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Imagine sitting at home or in your office, or in your favorite café and listening in on what are now secret, backroom policy discussions and decisions in the San Francisco mayor’s office. Imagine having access to an immediate transcript of the talks. Imagine being able to read internal e-mail discussions among city staffers about issues that affect you without ever filing a public records request. In fact, imagine never having to file another written request for public documents; imagine just going to a city Web site, entering a search term, and finding all of the records yourself.
Imagine filing a complaint with a city agency and tracking the issue, minute by minute, as it works its way through the system.
Imagine listening on your cell phone to any policy body as it meets in city hall.
All of this is possible, today. Much of it is not only consistent with but actually required by local law. And it won’t cost the city more than a modest amount of money.
Transparency is a common buzzword during this presidential campaign; the Barack Obama campaign has even issued a white paper describing policy and technological ways to embrace it. He’s talking about live Internet feeds of meetings about significant issues involving executive branch appointees as well as for those of regulatory departments (a program that would go far beyond what you see on C-SPAN).
So there’s no reason San Francisco can’t take the lead in using technology generally simple, off the shelf, existing technology to dramatically increase sunshine at City Hall and public participation in local government.
Proposition G, the city’s 1999 sunshine law, mandates that San Francisco use "all technological and economical means to ensure efficient, convenient and low cost access to public information on the Internet." Here are five easy ways to do that:
1. Fully adopt the voyeur concept for city meetings. This is the idea that the public should be able to observe and engage in government decision making all government decision making.
All policy meetings in City Hall should at the very least be broadcast as audio on the Web and available via phone teleconference. In other words, the meetings should be streamed online, and that stream should be accessible by calling a free conference line. This is already standard practice in the business world and is working well for many investors in public companies that disclose financial information in compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission rules. It can be done for little or no cost with services like blogtalkradio.com, skype.com, freeconferencecalls.com, and webex.com.
Today only a limited number of public meetings are broadcast, mostly because the only outlet is SFG-TV and resources are limited. But audio streaming is a no-brainer there’s no need for a staffer to control cameras, the microphones are already set up, and these days just about every room has a speakerphone.
Currently, the SFG-TV video coverage isn’t posted on the city’s Web site, sfgov.org, until two or three days after a meeting. That’s too long; the audio should be made immediately available online. And the Internet URL and dial-in options should be listed on the meeting agenda so that news media and citizen bloggers can instantly refer back to the URL with timecodes to point out specifics, and include them in their stories and blog postings.
With streaming, you can follow along in real time when you are stuck at home taking care of a sick relative, or at the office listening with headphones, or you are disabled and can’t cross town to attend in person.
The city already has a great contract for real time captioning the text you see at the bottom of the screen for video. It’s not 100 percent accurate, but it’s pretty decent. That could be expanded to cover streaming audio, and the text could be computer translated (or translated by bilingual typists) into other common languages. The advantage of media integrated with RTC is that specialized search engines like blikx.com and everyzing.com can be used to find relevant phrases and begin playback directly at that spot. And transcriptions can be posted online in real time (somewhat like live blogging!) so that if you are late for a meeting you can quickly scan what has already transpired, and by the end of the meeting you will effectively have a draft of minutes. That saves a lot of staff time and provides an immeasurably more useful historic record.
Today, video recordings of city meetings can’t be downloaded the only way to review it or post a clip to YouTube is to order a $10 DVD, which arrives a week after you send a check (and no, they don’t take PayPal). And while many other city meetings make audio recordings, you have to pay $1 for an audio tape and pick it up during business hours or pay more for postage. They all should be available as free podcasts.
The SFG-TV video shows more than just the speakers and officials; there are other angles, and they ought to be available too. It’s important to know who attended the meeting but never said anything, who greeted whom, and even who ignored whom.
2. Let the public do the broadcasting. All City Hall meeting rooms should provide wi-fi (and electrical outlets), and the system ought to have enough speed to allow bloggers or activists to upload high-quality video broadcasts of meetings that SFG-TV can’t afford to cover. It can be done using existing services like Justin.tv, Upstream.tv, and live.yahoo.com. This would also allow live blogging and let people preparing to testify on an issue have access to the Web to do research on the spot. If the room had a projector and a screen, people who were unable to attend the meeting could still comment, either through video or just by posting text messages that the decision makers could read.
The audio broadcasting of meetings should be expanded to include all meetings between the mayor (or supervisors) and city staff. The law already requires public access to so-called passive meetings those between the mayor or department heads and outside parties that influence city policy.
3. Make public most city emails and other documents as soon as they are produced.
San Francisco city employees produce thousands of records a day e-mails, memos, reports, etc. and the vast majority of them are and should be public record. But many are deleted and others never see the light of day. When a member of the public asks for all the records on a topic, just finding those documents can be a sizable task.
