Agencies Explain Web 2.0 Use Thus Far and Some Hopes for Future
Privacy and security don’t have to be in conflict with innovation, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in opening remarks at a DHS-sponsored workshop Monday on “Government 2.0: Privacy and Best Practices.” The Federal CIO Council has created a working group to look at privacy, specifically how privacy can be built into new solutions from the beginning, he said. The government should be thinking, not necessarily how it can securitize everything, but how it can create an ability for people to provide anonymous feedback to the government, he said. It should also think in terms of how an individual sees the government. With more than 24,000 federal Web sites, the person seeking government services must “navigate the physical bureaucracy, because we've mirrored it” online, he said. Businesses must deal with local, state and federal government agencies. The logical thing is to abstract the layers so the experience is seamless, but that raises a host of information sharing and security issues that must be dealt with, he said.
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Representatives of some of the agencies already dealing with the issues raised by social media spoke during a panel about their agencies’ practices. Victor Riche, managing director of the Office of Information Technology, Bureau of International Information Programs & Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs in the State Department, related the “ruckus” caused within the department when the office launched a social network, ExchangesConnect, on its site powered by commercial provider Ning. People have to give their name, date of birth and a valid e-mail to sign up, which set off privacy alarms within the department, he said. But the undersecretary of public diplomacy at the time instructed the lawyers to find a way to make it happen, he said. The site now says that people will be subject to Ning’s terms of service as well as ExchangeConnect’s. However, only Ning’s terms of service are visible before an individual joins the network. To read ExchangeConnect’s terms of service and privacy policy, the individual first must sign up.
The State Department has also extended its public diplomacy mission through Web sites, texting and video contests. Its site aimed at overseas audiences, America.gov, is visible to those in the U.S. because blocking isn’t really an option on a worldwide platform, Riche said. But the department doesn’t advertise the site in the U.S. because agencies are barred by statute from disseminating to domestic audiences information intended for foreign audiences. During President Barack Obama’s June 4 appearance in Cairo, the department made available text excerpts from the speech, he said. More than 5,000 people signed up to receive the texts, he said. The speech was translated into 14 languages on America.gov, he said. For the president’s next major speech, in Ghana, he expects an even bigger response, Riche said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency was the first federal agency to sign an agreement with YouTube for special terms of service, said Jodi Cramer, general attorney. Everything the agency posts on YouTube, Twitter or anywhere else is also posted on the FEMA Web site, she said. The agency doesn’t embed YouTube videos on its site, thus avoiding the persistent cookies issue, she said. Each of the 10 regional offices has its own Twitter account, allowing them to present information applicable to their audiences, she said. The agency brands everything it does with the phrase “FEMA in Focus” so that people will know they're getting information directly from FEMA and not an imposter, she said. An audience member questioned how the agencies deal with security on commercial sites, saying his Facebook account had been compromised and a blast e-mail sent to all his friends. If something similar happened to FEMA’s account, it could trigger public panic if someone sent a blast e-mail supposedly from FEMA that claimed a tsunami was heading to California, for example, he said. Cramer said the agency always links back to its main site. It never posts an entire story on Facebook or Twitter, she said. She also said she’s on “seal patrol,” sending warning letters to people or businesses improperly using the FEMA seal.
Dealing with comments on a government site can be “dicey,” said Lena Trudeau, vice president of the National Academy of Public Administration. The academy was tasked by the administration to run the first phase of the open government dialogue, which sought public comment about how to make the government more transparent (WID May 27 p1). Comments were civil and on point for the first week or so, she said. But after WorldNetDaily.com stoked the Barack Obama birth certificate story in conjunction with the comment site, the academy received thousands of comments from people asking Obama to produce his birth certificate, in the name of transparency, to prove his citizenship. The academy found itself trying to balance the utility of the site with the ability of people to ask for information from their government, however tangential those requests might be. Trudeau said the academy decided to leave the comments up. However, it found that having a specific section to which it can shunt off-topic comments, without actually deleting them, helps a site maintain an on-topic conversation.