For sale: Data on US servicemembers — and lots of it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alfred Ng: “Active-duty members of the U.S. military are vulnerable to having their personal information collected, packaged and sold to overseas companies without any vetting, according to a new report funded by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The report highlights a significant American security risk, according to military officials, lawmakers and the experts who conducted the research, and who say the data available on servicemembers exposes them to blackmail based on their jobs and habits.

It also casts a spotlight on the practices of data brokers, a set of firms that specialize in scraping and packaging people’s digital records such as health conditions and credit ratings.

“It’s really a case of being able to target people based on specific vulnerabilities,” said Maj. Jessica Dawson, a research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point who initiated the study.

Data brokers gather government files, publicly available information and financial records into packages they can sell to marketers and other interested companies. As the practice has grown into a $214 billion industry, it has raised privacy concerns and come under scrutiny from lawmakers in Congress and state capitals.

Worried it could also present a risk to national security, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point funded the study from Duke University to see how servicemembers’ information might be packaged and sold.

Posing as buyers in the U.S. and Singapore, Duke researchers contacted multiple data-broker firms who listed datasets about active-duty servicemembers for sale. Three agreed and sold datasets to the researchers while two declined, saying the requests came from companies that didn’t meet their verification standards.

In total, the datasets contained information on nearly 30,000 active-duty military personnel. They also purchased a dataset on an additional 5,000 friends and family members of military personnel…(More)”

Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Alison Campion, Tobias Lunt and Paul Novosad: “The government generates terabytes of data directly and incidentally in the operation of public programs. For intrinsic and instrumental reasons, these data should be made open to the public. Intrinsically, a right to government data is implicit in the right to information. Instrumentally, open government data will improve policy, increase accountability, empower citizens, create new opportunities for private firms, and lead to development and economic growth. A series of case studies demonstrates these benefits in a range of other contexts. We next examine how government can maximize social benefit from government data. This entails opening administrative data as far upstream in the data pipeline as possible. Most administrative data can be minimally aggregated to protect privacy, while providing data with high geographic granularity. We assess the status quo of the Government of India’s data production and dissemination pipeline, and find that the greatest weakness lies in the last mile: making government data accessible to the public. This means more than posting it online; we describe a set of principles for lowering the access and use costs close to zero. Finally, we examine the use of government data to guide policy in the COVID-19 pandemic. Civil society played a key role in aggregating, disseminating, and analyzing government data, providing analysis that was essential to policy response. However, key pieces of data, like testing rates and seroprevalence distribution, were unnecessarily withheld by the government, data which could have substantially improved the policy response. A more open approach to government data would have saved many lives…(More)”.

Inside India’s plan to train 3.1 million 21st century civil servants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anirudh Dinesh and Beth Simone Noveck: “Prime Minister Modi established the Government of India’s Capacity Building Commission (CBC) on April 1, 2021 to reimagine how the state can deliver high-quality citizen services. According to the Commission’s chairman, Adil Zainulbhai and its secretary, Hemang Jani, the Commission will work with 93 central government departments and more than 800 training institutions across India to train over three million central government employees.

The competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down

By training employees, especially those who interact with citizens on a daily basis like those in the railways and postal departments, the hope is to impart new ways of working that translate into more effective and trustworthy government and better quality interactions with residents. The Commission has set itself two “north stars” or stretch goals to accomplish, namely to contribute to improving the “ease of living” for citizens and to advance Prime Minister Modi’s vision to make India a $5 trillion economy…

The Capacity Building Commission’s philosophy is that the competencies that civil servants are trained in should not be defined from the top down. Rather, the Commission wants each ministry to answer: What is the single most important thing we need to accomplish and then define the competencies they need to achieve that goal. …

An important first step in creating a capacity building programme is to understand what competencies already exist (or not) in the civil service. We asked both Zainulbhai and Jani about the CBC’s thinking about creating such a baseline of skills. The Commission’s approach, Jani explained to us, is to ask each ministry to look at its training needs from three “lenses:”

  1. Does the ministry have the capacity to deliver on “national priorities”? And are government employees aware of these national priorities?
  2. Does the ministry have the capacity necessary to deliver “citizen-centric” services?
  3. The “technology lens”: Do civil servants not only understand the challenges posed by technology but also appreciate new technologies and the solutions that could come from them?

