The big local story lately in Newsday was that the Suffolk County (NY) Clerk’s office was posting land use records and other public documents online, and that those documents may have resident’s signatures and social security numbers on them. There is another story, less obvious but potentially more dangerous in the long run - the information going online is only accessible by Microsoft Windows users.I, like many Suffolk residents went online in short order after reading the Newsday story to see if my online documents revealed anything personal. A signature and a social security number are a healthy step forward if you’re planning some identity theft, so this was a big concern to a lot of folks.

Well, I didn’t see any personal information on my documents, because I couldn’t access them. Granted, I use a Mac, and I’ve gotten used to not being able to run Windows programs, but the internet doesn’t run on Windows. The internet is based on standards compliance and is largely run by BSD servers (an open source unix-like operating system like Linux), and the Mac OS is based on BSD. I use the Mozilla Firefox browser, which is the most standards compliant (open source) web browser made. The method the County Clerk’s office chose was to use an ActiveX control (yech!) which of course requires Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because of the ActiveX requirement, even if I was using Windows, I wouldn’t be able to access the information using Firefox. Interesting to note how *bad* a decision this is, since many viruses that plauge Windows users enter via ActiveX in the first place.

I will not easily accept that my own government is using my tax dollars to lock up public information in proprietary formats that we may not be able to read someday! The only solution is to MANDATE (through legislation) that all public information be kept in an OPEN FORMAT. Beyond a requirement that the information be stored in file formats that are readable by any operating system, I believe that if the government provides the information on the web, it should be accessible through any open standards compliant web browser.

The first sounds of battle on this issue in the states was in that most liberal of states, Massachusetts, earlier this year, but there are similar stirrings across Europe. According to Wikipedia, Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration and Finance in Massachusetts, was the first government official in the United States to publicly connect open formats to a public policy purpose: "It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access."

I shared my displeasure with a representative of the Clerk’s office, but it has been my experience that when it comes to data and computers, many administrative types consider it just another minor detail to be delegated and pass any concerns to their IT staff for explanation - and since it’s their IT staff that planned and implemented this gross miscarriage, they will defend it as any Microsoft-trained person would. After all, the MCSE classes can cost thousands of dollars and is worth a promotion and a raise or two to most of these folks. The longer-term ethical issues of future data retrieval and universal access to the public is of little concern.

Not surprisingly, several members of the local Linux users group shared my concerns. All I can suggest at this point is to write your representatives and try to explain to them how important it is that our governement agencies begin to plan to use open formats for file creation and storage and to offer documents on the web only through open and standards compliant methods. It would great if we could convince them of the importance of using open source operating systems on their desktops (which we are paying to patch and upgrade each year), AND on our voting machines as well !