5 ms·

Gainesville, Florida, put its internal emails online with few limits

141 points by danso 7y ago

turbinerneiter 7y ago
Meanwhile, in Germany, 2 ministers (one acting, one former) have wiped their phones, including text messages, although there were ongoing investigations in misconduct. These are the people who are now using Corona to gain access to our location data collected by our phones. One set of rules for the rich, one set of rules for the poor.
- aleksaxyz 7y ago
  Please be specific? I looked up "Germany ministers wiped phone" and saw a story about how the overall Defense Ministry wiped a phone of someone related to military contracts. What does that have to do with COVID-19 and data collection?
  - xnyan 7y ago
    I would assume they are referring to the to the widespread [1,2,3] use of data gathered from smartphones for getting epidemiological data. Every nation is doing it. I would say it's not a great comparison, bad actors wiping their phone is not the same as gathering of bulk data to address a pandemic. 1) https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615329/coronavirus-south-korea-smartphone-app-quarantine/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615329/coronavirus-south-... 2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spy-apps-israel-joins-iran-and-china-tracking-citizens-smartphones-to-fight-covid-19/#5e444c31781b https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/14/coronavir... 3) https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200330/United-States-tracking-mobile-phones-to-map-spread-of-COVID-19.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200330/United-States-tra...
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Sweden is not using smartphone or base station location data for tracking of Corona. https://www.datainspektionen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset-och-digital-smittsparning/ https://www.datainspektionen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset-och-di...
  - turbinerneiter 7y ago
    It's related to the COVID data gathering in a quite simple way: the government is telling the people gathering this data helps containing the disease and that they can be trusted to not abuse that data. This trust however is severely undermined by a lot of factors, like past abuses which came out due to Snowden, the continued push to collect data with claims of fighting terror or other crime - and, in my opinion, also extreme difference in transparency that politicians ask from citizens versus the transparency they themselves will commit to. The two cases were the former minister of defense, von der Leiten, and the current minister of transport, Scheuer. Both wiped their cellphone data although they knew that there are ongoing investigations. The investigations are called "Untersuchungsausschuss" - not sure how to correctly translate that. They are not criminal investigations, although they could to them, but basically a group of members of parliament investigate into affairs to find out if criminal misconduct happened or off processes need to be improved. In case of von der Leien, there were large amounts of money going to consultants, with some contracts not following the legal processes to give them out. In case of Scheuer, there is a completely bitched toll project, which is costing the taxpayer 500 millions, where there are clear sings of him if ignoring risks to be seen as a quick actor to help with an election, as well as giving information to one of the bidders for the contract. I don't trust politicians like that to only use the collected data for the given purpose and I don't trust them to stop the collection after the crisis is over. That's how, in my opinion, these topics are related.
iveqy 7y ago
Even if Sweden doesn't have a webpage for this, anyone can request anything https://www.government.se/emails-to-the-government-and-ministries/ https://www.government.se/emails-to-the-government-and-minis...
secstate 7y ago
As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. But I also think that the people upset with the exposure after emailing public officials maybe don't fully understand that anything you communicate to a public official is defacto public and can be requested from anyone at anytime. The alternatives to that default are terrible for public confidence in officials.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. There shouldn't be any legal issues since it's already all public, but regardless there is some possible middle ground here: - All conversations regarding public policy and/or the allocation of public resources get published on the web by default. (With the possibility of making redactions on anonymizing folks, at the discretion of the public official.) - Things like emails from constituents asking for advice about personal issues and bulk newsletters would stay private unless FOIA'd. - Anything redacted or anonymized at the discretion of a public official can still be FOIA'd, and in the FOIA'd version of the email things would only be allowed to the redacted or anonymized to the extent allowable by law. This is similar to how NYC's proposed algorithmic transparency legislation would have worked, where software involved in allocating public resources needs to be public but the rest of the software does not.
- vidarh 7y ago
  In Norway all communications with the government at national levels needs to be logged in journals that are publicly accessible by default. Not logging everything is a crime. Personal details can be redacted, and some things can be marked as not for public view, but doing so tends to be inviting scrutiny, as the big media organisations have people trawling the post journals.
