Openness and transparency goes in one direction only

Net Results/Karlin Lillington: Imagine if every phonecall or mail inquiry you made to any Government department was logged and then posted on the internet, identifying you as the inquirer, listing your address, your inquiry, and the full reply you received.

It would probably restrict your inquiries, since you couldn't be sure what might get published online in the reply. You may have nothing to hide, but you consider it a private matter when you make a request for information to a Government office, and don't expect to have every inquiry available for public viewing.

Well, the Department of Communications is doing this with all Freedom of Information requests. It now posts all requests, along with the name and address of the requestor, on its website, www.dcmnr.gov.ie. And it plans to post the full contents of replies.

It is one thing for an individual to request to see information held on a given subject. It is an entirely different matter for that content to be posted where thousands of people can look at information that is not placed in any context. It's no surprise that the move has concerned the Irish Data Protection Commissioner and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

The plan is disguised as a "transparency" initiative to, as Mr Ahern's Department press release states, "indicate clearly just how the internet and the information society can benefit citizens and provide open Government". But politically connected individuals, including veteran politicians, have told me privately that the move clearly aims to thwart journalists' requests for information that often becomes part of revealing stories on Government deliberations.

Even if we humour the Department and accept its claims, it is still deeply wrong. Such a move poses threats to personal privacy that must be strongly opposed.

The Department will no doubt argue that it has promised not to post requests for "personal information". But how will it judge this? This seems to mean only requests for information about the given individual. But many requests are indeed personal when they have little to do with personal detail, and could be revealing, even compromising, about an individual or business simply because of the request's content.

In addition, the material returned in a typical FOI request is typically full of speculative and sensitive information, often about third parties that have not themselves been able to screen the documentation.

Information in an FOI response is not vetted for veracity but instead represents a jumbled set of documents covering discussions and debates and decision-taking. Comments could be made that are not fact, including assumptions about individuals and businesses.

Information in FOI requests is often so sensitive that at this newspaper, many stories based on FOI material must be read by lawyers before publication. The Department is obviously not taking similar care that compromising inferences will not be drawn from information it will post to the Web. It surprises me that the Department's legal advisers would not advise against such a move. Inevitably, too, information is released that should not have been, with all the potential for unacceptable privacy compromises for persons and businesses that this entails. Remember that FOI requests are handled by a single, often overworked, FOI officer in a department, trying to judge what is acceptable to release and what is not.

Sometimes there are slip-ups. I've received information in FOI requests that I was not supposed to have received. And private information about me - a name and personal phone number scrawled on the side of a document - was improperly released in an FOI request made by an individual who later pointed this out to me.

This finagling may be to annoy journalists by revealing a reporter's FOI requests to competitor papers. But that's a minor issue (and I for one encourage as many rival papers as possible to look into the Government's deliberations over its proposed Data Retention Bill, which will place us all under scrutiny in thoroughly unacceptable ways).

On one hand, the State continues in its Big Brother efforts to store increasing amounts of personal information about its citizens in searchable databases, where it will be open to misuse. At the same time, it is placing overt and covert restrictions on citizens' abilities to use the few tools available to keep an eye on Government, such as the Freedom of Information Act. And now it wants to compromise the privacy of individuals and businesses by placing unscreened, decontextualised information in the public domain.

Citizen and business rights are slowly being diminished in the name of "openness" as Government becomes ever more secretive, closed and self-contained.

klillington@irish-times.ie Karlin's weblog: http://weblog.techno-culture.com