But it’s technologically simply to solve that problem: every time a city employee produces a document, the computer system should automatically send a back-up copy to a public web server. That way nothing would get lost or erased, and anyone looking for public information could simply go to that site and search for it him or herself.
For e-mails sent by city staff, one way might be to CC (carbon copy) an online message board (for example Google or Yahoo groups, which would be available at no cost to the city). Other approaches for instant messages, text messages and voicemails could be adopted as well. The Palo Alto City Council is already doing something like this for a narrow collection of e-mails (although not in real time).
We all know there are some city communications that must remain private or be redacted for example Attorney Client discussions or human-resource conversations regarding personnel. But there are simply ways to make sure those stay confidential: one approach might simply have the user tick a flag or answer a Yes/No Possible Redaction popup when the message is sent. Certain employees like the people who handle sensitive employee health records and certain litigators in the city attorney’s office could have software that defaults to a confidential server.
The added advantage, of course, is that the computers could also make a record of the title and date of every confidential document and that information could be made public. If a dispute arose over whether the city was improperly withholding records, the public would at least know that certain documents existed.
All city files could be stored on network drives (not on local drives) with one location for default public files that would not allow overwriting or deletions and would be mirrored to a Web server and another drive for the few that may require redaction first.
4. Save all the old records. After a very embarrassing lawsuit that is threatening the Missouri governor’s job, that state in January adopted an email retention system that preserves all email for at least seven years (based on federal requirements for financial records). And e-mail/instant message/text/fax retention systems are standard practice now in the financial industry (Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgment because the company failed to preserve e-mail).
In fact, we all know storage continues to get cheaper and smaller so San Francisco should abolish any retention timeframes for electronic records and keep them all into the foreseeable future. The world-famous Internet Archive is right here in the Presidio: I suspect that group would love to archive all the city information, and keep it online, free and forever.
When paper documents are part of the public record, they should be scanned and converted to text and posted within two days. This would include discussions between staff and individual members of policy bodies and the creation of the draft agenda and supporting materials as they are obtained.
All these methods would significantly reduce the number of public records requests to the city staff and thus save the city money.
5. Make calendars public and keep communications public. Mayor Gavin Newsom won’t provide detailed daily calendars even after the fact, when there is no possible security reason for keeping his workday itinerary secret. All top officials should post their calendars on the web so the public can track what they are doing.
The city needs to adopt a global policy that city business should be performed on city devices (computers, email accounts, phones) whenever possible and when city employees or officials use their own computers or hand-held communications tools, those should be forwarded immediately to the city system and made public.
San Francisco has one of the best local Sunshine laws in the country and at a time when activists at every level are looking for ways to use technology to expand public access, the city should be in the forefront. All it takes is some political will.
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Here are some more ways that the city could use technology to improve public access:
1. Use a program like govtrack.us to follow legislative changes.
2. Explore ways to bring nonprofits that perform traditional government services under sunshine laws.
3. Significantly improve the city’s Crimestats system (more real-time allow alerts for crimes near you) – google mashup et al. See http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/
4. Embrace e-rulemaking technology – similar to federal rulemaking use technology to get ideas online and generate more participation for those who can’t show up in a meeting.
5. Require the Police Department to issue press credentials to bloggers.
6. Fund a few open-government lawsuits to expand the boundaries on access to public records (the law provides for attorney’s fees if the suit is successful).
7. Require city agencies to post the method for obtaining public records online. Require posting of all negative determinations on home pages.
8. At budget time, mandate that each agency provide statistics as determined by SOTF on sunshine responsiveness.
9. Require an assessment of sunshine compliance as a mandatory item for all Financial/Management audits.
10. Televise SOTF and Ethics Commission formal hearings.
11. Require active Ethics investigative files to be open.
12. Embrace fully the much-improved but incomplete example of posting online all interactions as part of large contract negotiations – as was partially done with TechConnect.