- Keverw 7y ago
  Nice to see public officials understanding this stuff :) So many cities have people untrained on this sort of stuff, I know there's been cities or other departments in cities deleting Facebook comments, and there's been some lawsuits over that. I kinda always got a feeling public officials feel like they are gods and above the law. Plus I think local officials can get away with things more compared to say a congress person or president since stuff they say and do have a bigger spot light on them. Probably more corruption happens at the local level is an assumption I've always had. Then if you go on YouTube can find tons of videos where cops or city officials get mad at being filmed, people go into the lobby of their local city and film the clerk there and some of them freak out or even goes as far as assaulting the camera person. However, I think some of those YouTubers though do it just to kinda just stir things up to see how people react so they'll get views, but technically it's still a first amendment protected activity.
CapriciousCptl 7y ago
A problem with complete transparency like this in our new era of yellow journalism is bad actors can cherry pick basically anything and get pageviews and mindshare by manufacturing outrage. Moreover, the kinds of things that are legitimately controversial get moved to other mediums.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  People might even make hyperbolic assumptions about the future while preying on uncertainty.
wyxuan 7y ago
They mentioned Palo Alto, and I think it's a decent example. If you email Citi council, your email will be printed out and made accessible during council meeting and also made public. However, the sheer volume of email and the obscurity surrounding the existence of this public email makes it very non controversial.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
This reminds me of politicians "going transparent" in The Circle. I would loathe to be in a position where every casual conversation I had was subject to public scrutiny.
- aleksaxyz 7y ago
  Having worked in the public sector in the U.S., email conversations are sterile for the fact that they are always potentially accessible through Freedom of Information Act requests. No one's having thoughtful and personal conversations over internal emails. But there does need to be a warning to the public that their emails are going to be public. Just so they aren't surprised and can schedule a call instead of going into detail via email.
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    > But there does need to be a warning to the public that their emails are going to be public. It seems like Gmail et al. could just add a popup warning folks before sending anything to a .gov email. Folks running their own email servers hopefully know better already.
    - inetknght 7y ago
      > It seems like Gmail et al. could just add a popup warning folks before sending anything to a .gov email. If I'm not mistaken, Gmail _also_ keeps a record of your emails too, does it not?
      - deleted 7y ago
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- 7y ago
tomatotomato37 7y ago
Transparency does have its pros & cons. One of the reasons for the whole Florida Man meme is because of Florida's powerful Sunshine laws that make police reports easily accessible to the public
- BubRoss 7y ago
  This sounds all pro to me.
  - kreitje 7y ago
    Yes and no. I have received a handful of requests from lawyers to remove their clients charges from a news aggregator I ran. All of them had their charges dropped but when potential employers were searching them online they would come across the booking information.
newfeatureok 7y ago
Florida gets a lot of flak but this is good. Transparency is the only way to fight corruption. The only real downside to such absolute transparency like this is that most people don't want to be accountable.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I am not sure if this really fights corruption. It may also lead to a situation where official communication will be sanitized and the real stuff gets pushed to private channels.
jotakami 7y ago
I’m a resident of Gainesville and I was completely unaware of this. Now I know not to send anything sensitive to a local government email address...
- cool_dude85 7y ago
  In Florida, almost anything you send to any level of state or local government is public. If you're a customer of GRU, it's very likely that I could request your last year of bills, your address (if I know your name), etc. There are definitely some drawbacks of the very broad public records laws here.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Just use your Mayor's private email server. They'll be sure to acid wash the drives when they leave office.
Spooky23 7y ago
It's a big money saver probably. FOIA laws usually make most of this stuff public anyway, except you run it through lawyers and waste alot of time and energy. PII shouldn't be in email anyway.
- saila 7y ago
  Most people still think email is private for whatever reason. City and other government contact pages should have big red flags making it clear that your correspondence could be made public at any time. Even the record of correspondence with a government agency should be considered PII and/or sensitive, depending on the agency and subject matter.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Florida government websites do have these warnings, as well as in email auto responders.
qznc 7y ago
What is the matter with losing a little bit of privacy? You have nothing to hide, don't you? /s

