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Some Practical Limits to Transparency

This entry is inspired by, but not limited to, some issues on government transparency raised during a session I facilitated (”Led” sounds too pushy. Also, it’s completely inaccurate.) during last week’s Government 2.0 Camp.

“Transparency,” especially these days, is a mantra that’s so prevalent in social media and participatory government circles, that it’s all-encompassing, and therefore almost useless. As with many slogans, it’s basically a shortcut that gives people permission to stop thinking about it as they work on other things.

So what is transparency? Cribbing and paraphrasing from the wikipedia entry (see what I did there? That’s a bit of transparency), I’m going to use the loose definition of transparency as visibility into the government decision-making process. It also implies that citizens, users, consumers, etc. can access the information collected on their behalf. Transparency enables accountability.

How much should we be able to see? Some folks want to be able to look all the way into the sausage factory. As captured in a Tweet, one Gov20Camp attendee said (colorfully), “I just think we should be able to wire tap the federal government.”

Barring a few legitimate exemptions (including, say, national security, trade secrets, and that ever-so-sticky issue of personal privacy), and ignoring technical considerations (format,  sheer volume, timeliness, methods of dissemination, machine-readability, etc.), there are a few other practical limits to transparency that arise at the intersection of transparency, public interest, and privacy, which force us to look a little deeper past the buzzword.

The first is simply the loss of candor. There’s a piece of advice that floats around political circles, that goes something like, “Never say or send anything that you wouldn’t mind seeing on the front page of the Washington Post.” If you know your correspondence might be published, you self-censor and carry on the conversation using other channels.

In a lesson from the private sector, it’s pretty common these days that internal company memos get leaked to sites like Silicon Alley Insider or Valleywag, usually within minutes after getting sent. Because of this, memos get written with an eye for external distribution, so what used to be valuable (or at least slightly more valuable, thanks to proprietary info or internal data), basically gets turned into another press release written specifically for public consumption.

Although private industry is its own beast (being a publicly-traded company has its own disclosure requirements), just because something is published, doesn’t mean it’s useful.

Another sticking point comes when you take ostensibly public records, mash them up with a search engine or visualization tool and put them on the Web, wherein the records are actually made usable and accessible, and hilarity ensues.

One recent example came when donors in favor of California’s Proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage) were reportedly harassed via the contact information listed in their campaign contribution records. Another example crops up whenever a newspaper decides to publish their state’s list of concealed weapons permit holders (it’s happened in Virginia and Tennessee).

It’s the old “yeah, this is something we can do, but is this something we should do?” Even the tawdriest of celebrity gossip sites usually redact social security numbers, addresses, and other personally identifying info before publishing the latest celebrity arrest records, even though they’re public records.

Anyway, this is just barely scratching the surface of transparency issues, and there are much deeper thinkers looking at this problem than me. I will just end this by just asking that people think about what they mean when they say “transparency,” whether it’s in the context of government, the private sector, or social media in general.

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