13. Host accounts payable/receivables online with the scanned images of invoices paid.
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San Francisco has the best local sunshine law in the country and there are still problems getting access to information. Even though the digital age in which we live affords government agencies with myriad ways to give citizens more access to public documents, there is too often little official will to create transparency. And often, bureaucrats are downright hostile to public scrutiny. But help is out there. This guide to local and national organizations offers a wide range of resources for journalists, citizen activists, and hell-raisers who want to track their tax money and hold their government accountable. The California First Amendment Coalition is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to "promote and defend the people’s right to know" by improving compliance with state and federal access laws. CFAC’s Web site contains an archive of articles dealing with FOI issues, the texts of state FOI laws, and other useful resources. 534 Fourth St., Suite B, San Raphael, CA 94901. (415) 460-5060, cfac@cfac.org, www.cfac.org. The California Newspaper Publishers Association is the umbrella organization to which most newspapers in the state belong, so it has an acute interest in open government. Its FOI Watch newsletter (also available online) includes a clearinghouse of sunshine news from around the state. 708 Tenth St., Sacramento, CA 95814. (916) 288-6015, tom@cnpa.com (general counsel Thomas Newton), www.cnpa.com. Californians Aware, run by former CFAC general counsel Terry Francke, helps activists and organizations get access to public meetings and records and offers resources on the Web for citizens, public officials, journalists, and attorneys. 2218 Homewood Way, Carmichael, CA 95608. (916) 487-7000, info@calaware.org, www.calaware.org. The Center for Investigative Reporting sponsors workshops on investigative techniques for journalists and university students. The center’s Web-based magazine provides FOI information, tips for journalists, and updates on past CIR investigations. 2927 Newbury St., Suite A, Berkeley, CA 94703. (510) 809-3160, center@cironline.org, www.muckraker.org. The DataCenter provides on-call research, consultation, and referrals to justice organizations regarding FOI issues. It also offers research and action training. Services are free or on a sliding scale, depending on one’s ability to pay. 1904 Franklin St., Suite 900, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 835-4692, ext. 376, www.datacenter.org. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online First Amendment organization, works to uphold digital free speech, empower the online public, and protect privacy on the Internet. It provides stories and alerts on its Web site, with daily updates. Effector, an e-mail newsletter, is available through the site. 454 Shotwell St., S.F., CA 94110. (415) 436-9333, information@eff.org, www.eff.org. The First Amendment Project is a public interest law firm that provides legal representation, educational programs, and low-cost or free advice for journalists, public interest organizations, and individual citizens with public records and FOI-related issues. In a joint publication effort with the Society of Professional Journalists, the project offers three free pocket guides, on the Brown Act, California’s Open Meeting Law, and accessing court records. The Web page has information on using the California Public Records Act as well as on getting court records. 1736 Franklin St., 9th floor, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 208-7744, fap@thefirstamendment.org, www.thefirstamendment.org. Media Alliance is a nonprofit media center that offers classes on journalism skills, including how to find and use public records. 1904 Franklin St., Suite 500 Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 832-9000, information@media-alliance.org, www.media-alliance.org. The Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter, FOI Committee fights for open access to information and educates members of the public on FOI issues. The group provides a subscription e-mail list for journalists and others involved in FOI and First Amendment issues in California as well as putting on the James Madison FOI Awards. 222 Sutter St, 6th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108 (415) 321-1700, www.spj.org/norcal. The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information conducts research and educates the public in mass-media law and the First Amendment, including public access to government meetings and records and litigation information. University of Florida, College of Journalism and Communications, 3208 Weimer Hall, P.O. Box 118400, Gainesville, FL 32611-8400. (352) 392-2273, www.jou.ufl.edu/brechner. The Center for National Security Studies works with concerned citizens and groups to expose secret government policies and offers free assistance to those seeking records under the Freedom of Information Act. It also coordinates related litigation. 1120 19th St. NW, 8th floor, Washington, D.C. 20036. (202) 721-5650, cnss@cnss.org, www.cnss.org. The FOIA Blog, created by an FOIA Washington attorney, has an updated list of documents currently being released by several government agencies infoprivacylaw@yahoo.com, www.thefoiablog.typepad.com. The Freedom of Information Center of the University of Missouri School of Journalism has a collection of more than one million articles and documents about access to information at the local, state, and federal levels. The center works to ensure compliance with sunshine laws around the country. Its Web site contains links, updates, and tips on FOI inquiries. A free e-mail newsletter provides information on developments in FOI access and issues; you can sign up by contacting umcjourfoi@missouri.edu. University of Missouri, 133 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. (573) 882-5736, daviscn@missouri.edu, www.missouri.edu/~foiwww. GovernmentDocs allows people to browse and search