“Do I need to P.I.A. Facebook?” said the perplexed bureaucrat squished into a narrow basement hotel conference room in Washington DC.
P.I.A. stands for Privacy Impact Assessment, a procedure that federal agencies must go through every time they create a new computer system. It was one of many questions about how the government can use the tools of Web 2.0 raised in a session of a privacy conference last week.
Organizations of all sorts have been trying to figure out how they can adapt social networks, blogs, wiki’s and other Web tools to their traditional operating methods in order to connect to customers and partners.
But it is tough. “We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.”
There are many other procedures at government agencies that aren’t just tradition, they are the law.
For example, the mostly harmless feature of Facebook that allows users to specify their religious and political views, may run afoul of the Privacy Act. That law prevents the government from using the site because a provision in the Privacy Act bans it from keeping records related to how people exercise their first amendment rights.
“We are stodgier” than the private sector, said Alex Joel, the civil liberties protection officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who moderated the session at the annual meeting of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, the trade group for corporate and government privacy officers. “We have our own way of doing things.”
Speaking of the First Amendment, one person asked, does the government have the right to remove offensive comments on a blog or social network page? And if it does, must it keep copies of the deleted material under the Federal Records Act and provide them to people making Freedom of Information Act Requests? Yes, it can remove comments that violate posted policies about decency and so on, and yes, it must keep them for a specified time, other participants said.
Private companies are considering whether they should look at someone’s Facebook and MySpace profiles before deciding whether to hire them. Some government participants wondered if doing so would require that the government file a notice under a provision of the Privacy Act that requires it to disclose all of the “systems of records” it uses to keep track of information about people.
Peter Swire, a former government privacy official who now teaches law at Ohio State University, raised another question: anti-corruption law prevents federal officials from receiving gifts of goods and services. Does that prevent an agency from using software or services available free on the Web?
Mr. Swire also pointed to legal pitfalls: federal computer systems must be made accessible to the disabled. For example, they must have captions on videos. Many commercial sites don’t meet these standards. Moreover, the government generally isn’t allowed to endorse commercial products. Mr. Swire said this could be interpreted to mean it can’t use any sites that include advertising.
So far, these issues have not prevented at least some agencies from experimenting with many forms of social media, although some have had to ask sites to modify their formats. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, does not allow advertising on its YouTube channel. (Craig Newmark, founder of CraigsList, wrote Tuesday about government officials organizing to use social media.)
The Central Intelligence Agency uses Facebook to recruit employees. The State Department uses it as part of its “public diplomacy” efforts, such as a page for the embassy in Jakarta.
But there are at least as many pages created on Facebook that are about the agencies that are not officially sanctioned. “For every Facebook page that represents itself as an official State Department page, there is another unofficial page,” one participant said. The government already maintains a list of all federal blogs, and some wondered if it should do the same for social networking pages.
Officials at the session said they feel urgent pressure to get hip to social networks, Wikis and such because of the open government agenda of the Obama administration. But clearly there are a lot of rules and regulations that need to be adjusted for this to work.
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