Many years ago, when I was a young immigrant with very limited knowledge
of English-stuck without money, education or support of any kind in a Canadian
basement apartment with a savagely handicapped child-somebody sent a social
worker my way to check on how I was doing.
My son, then three or so, had a horrendous gagging problem as part of his
overal paralysis, and feeding him was Nightmare Magnified. When I had finally
succeeded in getting him to manage a whole doughnut, that was a major victory.
There sat this social worker on my couch, and I, elated at my triumph,
told her, all flushed and happy: "All day, I feed him doughnuts."
I really meant to say ". . . every day" but linguistic subtleties
were not my worry in those years.
That simple sentence went into my youngster's "Progress Folder",
thanks to Canadian bureaucracy. For what this social worker wrote was this:
"This child is badly malnourished. All his mother does is feed him
doughnuts." My son graduated at age twenty from high school, and that
note was still in his folder. For seventeen years or so, every time he
had a new teacher, or a new doctor, or a new social worker, I had to defend
myself that, no, I never had neglected, maltreated, starved or otherwise
abused my child.
That is what falsified records can do.
Against that backdrop, consider the following. It is an excerpt from the
"The Cook Report on Internet: The Dark Side in Washington State."
". . . The COOK Report finds that the state of Washington leads the
rest of the nation in developing the building blocks of a statewide information
infrastructure. What is being "leveraged" there is the Clinton
-- Gore push for National Information Infrastructure (NII). NII is touted
in commercials by AT&T and others as being kind of warm and friendly
communications utopia. But the essence of NII is often in the eye of the
beholder. In fact, there is no widely accepted definition of or goals for
NII. Instead, it is one of those terms with a definition specific to whomever
is talking about it at any given moment.
In the state of Washington what is being constructed is not a service for
video on demand; nor is it home shopping. It is a statewide web of state
agency networks and interlinked databases. While other states have some
NII related projects, we are not aware of any that have the number and
scope of those in Washington.
People with whom we talked generally agreed that the citizens of Washington
are facing a situation where their privacy is fast disappearing and where
the rights to information that they own and should effectively control
are being sold out from under them. In the opinion of many to whom we talked,
the situation is volatile and may become more so. Even George Lindamood,
the outgoing Director of the Department of Information Services, acknowledged
that when the citizens of the state understand the totality of what had
happened to them, they will be angry.
In order to bring a "competitive environment" to the citizens
of the state, Washington State agencies are moving forward to implement
new information technology programs. But this information technology is
the new hucksterism of the second half of the '90s. With the Clinton Administration
pushing it in the first half of the decade, officials from the various
departments of state government are lined up at the federal table to make
sure they get the technology grants that will make their agencies stand
out at home. They are very likely perfectly well-intentioned civil servants
- in a hurry to build now and ask questions later. Policy issues, the big
picture, privacy and confidentiality concerns are given lip service, but
usually put off as being to difficult to deal with now. As these are put
off, the web of interconnected communications systems and databases grows
and wraps more firmly in place around Washington State residents.
There may be about a year to make meaningful changes before the average
citizen is irretrievably caught in the emerging state data web. The only
hope that we see is for citizen groups to coalesce, get educated and agree
on the objectives for and definition of a state commission on citizen information
rights -- one that has legal power to slow down the technocratic juggernaught
-- until adequate legal safeguards to protect privacy can be put in place.
The citizen's lobby must then sell these objectives to the legislature.
If they don't succeed, Washington State may be neither comfortable nor
a good place in which to live. It will be a combination of "Brave
New World," "Blade Runner" and a digital Singapore transplanted
to the Pacific northwest by a seemingly well-intentioned alliance between
corporate and political technocratic elites.
One agency that is part of this Washington State web has a database of
at-risk four-year-olds that can be linked with databases of violent juveniles,
drug use incidence, trade and economic activity. All this information can
be mapped matched with census tract and other economic data through a Geographic
Information System (GIS). A GIS Database allows many different kinds of
information to be overlaid on maps of differing scales according to physical
location. GIS was described to us by the Assistant Director of Administrative
Services of Community, Trade and Economic Development (CTED), a relatively
new state agency, as "the glue that holds all the other disparate
information together". The CTED system is under construction.
Someone has obviously decided there is a public purpose to be served in
creating a database of at-risk four-year- olds and another of violent offenders.
Missing from the Washington State scene is any widespread public understanding
either that these and other data bases exist. Also absent is any reasonable
means of challenge by the public to state agency use of them. For example,
what if CTED were to decide that when a business had narrowed its choice
to four potential locations, the final step towards maximum competitiveness
for that business would be to show it the population density of at-risk
four-year-olds and violent offenders in each of the sites? The business
would surely choose to locate in an area with as few undesirables as possible.
The potential of information technology to be used in building economic
ghettos in Washington State is not generally known let alone an item on
the public policy agenda.
This report describes the all ensnaring data web that is being woven in
Washington State. Since many of the programs being field tested in Washington
are federally backed, what happens there is likely to spread to other states
unless we understand what is happening and insist that it be stopped. The
spinning of the data web begins in kindergarten -- or even earlier -- when
parents are asked to supply their children's Social Security Numbers as
identifiers. Goals 2000 and other school restructuring efforts have led
to increased data collection about individual students. Educators want
to know everything about today's students, even whether they arrive at
school "ready to learn." With the help of national business groups
and the well-intentioned but perhaps naive support of the Annenberg Foundation,
Total Quality Management is the current Band-Aid being applied to a education
system that policy makers with the study A Nation at Risk, in the
early 1980s declared effectively "broken." Total Quality Management
demands that all "relevant" data be gleaned and applied to the
process at hand whether it involves manufacturing, or shaping our children's
future.
To this end, the educational bureaucrats within the US Department of Education
have established a National Center for Education Statistics. The Center
has come up with standards for state student record databases and over
500 questions for states and local school districts to choose from in constructing
their own systems. Depending on how faithfully the states follow the federal
model, what could easily become the student's life long dossier may start
with questions like the date of the last dental exam and the condition
of soft tissue inside the student's mouth!
Indeed the federal student data handbooks contains fields for the phone
number of the students email provider, whether the student is a registered
voter and information about the student's post high school employment.
If the student moves between states, a national system called SPEEDE/ExPRESS
is being put into place to transfer his or her electronic record from one
jurisdiction to another. If federal planners have their way, electronic
tracking will continue throughout high school and from there into the student's
employment.
The product of this nationalized and homogenized school record system --
the graduate -- may ultimately submit electronic portfolios, including
teacher evaluations, to area employers via WORKLINK, a national program
developed by Educational Testing Service. Under the guise of making school
more relevant to the world of work, employers with desirable jobs will
be able to glean electronically, from among thousands of area graduates,
the few with the cleanest records. Those who don't make the electronic
cut may walk their paper records to the nearest McDonalds. . ."
People laugh when I speak of the Global Plantation. Their children and
their children's children will not laugh.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you
just sit there."