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Report: Govt Info at Your Fingertips? Not Quite
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ShareDecember 11, 2007 1:13 PM
Looking for information on grandparents' visitation rights? Wondering how to obtain a farm loan? Want to know more about federal radiation monitoring in New York City?
The U.S. government has the answers to questions like these, and they are mostly online. But you won't find them using Google, Yahoo or other major search engines, according to an Internet-age Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group.
By accident or by design, millions of pages of potentially useful, publicly-funded information are blocked from major search engines, the Center for Democracy and Technology says in a new report.
Click Here for Full Blotter Coverage.
In many cases, government agencies fail to take basic steps to ensure their Web sites can be indexed by search engines, the group found.
"It's really trivial," said CDT spokesman Brock Meeks. The process "takes maybe half an hour," he said. "It's a well-known, commonly-used standard...something you could find in the 'Dummies Book to the Internet.'"
In some cases, government employees have written files to bar Web surfers from finding particular pages on their sites through Google or other search engines. Until recently, the White House made it impossible for U.S. taxpayers and others to find information about Iraq on the whitehouse.gov Web site without searching at the site itself. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence also blocked search engines' access to its public site.
Following reports of the blocks on cNet.com in September, both the White House and ODNI said the blocks were written in error and removed them.
Do you have a tip for Brian Ross and the Investigative Team?
December 11, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (2)
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When it's on purpose it's very easy todo, as the major search engines abide by the rules put into a robots.txt file,
Any of the folders next to a "disallow" statement won't be indexed by an engine that follows the rules. Of course the engines don't HAVE to, but Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN all do to be polite.
Usually it's so they don't index script includes and stuff like that, but if there happens to be one of these files in a directory put there on purpose to stop people from finding information, that's just weird, and probably just some dumb kid who designed the site for a Govt. firm such as Bearingpoint or Accenture. Whom of course charge $600 per hour to develop a web site, but it's ALWAYS some 22 year old kid getting $35k a year that does the actual work.
Posted by: Brandon Pliska | Dec 12, 2007 7:35:49 PM
As a matter of official policy, our President's "ownership society" encourages bureaucratic entrepreneurs who can find a way to squeeze a buck out of citizens by charging for services that cost the government money but are expected to be provided at no charge. These are different from user fees for things like camping, fishing, or hunting which are "pay-as-you-go". In the new society, you might not be asked to pay
directly for having a person or, more likely, a computer provide you with information over the phone. In order to make these programs "efficient" and to maybe even eliminate having any actual people available to help you, you will be asked to wait or to divert to a special line where you will be charged
a "special handling fee" for "faster" service. While you are waiting, and you may be waiting for minutes or hours if you are poor or stubborn, you may incur high cell phone charges if you are among the majority of ordinary people who now use cell phones instead of land-lines. Is it any wonder that the companies that
design the "customer service phone systems" are also telecommunications
companies? Can you even imagine the millions that can be bilked by keeping people on line for just a few seconds more? For English, press one.
Posted by: Archeoptimist | Dec 27, 2007 3:20:19 PM
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