The Commission also looks at capacity building on three levels:

  1. The individual level: What knowledge, skill and attitude an individual needs.
  2. The organisation level: What rules and procedures might be hindering service delivery.
  3. The institutional level: How to create an enabling environment for employees to upskill themselves resulting in better public services…(More)”

Financing Models for Digital Ecosystems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rahul Matthan, Prakhar Misra and Harshita Agrawal: “This paper explores various financing models for the digital ecosystem within the Indian setup. It uses the market/non-market failure distinction and applies it to different parts of the ecosystem, outlined in the Open Digital Ecosystems framework. It identifies which form of financing — public, private and philanthropic — is suitable for the relevant component of the digital world — data registries, exchanges, open stacks, marketplaces, co-creation platforms, and information access portals. Finally, it treats philanthropic financing as a special case of financing mechanisms available and analyses their pros and cons in the Indian digital ecosystem…(More)”.

A World With a Billion Cameras Watching You Is Just Around the Corner

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Liza Lin and Newley Purnell at the Wall Street Journal: “As governments and companies invest more in security networks, hundreds of millions more surveillance cameras will be watching the world in 2021, mostly in China, according to a new report.

The report, from industry researcher IHS Markit, to be released Thursday, said the number of cameras used for surveillance would climb above 1 billion by the end of 2021. That would represent an almost 30% increase from the 770 million cameras today. China would continue to account for a little over half the total.

Fast-growing, populous nations such as India, Brazil and Indonesia would also help drive growth in the sector, the report said. The number of surveillance cameras in the U.S. would grow to 85 million by 2021, from 70 million last year, as American schools, malls and offices seek to tighten security on their premises, IHS analyst Oliver Philippou said.

Mr. Philippou said government programs to implement widespread video surveillance to monitor the public would be the biggest catalyst for the growth in China. City surveillance also was driving demand elsewhere.

“It’s a public-safety issue,” Mr. Philippou said in an interview. “There is a big focus on crime and terrorism in recent years.”

The global security-camera industry has been energized by breakthroughs in image quality and artificial intelligence. These allow better and faster facial recognition and video analytics, which governments are using to do everything from managing traffic to predicting crimes.

China leads the world in the rollout of this kind of technology. It is home to the world’s largest camera makers, with its cameras on street corners, along busy roads and in residential neighborhoods….(More)”.

Government at a Glance 2019

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Government at a Glance provides reliable, internationally comparative data on government activities and their results in OECD countries. Where possible, it also reports data for Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and South Africa. In many public governance areas, it is the only available source of data. It includes input, process, output and outcome indicators as well as contextual information for each country.

The 2019 edition includes input indicators on public finance and employment; while processes include data on institutions, budgeting practices and procedures, human resources management, regulatory government, public procurement and digital government and open data. Outcomes cover core government results (e.g. trust, inequality reduction) and indicators on access, responsiveness, quality and citizen satisfaction for the education, health and justice sectors.

Governance indicators are especially useful for monitoring and benchmarking governments’ progress in their public sector reforms.Each indicator in the publication is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of graphs and/or charts illustrating variations across countries and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological section on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability….(More)”.

Urban Slums in a Datafying Milieu: Challenges for Data-Driven Research Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bijal Brahmbhatt et al: “With the ongoing trend of urban datafication and growing use of data/evidence to shape developmental initiatives by state as well as non-state actors, this exploratory case study engages with the complex and often contested domains of data use. This study uses on-the-ground experience of working with informal settlements in Indian cities to examine how information value chains work in practice and the contours of their power to intervene in building an agenda of social justice into governance regimes. Using illustrative examples from ongoing action-oriented projects of Mahila Housing Trust in India such as the Energy Audit Project, Slum Mapping Exercise and women-led climate resilience building under the Global Resilience Partnership, it raises questions about challenges of making effective linkages between data, knowledge and action in and for slum communities in the global South by focussing on two issues.

First, it reveals dilemmas of achieving data accuracy when working with slum communities in developing cities where populations are dynamically changing, and where digitisation and use of ICT has limited operational currency. The second issue focuses on data ownership. It foregrounds the need for complementary inputs and the heavy requirement for support systems in informal settlements in order to translate data-driven knowledge into actionable forms. Absence of these will blunt the edge of data-driven community participation in local politics. Through these intersecting streams, the study attempts to address how entanglements between southern urbanism, datafication, governance and social justice diversify the discourse on data justice. It highlights existing hurdles and structural hierarchies within a data-heavy developmental register emergent across multiple cities in the global South where data-driven governmental regimes interact with convoluted urban forms and realities….(More)”.

