protection Board/Agency/Commission, some body that maintains oversight and can bring action as required. An alternate legal possibility would be to give the citizen standing to bring civil suit for damages that resulted from the misuse of personal information. That equates to full employment for lawyers, but maybe it's the only mechanism that the country has to address the problem. It's not at all clear what to do about the burgeoning traffic in personal information, especially that which is aggregated from public records sources. In fact, it isn't at all clear, except as a principle of privacy, that something needs to be done -- even though we can all be sure that some nasty, dangerous, embarassing, et al events are certain to occur. Maybe such unpeasantries are simply one aspect of the contemporary information-oriented world that we have to live with? --Willis Ware ------------------------------ CONNECTICUT & NEW YORK ONLINE PUBLIC ACCESS VIA PUBLIC LIBRARIES From: "Harry J. Saal" Aug 9 00:11:27 1994 I made a presentation on Sunday August 7, 1994 to the attendees of the White House Conference on Library and Information Science. A very interesting and turned-on group of people! ... There were some questions and discussion about public access through libraries elsewhere in the USA. Someone from Connecticut told of their state's support for Internet access. 95% of all public libraries branches have public access terminals installed. Any citizen can go and get an E-mail account and use these terminals, plus the state offers access from home via personal computers with modems on a dial-in basis (available at no cost?). Apparently Montgomery County (MD) has a similar situation already in place. >From some literature I saw being distributed, New York State is out in front doing exciting things with Internet access through public libraries. ------------------------------ SILICON VALLEY'S "SMART COUNTY" DISTRIBUTION LIST Sender: Jan Sniderman [from last August -jim] Smart Valley, Inc. is providing scpan@svi.org as a means of disseminating information among concerned Smart Valley members and other parties interested in sharing and fostering information on public access to the Internet. ... Once subscribed to the service, all E-mail addressed to scpan@svi.org will be broadcast to you and the rest of the subscription list by sending one message to the scpan@svi.org address. Anyone can send a message to the list. OVERVIEW OF THE PROJECT As part of Smart Valley's continuous efforts to stimulate the demand for information technology based applications, the Smart County Public Access Network (SCPAN) project will focus on the development and subsequent installation of several Internet public access sites throughout Santa Clara County. These sites will provide individuals who, because of economic and social barriers, have previously lacked access to information technology resources. ... The SCPAN project is still in the initial planning phase and Smart Valley, Inc. is still recruiting project planning and implementation partners. Regis McKenna Inc., Andersen Consulting, Cisco Systems, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) and Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI) will be providing both project planning and project marketing expertise as well as equipment contributions to the Smart Valley Resource Bank. Our initial timeline of activities will include the development of a project marketing plan that will assist in recruiting additional project sponsors, equipment providers as well as increase the demand for sites throughout the County . This activity will be led by Regis McKenna, Inc. and will take place around the September time frame. A formal project planning working group will be formed later in the fall of '94*. This working group will be responsible for developing a comprehensive plan that encompasses all of the key steps that will be needed to implement the concepts of SCPAN. The planning phase for the project is expected to proceed through September of 1995 with implementation beginning in the fall of 1995. ... To subscribe to scpan@svi.org, send the following command in e-mail addressed to "majordomo@svi.org" (without the quotes). In the text of the message, write the following command: subscribe scpan Please do not include brackets around your e-mail address. Also, please write your E-mail address in lower case for best operational results. Please do not send the request to subscribe to the list (scpan@svi.org) itself. This results in the entire list receiving your request to subscribe. If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, send the following command in e-mail message text to "majordomo@svi.org": unsubscribe scpan If you have any problem with this service, please contact Jan Sniderman . If you have any comment on the content of this service, please contact Steve Elston . Smart Valley, Inc. (info@svi.org) 1661 Page Mill Rd, Ste. 200, Palo Alto, CA 94304-1209 tel: 415 843 2073; fax: 415 843 2222; main: 415 843 2160 Mo' as it Is. --jim GovAccess is an email distribution-list of irregular postings, maintained by Jim Warren, columnist for MicroTimes, Government Technology, BoardWatch, etc. 345 Swett Rd., Woodside CA 94062; voice/415-851-7075; fax/<# upon request> jwarren@well.com -or- jwarren@autodesk.com >> Permission herewith granted for unlimited reposting and recirculation.<< >> Past postings are at ftp.cpsr.org:/cpsr/states/california/govaccess << >> To add or drop the GovAccess list, email to jwarren@well.com . <<