Giving Americans Easier Access to Their Own Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai and Rajive Mathur  at the White House Blog: “…One of the newest My Data efforts is the IRS tool, Get Transcript. Launched in 2014, Get Transcript allows taxpayers to securely view, print, and download a PDF record of the last three years of their IRS tax account. Get Transcript has produced over 17 million so-called tax transcripts, reducing phone, mail, or in-person requests by approximately 40% from last year. Secure access to your own tax data makes it easier to demonstrate your income with prospective lenders and employers, or help with tax preparation. What was a paper-based transcript process which took multiple days has been made instantaneous and easy for the American taxpayer.
The IRS is an agency that serves virtually every American, and runs one of the nation’s largest customer service operations. To give an idea of the size and scope of responsibilities, the Internal Revenue Service:

  • receives over 80 million phone calls per year, mostly from people eager to hear the status of their refund, understand a notice, make a payment, or update their account;
  • sends out nearly 200 million paper notices annually; and
  • receives over 50 million unique visitors to its website each month during filing season.

Meeting this demand from citizens is a challenge with limited staff and resources. Nonetheless, the IRS is committed to improving service to citizens across all of its channels – whether it’s by phone, walk-ins, or especially its digital services.
Building on the initial success of Get Transcript, there are more exciting improvements to IRS services in the pipeline. For instance, millions of taxpayers contact the IRS every year to ask about their tax status, whether their filing was received, if their refund was processed, or if their payment posted. In the future, taxpayers will be able to answer these types of questions independently by signing in to a mobile-friendly, personalized online account to conduct transactions and see all of their tax information in one place. Users will be able to view account history and balance, make payments or see payment status, or even authorize their tax preparer to view or make changes to their tax return. This will also include the ability to download personal tax information in an easy to use and machine-readable format so that taxpayers can share with trusted recipients if desired….”

Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Webcast of Book release by G. Thomas Kingsley Claudia J. Coulton, and Kathryn L. S. Pettit: “Efforts to address the problems of distressed urban neighborhoods stretch back to the 1800s, but until relatively recently, data played little role in forming policy solutions. Published by the Urban Institute with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the new book Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data documents how government and nonprofit institutions have used information about neighborhood conditions to change the way we think about community and local governance in America.”
Get a free copy of Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data

Stories of Innovative Democracy at Local Level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Issue of Field Actions Science Reports published in partnership with CIVICUS, coordinated by Dorothée Guénéheux, Clara Bosco, Agnès Chamayou and Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil: “This special issue presents many and varied field actions, such as the promotion of the rights of young people, the resolution of the conflicts of agropastoral activities, or the process of participatory decisionmaking on community budgetary allocations, among many others. It addresses projects developed all over the world, on five continents, and covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The legitimate initial queries and doubts that assailed those who started this publication as regards its feasibility, have been swept away by the enthusiasm and the large number of papers that have been sent in….”

 

Spain is trialling city monitoring using sound

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “There’s more traffic on today’s city streets than there ever has been, and managing it all can prove to be a headache for local authorities and transport bodies. In the past, we’ve seen the City of Calgary in Canada detect drivers’ Bluetooth signals to develop a map of traffic congestion. Now the EAR-IT project in Santander, Spain, is using acoustic sensors to measure the sounds of city streets and determine real time activity on the ground.
Launched as part of the autonomous community’s SmartSantander initiative, the experimental scheme placed hundreds of acoustic processing units around the region. These pick up the sounds being made in any given area and, when processed through an audio recognition engine, can provide data about what’s going on on the street. Smaller ‘motes’ were also developed to provide more accurate location information about each sound.
Created by members of Portugal’s UNINOVA institute and IT consultants EGlobalMark, the system was able to use city noises to detect things such as traffic congestion, parking availability and the location of emergency vehicles based on their sirens. It could then automatically trigger smart signs to display up-to-date information, for example.
The team particularly focused on a junction near the city hospital that’s a hotspot for motor accidents. Rather than force ambulance drivers to risk passing through a red light and into lateral traffic, the sensors were able to detect when and where an emergency vehicle was coming through and automatically change the lights in their favor.
The system could also be used to pick up ‘sonic events’ such as gunshots or explosions and detect their location. The researchers have also trialled an indoor version that can sense if an elderly resident has fallen over or to turn lights off when the room becomes silent.”