141 points by danso 7y ago

Meanwhile, in Germany, 2 ministers (one acting, one former) have wiped their phones, including text messages, although there were ongoing investigations in misconduct. These are the people who are now using Corona to gain access to our location data collected by our phones. One set of rules for the rich, one set of rules for the poor.

aleksaxyz 7y ago
Please be specific? I looked up "Germany ministers wiped phone" and saw a story about how the overall Defense Ministry wiped a phone of someone related to military contracts. What does that have to do with COVID-19 and data collection?
- xnyan 7y ago
  I would assume they are referring to the to the widespread [1,2,3] use of data gathered from smartphones for getting epidemiological data. Every nation is doing it. I would say it's not a great comparison, bad actors wiping their phone is not the same as gathering of bulk data to address a pandemic. 1) https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615329/coronavirus-south-korea-smartphone-app-quarantine/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615329/coronavirus-south-... 2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/14/coronavirus-spy-apps-israel-joins-iran-and-china-tracking-citizens-smartphones-to-fight-covid-19/#5e444c31781b https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/03/14/coronavir... 3) https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200330/United-States-tracking-mobile-phones-to-map-spread-of-COVID-19.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200330/United-States-tra...
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Sweden is not using smartphone or base station location data for tracking of Corona. https://www.datainspektionen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset-och-digital-smittsparning/ https://www.datainspektionen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset-och-di...
- turbinerneiter 7y ago
  It's related to the COVID data gathering in a quite simple way: the government is telling the people gathering this data helps containing the disease and that they can be trusted to not abuse that data. This trust however is severely undermined by a lot of factors, like past abuses which came out due to Snowden, the continued push to collect data with claims of fighting terror or other crime - and, in my opinion, also extreme difference in transparency that politicians ask from citizens versus the transparency they themselves will commit to. The two cases were the former minister of defense, von der Leiten, and the current minister of transport, Scheuer. Both wiped their cellphone data although they knew that there are ongoing investigations. The investigations are called "Untersuchungsausschuss" - not sure how to correctly translate that. They are not criminal investigations, although they could to them, but basically a group of members of parliament investigate into affairs to find out if criminal misconduct happened or off processes need to be improved. In case of von der Leien, there were large amounts of money going to consultants, with some contracts not following the legal processes to give them out. In case of Scheuer, there is a completely bitched toll project, which is costing the taxpayer 500 millions, where there are clear sings of him if ignoring risks to be seen as a quick actor to help with an election, as well as giving information to one of the bidders for the contract. I don't trust politicians like that to only use the collected data for the given purpose and I don't trust them to stop the collection after the crisis is over. That's how, in my opinion, these topics are related.

iveqy 7y ago

Even if Sweden doesn't have a webpage for this, anyone can request anything https://www.government.se/emails-to-the-government-and-ministries/ https://www.government.se/emails-to-the-government-and-minis...

secstate 7y ago

As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. But I also think that the people upset with the exposure after emailing public officials maybe don't fully understand that anything you communicate to a public official is defacto public and can be requested from anyone at anytime. The alternatives to that default are terrible for public confidence in officials.

Alex3917 7y ago
> As a public official in a small town, I have thought about doing this before. The legal issues always come up. There shouldn't be any legal issues since it's already all public, but regardless there is some possible middle ground here: - All conversations regarding public policy and/or the allocation of public resources get published on the web by default. (With the possibility of making redactions on anonymizing folks, at the discretion of the public official.) - Things like emails from constituents asking for advice about personal issues and bulk newsletters would stay private unless FOIA'd. - Anything redacted or anonymized at the discretion of a public official can still be FOIA'd, and in the FOIA'd version of the email things would only be allowed to the redacted or anonymized to the extent allowable by law. This is similar to how NYC's proposed algorithmic transparency legislation would have worked, where software involved in allocating public resources needs to be public but the rest of the software does not.
vidarh 7y ago
In Norway all communications with the government at national levels needs to be logged in journals that are publicly accessible by default. Not logging everything is a crime. Personal details can be redacted, and some things can be marked as not for public view, but doing so tends to be inviting scrutiny, as the big media organisations have people trawling the post journals.
Keverw 7y ago
Nice to see public officials understanding this stuff :) So many cities have people untrained on this sort of stuff, I know there's been cities or other departments in cities deleting Facebook comments, and there's been some lawsuits over that. I kinda always got a feeling public officials feel like they are gods and above the law. Plus I think local officials can get away with things more compared to say a congress person or president since stuff they say and do have a bigger spot light on them. Probably more corruption happens at the local level is an assumption I've always had. Then if you go on YouTube can find tons of videos where cops or city officials get mad at being filmed, people go into the lobby of their local city and film the clerk there and some of them freak out or even goes as far as assaulting the camera person. However, I think some of those YouTubers though do it just to kinda just stir things up to see how people react so they'll get views, but technically it's still a first amendment protected activity.