thousands of pages acquired through the FOIA and sunshine laws. Registered users can review and comment on documents. www.governmentdocs.org GovTrack provides information on the U.S. Congress. It compiles information on federal legislation, voting records, and other congressional date and simplifies the language for ordinary citizens. It also indexes all bills, as well as changes to them, in Congress and all roll call votes www.govtrack.us. Investigative Reporters and Editors provides educational services for investigative reporters and editors. The group’s Web site offers FOI-related resource guides, a database of FOI stories, tips for using the Freedom of Information Act, and a database of previous FOI requests. University of Missouri School of Journalism, 138 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. (573) 882-2042, www.ire.org The National Freedom of Information Coalition is composed of First Amendment organizations dealing with FOI issues. It provides resources for the media, government officials, lawyers, and citizens who want access to public information. The coalition also offers seminars and workshops to media professionals, attorneys, academics, students, and the public on FOI issues and helps nurture start-up FOI groups and Internet sites. Its Web site offers links to relevant legislation and organizations state by state, as well as an Internet mailing list, FOI-L. 133 Neff Annex, Columbia, MO 65211. (573) 882-5736, cdavis@nfoic.org, www.nfoic.org. OMB Watch is a member of the Public Access Working Group, a coalition of organizations promoting greater access to government information. OMB Watch offers an online newsletter, OMB Watcher, available on its Web site or by e-mail, which typically includes articles on FOI issues. To subscribe to the weekly e-mail version, e-mail join-ombwatcher@lyris.ombwatch.org. 1742 Connecticut NW, Washington, D.C. 20009. (202) 234-8494, www.ombwatch.org. The Project on Government Secrecy is an advocacy and public education project of the Federation of American Scientists. The project has an extensive archive and provides regular news updates through its Web site and e-mail newsletter, Secrecy News. 1725 DeSales Street NW, 6th floor, Washington, D.C. 20036. (202) 454-4691, www.fas.org/sgp/index.htm. Project Vote Smart provides information on local, state, and national candidates, including voting records, issue positions, campaign contributions, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. The database is accessible by calling the toll-free hotline at 1-888-VOTE-SMART. 1 Common Ground, Phillipsburg, MT 59858. (406) 859-8683 comments@vote-smart.org, www.vote-smart.org. The Radio-Television News Directors Association is the world’s largest professional organization devoted to electronic journalism. It lobbies for cameras in courtrooms and strong FOI laws and provides coverage of FOI issues on its Web site. 1600 K St. NW, Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20006. (202) 659-6510, www.rtnda.org. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press operates the 24-hour FOI Service Center at 1-800-336-4243 to answer emergency questions from journalists and others with open-records problems. 1101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 1101, Arlington, VA 22209. (703) 807-2100, rcfp@rcfp.org, www.rcfp.org. The Society of Professional Journalists advocates for open access to information and educates members of the public on FOI issues. The society’s Web site has an FOI section with extensive links to resources and information, including a list of FOI advocacy organizations. 3909 N. Meridian St., Indianapolis, IN 46208. (317) 927-8000, questions@spj.org, www.spj.org. State Sunshine and Open Records shares information, guidance and advice on developments and news about open records at the state and local level. They also have an extensive list of links to other sunshine blogs. www.openrecords.wordpress.com. The Student Press Law Center works with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to cover FOI and other First Amendment issues reutf8g to high school and college journalists. It offers free advice, lawyer referrals, and analysis. 1101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209. (703) 807-1904, admin@splc.org, www.splc.org. The Sunlight Foundation develops a database to ensure transparency in government and fiscal accountability. They digitize new info and provide access to existing information. 1818 N Street NW, Suite 410, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 742-1520. www.sunlightfoundation.com. WikiFOIA helps people understand the FOI Act on a state and federal level by providing a how-to-guide about open records requests, as well information on how to make that request. www.wikifoia.pbwiki.com. The Guardian Web site has extensive information and links concerning international press-freedom issues. For details on journalists under fire, including frontline dispatches and reports from the battle to keep the world safe for journalists, go to www.sfbg.com/journalists/. For updates, dispatches, and links to national and international FOI groups, go to www.sfbg.com/FOI. The UK FOI Blog provides a glimpse into how FOI issues are dealt with across the pond by listing news and developments on FOI in Great Britain. www.foia.blogspot.com. Local government resources The Government Information Center, on the fifth floor of the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch, stocks public documents published by the city. These include annual reports for committees and departments, minutes and agendas of official meetings, environmental impact reports, and city audits, ordinances, and resolutions. San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St., S.F., CA 94102. (415) 557-4500, www.sfpl.org. The Oakland Public Ethics Commission responds to complaints and holds hearings on possible violations of the city’s Sunshine Ordinance. Records, tapes of the commission’s meetings, agendas, and minutes can be picked up at the commission’s office. 