Text Size
Print
Email
National News
- Text Size
- Print
- Email
States, Counties, Cities, Your Government Sells Off Public Access To Private Contractors
Tom MacWright, a software engineer who cycles to work in Washington, D.C., would be breezing along 14th Street NW when he suddenly would find himself boxed out of the city’s bike lanes.
Businesses were running valet parking stations in the middle of the lanes, forcing cyclists to swerve into the road or stop to avoid a collision. MacWright, who blogs about cycling, privacy and technology, thought this was probably illegal. He wanted to be able to cite the law on his blog and a website he was developing for cyclists in the area.
In Washington, D.C., some businesses run valet parking stations in the middle of bike lanes, causing hazards for cyclists. When software engineer and cyclist Tom MacWright decided to blog about the issue, he found he couldn’t link to the city’s laws because a private contractor owned the publication rights.
“I wanted to create a reference to show what the current laws were and link to them,” he said. “And I wanted to link to primary sources.”
In theory, that sounds relatively easy. State and local laws usually can be found online. But in the District and dozens of other cities and states, the rights to publish those laws don’t belong to the people or the governments. They belong to private contractors.
The fight to unravel that legal maze put MacWright in the epicenter of a long-standing debate over private companies that are controlling access to government data, documents and laws. He and others are trying keep in the public domain all sorts of data, documents, regulations and laws that taxpayers pay the government to develop but then often cannot obtain without putting up a fight or a paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in fees.
Government agencies, in many instances, have given contractors exclusive rights to the data. The government then removes it from public view online or never posts the data, laws and documents that are considered public information.
Public datasets that state and local governments are handing off to private contractors include court records and judicial opinions; detailed versions of state and local laws and, in some cases, the laws themselves; building codes and standards; and public university graduation records.
Much of the information collected and stored by private data companies such as LexisNexis, Westlaw or CrimeMapping.com is not available to the public without a price. The information that is available often is not searchable, cannot be compared with data from other jurisdictions and cannot be copied unless members of the public pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in subscription fees.
Sometimes, governments pay the companies to put the data into a useful format; other times, they turn over the data, get it back from the company in a useful format and give republishing rights to the company, which can then sell the data, laws and documents to the public.
The bottom line is good for the vendors, which can make millions of dollars from the sale of public information. But the public, who paid for the information to be developed in the first place, often is left on the outside, unable to get to the information as quickly as the private vendor, if they can get it at all, without paying for it.
In a vast number of these deals, the contractor gets to control the flow of information, restrict its duplication and downloading, and repackage and sell it to other clients, such as businesses, that want quick information about crime near their facilities. Or they publish state laws, regulations and building codes – sometimes with commentary – and then sell the records, often becoming the only “public” source of the information.
State and local governments often still are stuck in the digital past. Some departments lack the funding or internal expertise to build an open-source website and look for outside vendors, which then demand some type of exclusive control. Others continue to rely on paper reports that haven’t been digitized and need vendors to put them online and crunch the data.
Still others, eager to make use of sophisticated mapping tools and the reports they can produce, have gone to outside vendors to build data portals and mapping and alert systems. But these deals usually include limits on use by others – imposed by the contractor and agreed to by the government – that restrict the public’s access and right to republish without permission from the vendor.
On the LexisNexis crime-mapping site, formerly known as RAIDS Online but rebranded as Community Crime Map, the user needs to agree to lengthy terms of use that, among other requirements, say the user may gain access to the site for “personal, non-commercial use only” and may not “duplicate, publish, modify, or otherwise distribute the material on the Site unless specifically authorized in writing by (LexisNexis) to do so.” CrimeView – a crime analysis tool from The Omega Group, which works with law enforcement agencies – imposes similar restrictions.
Restrictions, the vendors say, must be imposed because they have turned the data into a new format – such as a map – and created tools that are copyrighted. Although the data are public, the company can insist that the material can be viewed but not copied, downloaded or in some other way appropriated without the company’s permission or a payment plan.
2024 The Background Investigator. All Rights Reserved.