‘Digital colonialism’: why some countries want to take control of their people’s data from Big Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jacqueline Hicks at the Conversation: “There is a global standoff going on about who stores your data. At the close of June’s G20 summit in Japan, a number of developing countries refused to sign an international declaration on data flows – the so-called Osaka Track. Part of the reason why countries such as India, Indonesia and South Africa boycotted the declaration was because they had no opportunity to put their own interests about data into the document.

With 50 other signatories, the declaration still stands as a statement of future intent to negotiate further, but the boycott represents an ongoing struggle by some countries to assert their claim over the data generated by their own citizens.

Back in the dark ages of 2016, data was touted as the new oil. Although the metaphor was quickly debunked it’s still a helpful way to understand the global digital economy. Now, as international negotiations over data flows intensify, the oil comparison helps explain the economics of what’s called “data localisation” – the bid to keep citizens’ data within their own country.

Just as oil-producing nations pushed for oil refineries to add value to crude oil, so governments today want the world’s Big Tech companies to build data centres on their own soil. The cloud that powers much of the world’s tech industry is grounded in vast data centres located mainly around northern Europe and the US coasts. Yet, at the same time, US Big Tech companies are increasingly turning to markets in the global south for expansion as enormous numbers of young tech savvy populations come online….(More)”.

Great Policy Successes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mallory Compton and Edited by Paul ‘t Hart: “With so much media and political criticism of their shortcomings and failures, it is easy to overlook the fact that many governments work pretty well much of the time. Great Policy Successes turns the spotlight on instances of public policy that are remarkably successful. It develops a framework for identifying and assessing policy successes, paying attention not just to their programmatic outcomes but also to the quality of the processes by which policies are designed and delivered, the level of support and legitimacy they attain, and the extent to which successful performance endures over time. The bulk of the book is then devoted to 15 detailed case studies of striking policy successes from around the world, including Singapore’s public health system, Copenhagen and Melbourne’s rise from stilted backwaters to the highly liveable and dynamic urban centres they are today, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia poverty relief scheme, the US’s GI Bill, and Germany’s breakthrough labour market reforms of the 2000s. Each case is set in context, its main actors are introduced, key events and decisions are described, the assessment framework is applied to gauge the nature and level of its success, key contributing factors to success are identified, and potential lessons and future challenges are identified. Purposefully avoiding the kind of heavy theorizing that characterizes many accounts of public policy processes, each case is written in an accessible and narrative style ideally suited for classroom use in conjunction with mainstream textbooks on public policy design, implementation, and evaluation….(More)”.

The Art of Values-Based Innovation for Humanitarian Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Earney & Aarathi Krishnan at SSIR: “Contrary to popular belief, innovation isn’t new to the humanitarian sector. Organizations like the Red Cross and Red Crescent have a long history of innovating in communities around the world. Humanitarians have worked both on a global scale—for example, to innovate financing and develop the Humanitarian Code of Conduct—and on a local level—to reduce urban fire risks in informal settlements in Kenya, for instance, and improve waste management to reduce flood risks in Indonesia.

Even in its more-bureaucratic image more than 50 years ago, the United Nations commissioned a report to better understand the role that innovation, science, and technology could play in advancing human rights and development. Titled the “Sussex Manifesto,” the report outlined how to reshape and reorganize the role of innovation and technology so that it was more relevant, equitable, and accessible to the humanitarian and development sectors. Although those who commissioned the manifesto ultimately deemed it too ambitious for its era, the effort nevertheless reflects the UN’s longstanding interest in understanding how far-reaching ideas can elicit fundamental and needed progress. It challenged the humanitarian system to be explicit about its values and understand how those values could lead to radical actions for the betterment of humanity.

Since then, 27 UN organizations have formed teams dedicated to supporting innovation. Today, the aspiration to innovate extends to NGOs and donor communities, and has led to myriad approaches to brainstorming, design thinking, co-creation, and other activities developed to support novelty.

However, in the face of a more-globalized, -connected, and -complex world, we need to, more than ever, position innovation as a bold and courageous way of doing things. It’s common for people to demote innovation as a process that tinkers around the edges of organizations, but we need to think about innovation as a tool for changing the way systems work and our practices so that they better serve communities. This matters, because humanitarian needs are only going to grow, and the resources available to us likely won’t match that need. When the values that underpin our attitudes and behaviors as humanitarians drive innovation, we can better focus our efforts and create more impact with less—and we’re going to have to…(More)”.