Hashtag Standards For Emergencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Key Findings of New Report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:”

  • The public is using Twitter for real-time information exchange and for expressing emotional support during a variety of crises, such as wildfires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, political protests, mass shootings, and communicable-disease tracking.31 By encouraging proactive standardization of hashtags, emergency responders may be able to reduce a big-data challenge and better leverage crowdsourced information for operational planning and response.
  • Twitter is the primary social media platform discussed in this Think Brief. However, the use of hashtags has spread to other social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora. As a result, the ideas behind hashtag standardization may have a much larger sphere of influence than just this one platform.
  • Three hashtag standards are encouraged and discussed: early standardization of the disaster name (e.g., #Fay), how to report non-emergency needs (e.g., #PublicRep) and requesting emergency assistance (e.g., #911US).
  • As well as standardizing hashtags, emergency response agencies should encourage the public to enable Global Positioning System (GPS) when tweeting during an emergency. This will provide highly detailed information to facilitate response.
  • Non-governmental groups, national agencies and international organizations should discuss the potential added value of monitoring social media during emergencies. These groups need to agree who is establishing the standards for a given country or event, which agency disseminates these prescriptive messages, and who is collecting and validating the incoming crowdsourced reports.
  • Additional efforts should be pursued regarding how to best link crowdsourced information into emergency response operations and logistics. If this information will be collected, the teams should be ready to act on it in a timely manner.”

Transparency for Trust in Government: How Effective is Formal Transparency?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Maria Cucciniello & Greta Nasi in the International Journal of Public Administration: “Many countries refer to transparency not only as the right to access information, but also as a tool for enhancing government efficiency and accountability. However, the practice of transparency is still linked to the need to comply with legal obligations, not necessarily meeting citizens’ needs. The purpose of this article is twofold: it measures the levels of transparency of governments and the needs of citizens for government information and consequently assesses whether there is a gap, offering recommendations for reducing it. This should contribute to reaching higher levels of useful rather than formal transparency and may help in facilitating government-constituent relations.”

Why the World Needs Anonymous

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gabriella Coleman at MIT Technology Review: “Anonymity is under attack, and yet the actions of a ragtag band of hackers, activists, and rabble-rousers reveal how important it remains.
“It’s time to end anonymous comments sections,” implored Kevin Wallsten and Melinda Tarsi in the Washington Post this August. In the U.K., a parliamentary committee has even argued for a “cultural shift” against treating pseudonymous comments as trustworthy. This assault is matched by pervasive practices of monitoring and surveillance, channeled through a stunning variety of mechanisms—from CCTV cameras to the constant harvesting of digital data.
But just as anonymity’s value has sunk to a new low in the eyes of some, a protest movement in favor of concealment has appeared. The hacker collective Anonymous is most famous for its controversial crusades against the likes of dictators, corporations, and pseudo-religions like Scientology. But the group is also the embodiment of this new spirit.
Anonymous may strike a reader as unique, but its efforts represent just the latest in experimentation with anonymous speech as a conduit for political expression. Anonymous expression has been foundational to our political culture, characterizing monumental declarations like the Federalist Papers, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly granted anonymous speech First Amendment protection.
The actions of this group are also important because anonymity remains important to us all. Universally enforcing disclosure of real identities online would limit the possibilities for whistle-blowing and voicing unpopular beliefs—processes essential to any vibrant democracy. And just as anonymity can engender disruptive and antisocial behavior such as trolling, it can provide a means of pushing back against increased surveillance.
By performing a role increasingly unavailable to most Internet users as they participate in social networks and other gated communities requiring real names, Anonymous dramatizes the existence of other possibilities. Its members symbolically incarnate struggles against the constant, blanket government surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden and many before him.
As an anthropologist who has spent half a dozen years studying Anonymous, I’ve have had the unique opportunity to witness and experience just how these activists conceive of and enact obfuscation. It is far from being implemented mindlessly. Indeed, there are important ethical lessons that we can draw from their successes and failures.
Often Anonymous activists, or “Anons,” interact online under the cover of pseudo-anonymity. Typically, this takes the form of a persistent nickname, otherwise known as a handle, around which a reputation necessarily accrues. Among the small fraction of law-breaking Anons, pseudo-anonymity is but one among a roster of tactics for achieving operational security. These include both technical solutions, such as encryption and anonymizing software, and cultivation of the restraint necessary to prevent the disclosure of personal information.
The great majority of Anonymous participants are neither hackers nor lawbreakers but must nonetheless remain circumspect in what they reveal about themselves and others. Sometimes, ignorance is the easiest way to ensure protection. A participant who helped build up one of the larger Anonymous accounts erected a self-imposed fortress between herself and the often-private Internet Relay Chat channels where law-breaking Anons cavorted and planned actions. It was a “wall,” as she put it, which she sought never to breach.
During the course of my research, I eschewed anonymity and mitigated risk by erecting the same wall, making sure not to climb over it. But some organizers were more intrepid. Since they associated with lawbreakers or even witnessed planning of illegal activity on IRC, they chose to cloak themselves for self-protection.
Regardless of the reasons for maintaining anonymity, it shaped many of the ethical norms and mores of the group. The source of this ethic is partly indebted to 4chan, a hugely popular, and deeply subversive, image board that enforced the name “Anonymous” for all users, thus hatching the idea’s potential (see “Radical Opacity”)….
See also: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.