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza, 4th floor, Oakland, CA 94612. (510) 238-3593, ethicscommission@oaklandnet.com, www.oaklandnet.com/government/public_ethics/webpage.html. The Office of Information and Privacy, U.S. Department of Justice, provides online versions of frequently requested records, opinions, policy statements, and guides to the Freedom of Information Act. The guides include detailed instructions for filing FOIA requests, average response times for different governmental offices, and a wealth of other useful information. The text of the FOIA is available on the office’s Web site. 1425 New York Ave., Suite 11050, Washington, D.C. 20530. (202) 514-3642, www.usdoj.gov/oip/oip.html. Public Access to Court Electronic Records is an online database of court records and decisions. Web access is 8¢ a page, and requires registration through the Web at www.pacer.psc.uscourts.gov. P.O. Box 780549, San Antonio, TX 78278. 1-800-676-6856, pacer@psc.uscourts.gov. The San Francisco Ethics Commission monitors and enforces the Sunshine Ordinance and the city’s governmental-ethics, campaign-finance, and lobbyist-reporting laws. Individuals can file complaints regarding violations of the Sunshine Ordinance. The commission meets the second Monday of each month at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall, Room 408. 25 Van Ness, Suite 220, S.F., CA 94102. (415) 252-3100, ethics.commission@sfgov.org, www.sfgov.org/site/ethics_index.asp. The San Francisco Law Library is open to the public, though only government officials, state bar members, and judges can check out items. Main reference library: Mon.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m., Veterans War Memorial Building, 401 Van Ness, Room 400, S.F. (415) 554-6821. Courthouse reference room: Mon.-Fri., 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., 400 McAllister, Room 512, S.F. (415) 551-3647. Financial District branch: Mon.-Thurs., 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., noon-4 p.m., 685 Market St., Suite 420, S.F. (415) 882-9310, www.ci.sf.ca.us/site/sfll_index.asp. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force oversees compliance with San Francisco’s sunshine law by investigating complaints from individuals who believe city officials have withheld records or conducted meetings in violation of the law. The task force meets the fourth Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m. City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244 (meetings held in Room 408), S.F. For complaint forms and other information call (415) 554-7724 or go to http://www.sfgov.org/site/sunshine_index.asp The California First Amendment Coalition publishes the California Journalist’s Legal Notebook, a handy guide to the legal issues surrounding telephone interviews, press passes, gags on sources, and other journalism-related topics ($36.25, $30.88 for CFAC members, shipping included). Also by CFAC is The New Brown Act: How the Open Meeting Law Has Been Revised ($12.75, $7.39 for CFAC members, shipping included). (415) 460-5060. The Oakland Public Ethics Commission publishes a free brochure, How to Notice a Public Meeting under the Oakland Sunshine Ordinance and the Brown Act, useful for making sure a public meeting follows the requirements of the Brown Act. (510) 238-3593, (510) 238-6620, ethicscommission@Oaklandnet.com, www.oaklandnet.com/government/public_ethics/webpage.html. Access to Courts and Court Records in California, Open Meeting Laws in California, and The California Public Records Act are free, convenient, quick-reference guides published by the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter, and the First Amendment Project. (510) 208-7744, www.thefirstamendment.org/freepress.html. The ACLU Freedom of Information Project publishes Using the Freedom of Information Act: A Step-by-Step Guide (#4002, $3) and Your Right to Government Information (#1190, $5.95), which covers a broader range of topics, including how to get into public meetings. Both publications can be ordered online through the ACLU’s e-store or by phone. ACLU Publications, P.O. Box 4713, Trenton, NJ 08650-4713. 1-800-775-2258, www.aclu.org. The Government Printing Office publishes The Freedom of Information Act Guide and Privacy Act Overview ($63), a 986-page guide to the FOIA produced by the Justice Department. It can be ordered by phone at 1-866-512-1800 or online at bookstore.gpo.gov. The Citizen’s Guide is available in its entirety online at www.fas.org/sgp/foia/citizen.html. The Freedom of Information Clearinghouse Guidebook is a free brochure about making FOIA requests and appealing agency decisions. It’s available online through the Freedom of Information Clearinghouse. www.citizen.org/litigation/free_info/index.cfm. Paper Trails: A Guide to Public Records in California ($12.89), written by Stephen Levine and Barbara Newcombe, is published by the Center for Investigative Reporting and supported by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. It can be ordered from the CIR. An abridged, online version is coming soon. 2927 Newbury St., Suite A, Berkeley,, CA 94703. (510) 809-3160, www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/ The fourth edition of the Investigative Reporters’ Handbook ($61, $51 for Investigative Reporters and Editors members), by Steve Weinberg, Brant Houston, and Len Bruzzese, is a comprehensive and accessible guide for novice and experienced journalists that shows how to locate and use more than 500 sources of public information. (573) 882-3364, www.ire.org/store/books. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press supplies a wealth of publications on public access and other First Amendment topics. How to Use the Federal FOI Act ($5) is a handbook on FOI rights, with instructions for appealing if your request is denied, and includes sample letters. The First Amendment Handbook ($7.50) is a journalist’s pocket guide to FOI issues. Two guides Judicial Records: A Guide to Access ($3) and Access to Electronic Records ($5) analyze state laws and decisions regarding access to legal records and government electronic data. Tapping Officials’ Secrets is a set of guides to state public records and open-meeting laws ($10 a state). The News Media and the Law is a quarterly magazine that includes updates on legislation pertinent to FOI ($30 a year for four issues). Some of these publications are available in their entirety online; all can be ordered online. 