Court Rules GIS Data Can't Be Kept Secret 269
Silverbear writes "In an update from a Slashdot story posted in January, The Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that there is not a significant security risk to the town of Greenwich in making its GIS Data available to the public, and therefore must do so. Greenwich had claimed that the data could compromise personal and national security, and was sued under CT Freedom of Information laws. The legal ruling is available."
This doesn't surprise me at all (Score:5, Insightful)
If the other 168 municipalities have to be wide open to publicly availible taxpayer funded satellite scans then so should they. I have a feeling however that they will keep on fighting this decision until Hell freezes over.
Re:All the information is available elsewhere (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse. Google is a for-profit company that creates software solutions for the public using public data. If they are charged for the use of the GIS data, fine.
The public, who paid for and even submitted the information stored in the GIS databases, should be able to freely examine and use the information as they see fit. There should be no restrictions on this, especially monetary or it will be another double-fuck fleecing of the public.
Yay, we paid for the taxes to collect this data and wasted our free time giving you Census information and now we have to pay to see it used in a useful manner?
If someone banned Google Maps I wouldn't really care. If the governments continue to close up our free access to information I will continue to get annoyed.
GIS data is public data (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:GIS info is sensitive? Give me a break! (Score:5, Insightful)
GIS data (as I have proven) is not sensitive information. I have a feeling that at least some of what the CIA and NSA do is probably top secret and a cause for concern of our Nation's security.
Where taxes go up and down is not sensitive. How much my neighbors pay in taxes on their houses is quite important and is even more important when you are looking for a place to live (the true reason they don't want to pony up the information).
Let's not compare oranges and apples here. GIS != NSA/CIA regardless of how it is funded.
Re:GIS info is sensitive? Give me a break! (Score:4, Insightful)
It tends to work correctly on shit that really doesn't matter (i.e. GIS data). It doesn't seem to work very well for civil rights violations such as the Patriot Act.
Yes, the people should stand up and revolt against the Patriot Act and those lawmakers, regime leaders, and officers of the court that aren't doing anything to stop it. Should we get bent out of shape over GIS data? No.
This is a step in the right direction showing that the information does need to be public even if someone uses the word "sensitive" or "terrorism".
Re:GIS info is sensitive? Give me a break! (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at the NSA, CIA, random military bases. You're liable to be shot on sight if you sneak into them,...
So who ultimately decides the cutoff as to what we as taxpayers can see and what we can't?
How about using: ``If they can't justify shooting you on sight if you sneak in, they can't justify keeping the information you paid for secret.'' as our criterion?
In this situation they made the proper choice, but I can't trust our judicial system in light of the 'other' rulings they've made.
Me, too.
This sort of wisdom does seem out of character for the courts in general. Not all judges are stupid, crooked, vicious scum, but that's the way to bet. Maybe this fellow is a principled exception to the general rule. Maybe he was just too stoned, and gave the wrong instructions to the clerk who wrote the ruling.
Re:All the information is available elsewhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ok now (Score:3, Insightful)
Even mm precise instruments don't get the correct postion when surverying things like sewer manholes because the center of the manhole cover is tough to find, and the center of manhold cover is not the center of the manhole in many cases.
Re:GIS info really *IS* sensitive. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:In this era of paranoia (Score:3, Insightful)
Guy parks his cruiser like 50 feet away sneaks up on me (I see him coming, he thinks he fucking Sam Fisher or something all crouched down and running from shrub to shrub. Then he gets to me whips on his gun in one hand. (it was pointed down atleast) his flashlight right in my eyes.
He's all like what are doing here. What are taking pictures off!"
"dude its for night photography for a class I'm taking. Could you turn the camera off and stop ruining my film."
What did he think I was doing recon for Al Qaida at 2 am with 30 year old 35MM camera? I seem to meet all the moronic Cops...
GIS data is easy to make (Score:2, Insightful)
It's really easy to make a computer map, if you want to. All you need to do is get a reasonably up-to-date city map and scan it in to the computer. From there, with a simple GPS unit, you can determine the latitude and longitude of landmarks in the city (which could be as simple as street intersections, buildings that are easy to pick out on the map, like airports, etc.) and, with any good GIS software, you can georeference the map and have a GIS map that's nearly as good as whatever the city has.
The city's objections are frivolous. I haven't heard of a lot of terrorists with smart bombs that work better with GIS maps. Do you need computers to load up a truck with fertilizer and drive it into a government building? The trade secrets avenue apparently didn't work, but in my state, we have hired a company to create georeferenced aerial photographs, and those are copyrighted by the company. We can only release that data to other state agencies. Fortunately, that data is currently being replaced by open data that the government is generating, so everyone will have access to it.
Re:GIS info really *IS* sensitive. (Score:3, Insightful)
Real reason for hiding public GIS data (Score:4, Insightful)
For some reason, they see providing any local information for "free" as a threat to their free-wheeling and dealing. Because GIS exoses local environmental violations, incompatible land-use practices, zoning violations, land holdings and conglomeration, and so forth. In recent years, GIS has helped to show redlining in communities (keeping poor people out of rich neighborhoods), gerrymandering school and election districts, and so forth.
Some cities mainly use GIS for fine tuning when and where to ticket parking violators. Washington DC was big on this. Some states (like Michigan) ban such practices, but by and large, local governments use GIS for activities that have not been fully sanctioned. Yet they are loathe to share GIS data with anyone else. For instance in Atlanta, they don't even share this information with other departments within the city or regional government. Their protectionist attitude puts to shame IP litigation we now see in the tech field.
I made most of my money in not setting up GIS systems, but how to keep the data away from public, public officials, and citizens' groups. The major software companies, mainly ESRI, have helped in this endeavor by creating tools to work around easy sharing. Only recently with OpenGIS and other initiatives, did this stranglehold began to loosen.
Anyway, needless to say, I don't work in this field anymore. And I sleep well now.
None... for now anyway. (Score:1, Insightful)
Right now none of it is published wide open to Joe Public without going thru an access request process so that the stuff we consider sensitive can get appropriate auditing and recordkeeping. Here in Texas, we're not subject to being forced to give wide open disclosure of such data to just anybody... yet.
Sure, some of this info can be pieced together from other sources, but a significant portion of our GIS system would be a concentrated gold mine of info that could be used by evildoers to cause great harm. Also the old "security thru obscurity" does have some merit here and we should preseve as many forms of security as we can instead of negligently handing over vital information to the wrong persons. Beleive me, anyone who has genuine and legitimate need for this data can come down to city hall in person and request access to it and upon approval, get it, and so we'll have a record of who is using it and why they want it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to stick it all out there onto the wild lawless untamed public Internet for any anonymous person to have full unfettered access to it without us knowning who they are and why they're wanting it.
Of course access to some of the layers (land parcels, platting data, etc) truly pose no safety threat and could be published to the world, but our GIS system is presently architected in such a way to contain *all* the data, and to provide access to it for the specifically authorized government officials who need it to do their jobs with it. The system was not designed to publish carefully selected subsets of the databases to the general public over the Internet. To do that would cost extra money to buy extra software and extra hardware and an extra Internet link with sufficient bandwidth for hosting such a GIS publishing service, not to mention hire extra staff whose job it is to manage the extra stuff. If the local taxpayers wish to fund such an animal, and the city council wishes to implement it, then of course we'd do it, but the hard cold truth is that we just barely got 80% of the funding really needed to implement and maintain the internal-use-only GIS system, and had to sacrifice other projects' funding to make up the missing 20% to get as much of the GIS system as we were fortunate enough to get at all.