CapriciousCptl 7y ago

A problem with complete transparency like this in our new era of yellow journalism is bad actors can cherry pick basically anything and get pageviews and mindshare by manufacturing outrage. Moreover, the kinds of things that are legitimately controversial get moved to other mediums.

BubRoss 7y ago
People might even make hyperbolic assumptions about the future while preying on uncertainty.

wyxuan 7y ago

They mentioned Palo Alto, and I think it's a decent example. If you email Citi council, your email will be printed out and made accessible during council meeting and also made public. However, the sheer volume of email and the obscurity surrounding the existence of this public email makes it very non controversial.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

This reminds me of politicians "going transparent" in The Circle. I would loathe to be in a position where every casual conversation I had was subject to public scrutiny.

aleksaxyz 7y ago
Having worked in the public sector in the U.S., email conversations are sterile for the fact that they are always potentially accessible through Freedom of Information Act requests. No one's having thoughtful and personal conversations over internal emails. But there does need to be a warning to the public that their emails are going to be public. Just so they aren't surprised and can schedule a call instead of going into detail via email.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > But there does need to be a warning to the public that their emails are going to be public. It seems like Gmail et al. could just add a popup warning folks before sending anything to a .gov email. Folks running their own email servers hopefully know better already.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    > It seems like Gmail et al. could just add a popup warning folks before sending anything to a .gov email. If I'm not mistaken, Gmail _also_ keeps a record of your emails too, does it not?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
7y ago

tomatotomato37 7y ago

Transparency does have its pros & cons. One of the reasons for the whole Florida Man meme is because of Florida's powerful Sunshine laws that make police reports easily accessible to the public

BubRoss 7y ago
This sounds all pro to me.
- kreitje 7y ago
  Yes and no. I have received a handful of requests from lawyers to remove their clients charges from a news aggregator I ran. All of them had their charges dropped but when potential employers were searching them online they would come across the booking information.

newfeatureok 7y ago

Florida gets a lot of flak but this is good. Transparency is the only way to fight corruption. The only real downside to such absolute transparency like this is that most people don't want to be accountable.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I am not sure if this really fights corruption. It may also lead to a situation where official communication will be sanitized and the real stuff gets pushed to private channels.

jotakami 7y ago

I’m a resident of Gainesville and I was completely unaware of this. Now I know not to send anything sensitive to a local government email address...

cool_dude85 7y ago
In Florida, almost anything you send to any level of state or local government is public. If you're a customer of GRU, it's very likely that I could request your last year of bills, your address (if I know your name), etc. There are definitely some drawbacks of the very broad public records laws here.
Fjolsvith 7y ago
Just use your Mayor's private email server. They'll be sure to acid wash the drives when they leave office.

Spooky23 7y ago

It's a big money saver probably. FOIA laws usually make most of this stuff public anyway, except you run it through lawyers and waste alot of time and energy. PII shouldn't be in email anyway.

saila 7y ago
Most people still think email is private for whatever reason. City and other government contact pages should have big red flags making it clear that your correspondence could be made public at any time. Even the record of correspondence with a government agency should be considered PII and/or sensitive, depending on the agency and subject matter.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Florida government websites do have these warnings, as well as in email auto responders.

qznc 7y ago

What is the matter with losing a little bit of privacy? You have nothing to hide, don't you? /s