1-800-336-4243, www.rcfp.org. The second edition of Law of the Student Press ($18) is a vital handbook for student newspapers. It’s extensively annotated but avoids legalese and tries to bring the law to life for students and educators. The Student Press Law Center also publishes Covering Campus Crime, Third Edition ($2) and the Student Press Law Center Report ($15 for three issues a year). (703) 807-1904, www.splc.org. Citizen Muckraking: How to Investigate and Right Wrongs in Your Community ($9) offers advice on writing press releases, conducting interviews, and using the FOIA. The book, a collaborative effort by the Center for Public Integrity, is available through Common Courage Press. 1-800-497-3207, www.commoncouragepress.com >
EDITORIAL The California Public Records Act needs an update. So does the state’s Brown Act, which mandates open meetings of government bodies, and the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. These are the landmark laws that keep government from operating in secret but all were written long before the explosion of information technology profoundly changed the way city, state, and local agencies compile, sort, process, present, and preserve information. And now, with agencies at every level trying to use information technology to hide data from the public and courts struggling with laws that didn’t anticipate the modern era, open-government advocates need to be working on every level to protect and expand access. As we point out in this issue, technology can be used to spy, to hide, and to obfuscate but it can also be used to make the operations and processes of the public sector far more open and accessible. Properly used, today’s information technology can vastly improve the way governments work and it’s neither difficult nor expensive to make that happen. The state Legislature, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the Sunshine Task Force should be looking at ways to make sure that computers don’t increase secrecy and to take advantage of the opportunities modern technology offers. The Brown Act, passed in 1954, forbids public agencies from meeting in secret, except in very limited circumstances. The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance goes further. The laws have been interpreted to mean that the members of a board or commission can’t use e-mail to discuss pending business; that would amount to a closed-door meeting. That same interpretation ought to apply to members participating in discussions on, say, a Yahoo! news group. Deliberations on a policy matter would be taking place outside of public view. But what if the public was invited? What if a virtual discussion took place before or between traditional meetings and any member of the public could log in from anywhere (work, home, the public library, terminals in City Hall) and watch? What if people who are now allowed only a minute or two to comment in public meetings were able to post longer, more detailed comments that policymakers would see during online discussions? What if the entire record of that meeting were instantly available on the Web, in a searchable form? Would that be an increase in public access? What about the large number of people who still don’t have computers or Web access would they be left out? That’s just one of the questions sunshine advocates are talking about. Legislators need to be addressing the issues, too. As Kimo Crossman reports on page 14, increasing public access doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive in fact, there are ways to save the city money. One obvious idea: almost every document that’s produced by a city employee, including e-mail, is already considered a public record. Why not simply program the computers to make an instant copy of everything and post it to a public Web site? That way someone looking for memos from, say, the Public Utilities Commission addressing solar energy could simply search that site with those key words and come up with all of the records quickly. That would save time for journalists and citizen watchdogs who now have to request those records from the agency and it would save money for the city. If the documents were all searchable for anyone, there would be no need to spend time and money responding to public-records requests. It wouldn’t be hard at all to add a "possibly confidential" key to records, preventing documents that really should remain secret from going into the public file. And the computers could automatically generate a list of the documents being withheld, so the public could find out what records are remaining out of view. Over time, old paper records could be scanned and put on the site, too. And with electronic storage so cheap these days, there’s no reason why all public records can’t be preserved in an accessible form and location. The County of Santa Clara a few years back began putting together a valuable data trove that included all of the county’s real estate and property ownership records. That allowed for the creation of a geographic information system that could be used to track property sales, taxes, crime rates, building permit applications, and much more. A wonderful public service except that the county didn’t offer it to the public. The data was for sale, for more than $100,000 a license. It took a lawsuit by the California First Amendment Coalition to force the county to back off and make the data public. But that’s just an example of a trend that’s cropping up all over the country: governments are developing ways to make more use of information and then are trying to copyright it, sell it, and make money. The problem with that, as attorney Rachel Matteo-Boehm, who handled the CFAC case, points out, is that it segregates access to information by wealth. The rich get