Politics, Policy and Privatisation in the Everyday Experience of Big Data in the NHS

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Chapter by Andrew Goffey ; Lynne Pettinger and Ewen Speed in Martin Hand , Sam Hillyard (ed.) Big Data? Qualitative Approaches to Digital Research (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Volume 13) : “This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data.
Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography of software and key informant interviews were used. Actor-network theories, as developed by Science and technology Studies (STS) researchers were used to inform the research questions, data gathering and analysis. The chapter focuses on the aftermath of legislation to change the organisation of the NHS.

Findings

The chapter shows the benefits of qualitative research into specific manifestations information technology. It explains how apparently ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ quantitative data gathering and analysis is mediated by complex software practices. It considers the political power of claims that data is neutral.

Originality/value

The chapter provides insight into a specific case of healthcare data and. It makes explicit the role of politics and the State in digitisation and shows how STS approaches can be used to understand political and technological practice.”

Open Elections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Welcome to OpenElections Our goal is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election data for the United States, including federal and statewide offices. No freely available comprehensive source of official election results exists. The current options for election data can be difficult to find and use or financially out-of-reach for most journalists and civic hackers. We want the people who work with election data to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a CSV file for stories and data analysis or JSON usable for web applications and interactive graphics. OpenElections is generously supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge.”

Gov.uk quietly disrupts the problem of online identity login

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Guardian: “A new “verified identity” scheme for gov.uk is making it simpler to apply for a new driving licence, passport or to file a tax return online, allowing users to register securely using one log in that connects and securely stores their personal data.
After nearly a year of closed testing with a few thousand Britons, the “Gov.UK Verify” scheme quietly opened to general users on 14 October, expanding across more services. It could have as many as half a million users with a year.
The most popular services are expected to be one for tax credit renewals, and CAP farm information – both expected to have around 100,000 users by April next year, and on their own making up nearly half of the total use.
The team behind the system claim this is a world first. Those countries that have developed advanced government services online, such as Estonia, rely on state identity cards – which the UK has rejected.
“This is a federated model of identity, not a centralised one,” said Janet Hughes, head of policy and engagement at the Government Digital Service’s identity assurance program, which developed and tested the system.
How it works
The Verify system has taken three years to develop, and involves checking a user’s identity against details from a range of sources, including credit reference agencies, utility bills, driving licences and mobile provider bills.
But it does not retain those pieces of information, and the credit checking companies do not know what service is being used. Only a mobile or landline number is kept in order to send verification codes for subsequent logins.
When people subsequently log in, they would have to provide a user ID and password, and verify their identity by entering a code sent to related stored phone number.
To enrol in the system, users have to be over 19, living in the UK, and been resident for over 12 months. A faked passport would not be sufficient: “they would need a very full false ID, and have to not appear on any list of fraudulent identities,” one source at the GDS told the Guardian.
Banks now following gov.uk’s lead
Government developers are confident that it presents a higher barrier to authentication than any other digital service – so that fraudulent transactions will be minimised. That has interested banks, which are understood to be expressing interest in using the same service to verify customer identities through an arms-length verification system.
The government system would not pass on people’s data, but would instead verify that someone is who they claim to be, much like Twitter and Facebook verify users’ identity to log in to third party sites, yet don’t share their users’ data.
The US, Canada and New Zealand have also expressed interest in following up the UK’s lead in the system, which requires separate pieces of verified information about themselves from different sources.
The system then cross-references that verified information with credit reference agencies and other sources, which can include a mobile phone provider, passport, bank account, utility bill or driving licence.
The level of confidence in an individual’s identity is split into four levels. The lowest is for the creation of simple accounts to receive reports or updates: “we don’t need to know who it is, only that it’s the same person returning,” said Hughes.
Level 2 requires that “on the balance of probability” someone is who they say they are – which is the level to which Verify will be able to identify people. Hughes says that this will cover the majority of services.
Level 3 requires identity “beyond reasonable doubt” – perhaps including the first application for a passport – and Level 4 would require biometric information to confirm individual identity.