the tools of technology to understand and use public data; the poor don’t. It’s a dangerous trend and the Legislature should address it right away. Information created by public agencies using public data should be public no excuses, no exceptions. And if the software that makes it easy to process that information is created by the public sector (or under contract to the public sector) the public needs free access to it. The Legislature also needs to shoot down a series of attempts by the secrecy lobbyists to cut off access to new types of data. A bill now before the Assembly, AB 1978 by Assemblymember Jose Solorio (D-Anaheim), would exempt certain types of information from the Public Records Act. The bill appears to be aimed at overturning the Santa Clara decision but could also address an issue that has come up in San Francisco: that of so-called metadata in public documents. Metadata is embedded information that may be in a file that doesn’t appear when the file is printed out. The City Attorney’s Office has been arguing that metadata isn’t public. That’s nonsense it’s part of a public document, created at public expense by public employees. The Legislature needs to reject this bill and instead pass a law that would specifically require agencies to release any internal data that’s created as part of a public record. The San Francisco Sunshine Task Force is in the process of updating and improving the city’s landmark law, and it should seek to incorporate some of the suggestions above. The Task Force also needs to be sure that the amendments to the law give that oversight body the teeth it needs to enforce public-access requirements. Far too often, city officials simply ignore task force findings, and, as Sarah Phelan reports on page 17, the Ethics Commission and the district attorney rarely follow up with sanctions. For starters, the task force should have the right to subpoena documents and witnesses (without first asking the supervisors for approval a cumbersome process). The panel should have its own full-time legal counsel. It should also have increased enforcement power: while giving the task force the right to levy fines and sanctions is politically tricky, a provision that allows the task force to order the release of documents backed up with the full support of the City Attorney’s Office ought to be part of the final package. By Alex Felsinger Some old dogs don’t need to learn new tricks The burn-out – or sell-out? – rate for punk-rock musicians can be high, but the Bay Area has some long-standing forces who make a point to keep their fires glowing. Kepi Ghoulie, the long-time frontman of the Sacramento pop-punk trio Groovie Ghoulies, has played essentially the same music for the past 22 years, since recording his first 7-inch EP in 1986. He still looks the same, wearing tight black pants, Converse All-Stars, and striped T-shirts. He makes music and sells his art for a living. At 43, he still epitomizes the do-it-yourself ethics of punk rock. Andy Van De Voorde, the Denver-based hit man for the Village Voice Media chain who is out here to cover the Guardian’s trial against the SF Weekly, rambles on at great length in print, using nasty personal attacks to fuel his vitriolic blogs. But when you try to ask him a question in person, he’s not quite as forthcoming. I tried to engage him outside of the courtroom yesterday. I had a question for Andy, and it went like this: Isn’t it standard journalistic practice and basic professional ethics to call the other side for comment when you do a story? And when you dredge up a story that’s 30 years old just to try to smear the people who dared to sue your almighty employer for predatory pricing, doesn’t basic decency require that you check the facts before you go to print? Van De Voorde refused to answer the question. The tough-sounding writer who excoriates his foes in print couldn’t handle a simple question from a reporter. “You write what you want and I’ll write what I want,” he said. There’s a reason I confronted Mr. Van De Voorde yesterday morning. One of his blog posts from earlier in the week contained some startling inaccurate information about a fascinating battle the Guardian was involved in back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The hit man dredged up information that was more than a quarter-century old to try to make some point about the Guardian (although I’m still not quite sure what it was or how it relates to this trial), and in the process, stuck his foot into a political and journalistic swamp that he clearly didn’t understand. I understand it all too well. I was right in the middle of it, right after I started working for the Bay Guardian. PREVIEW In February, as the days start getting longer again, two things come to mind: Black History Month summons deep reflections, and all of that extra light brings the advent of fresh views. In the Bay Area no better example of clear-sighted perspectives can be found than in the work of the Robert Moses’ Kin company and from the codirectors of the fourth Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now, Kendra Kimbrough Barnes and Laura Elaine Ellis. Moses starts his two-week season at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Feb. 14, while the Barnes-Ellis team is entering its festival’s second half at Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco. From Moses, be prepared for a smaller company of six dancers performing in a brand-new program that includes three world premieres and a revival of 2007’s Rose (set to Beethoven), which is new to San Francisco. In addition to choreographing, the prodigious Moses also created the score for one of the evening’s pieces, Reflections on an Approaching Thought. In step with the company’s tradition of addressing social issues, the program’s Consent delves into the ethics of medical experimentation on poor people. The Black Choreographers Festival has scheduled three lineups spanning work representative of the African diaspora jazz, African, Afro-Brazilian as well as modern and dance theater. If you have never seen site-specific choreographer Joanna Haigood and her Zaccho Youth Group, from the Bayview neighborhood, don’t miss them on the afternoon of Feb. 17. They are exceptional young artists. ROBERT MOSES’ KIN Thurs/14Sat/16 and Feb. 2023, 8 p.m.; Sun/17 and Feb. 24, 2 p.m.; $23$26. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS FESTIVAL Fri/15Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 3 and 7 p.m.; $10$20. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, (510) 801-4523, www.bcfhereandnow.com › annalee@techsploitation.com TECHSPLOITATION War changes everything, including technology. We are roughly six years into what the George W. Bush administration calls the war on terror and what hundreds of thousands of soldiers know as the occupation of Iraq. Gizmos that a decade ago would have been viewed entirely as communications tools and toys are now potential surveillance and killing machines. Don’t believe me? Consider how much the Web has changed. Referred to naively 10 years ago by Bill Clinton and Co. as the friendly, welcoming "information superhighway," the Web is now the National Security Agency’s surveillance playground. Last year a whistle-blower at AT&T revealed that every bit of Internet traffic routed by AT&T was also being routed through an NSA surveillance system. Millions of innocent people’s private Internet information, including online purchases and e-mail, was being watched without warrants. Cuddly consumer robots epitomized by Sony’s Aibo robot dog have changed too. The company that makes adorable Roomba vacuum robots, iRobot, just announced a huge deal with the United States military to make reconnaissance and killing robots called PackBots for use in combat zones. Already, 50 PackBots have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the ground versions of crewless aerial vehicles, remote-controlled spy planes that can also shoot weapons. Tech security expert Bruce Schneier describes technology as having "dual uses": one for peacetime and one for war. The Wii video game console, for example, is great for transutf8g physical movements into movements onscreen. That makes the Wii great for party games in which you swing your arms to move dancing penguins on the screen. It also makes a great interface for remote-controlled guns in a combat robot. Just move your arm to aim. In a time of war you can’t enjoy a party game without thinking about your game console being used to kill people. I realize that sounds melodramatic, but looked at pragmatically it’s quite simply true. Once you realize that every form of technology has a dual use, it becomes much easier to argue for ways of limiting the uses that aren’t ethical or legal. Consider that a roboticized antiaircraft cannon (similar to the PackBot) turned on its operators during a field exercise in South Africa in October 2007, killing nine people before it ran out of ammo. The software error that led this robot to slaughter friendly soldiers is no different from errors that make your Roomba crash. What do we draw from this analogy? Perhaps robots that are perfectly legal as vacuums should be illegal on the battlefield. Perhaps no weapon should ever be completely autonomous like the Roomba. Questions like these led me and my colleagues at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to put together a conference at Stanford University on the topic of technology in wartime, focusing especially on ethics and the law. Coming up on Jan. 26, the conference will be a day packed with talks and panels about everything from dual-use technology (Schneier will be a keynote speaker) to what happens when robots commit war crimes. We’ll also hear from people who are appropriating military technologies for human rights causes the very technologies that let military spies hide online also help human rights workers and dissidents shield themselves while still getting out their subversive messages. We’ll also have a panel on so-called cyberterrorism, or destructive hacks aimed at taking down a nation’s tech infrastructure. But should fears of cyberterror lead to total government surveillance of the Internet? Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal director, will talk about how the NSA used AT&T to spy on US citizens and the suit the EFF has brought against AT&T for vioutf8g its customers’ privacy rights. If you want to find out how to change the way militaries are appropriating consumer tech or just want to learn more about how war is changing the way we use technology, come to Stanford on Jan. 26 for the conference. It’s open to the public, and you can register at www.technologyinwartime.org. The cost of admission gets a you free lunch and a T-shirt, as well as a chance to talk to some of the smartest people in the field. See you there! Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants smart defense to replace buggy offense. Yesterday, the Board faced a choice: hire legal firm Garcia Calderon Ruiz, which specializes in government law, Three attorneys with GCR, Mary Hernandez, George Yin and Nicolas Vaca, gave a relatively slick presentation compared to the Dumbledore-style ramblings of Prof. Weisberg. “We have dealt with removal issues before,” said Hernandez. But that bid appeared to be $24,800 too much, compared to Weisberg’s offer to work pro-bono, even if he teaches criminal law and doesn’t have experience in government agency law. “This is not really a criminal matter,” said Weisberg. “The Board is a legislative body, and so it would be unconstitutional for it to convict someone of a crime.” Maybe the Board enjoyed Weisberg’s easy-to-grasp explanations,which included making an analogy between Jew’s case and congressional impeachments proceedings: just as Congress indicts and the Senate then votes to remove from office, the Ethics Commission would do the “impeaching” and the Board of Supervisors would then vote whether to remove Jew from office. Alles klar, Herr Professor. Because in the end Sup. Geraldo Sandoval, seconded by Sup. Tom Ammiano, directed the Clerk of the Board to enter into an agreement with the professor, which does include the possibility of the $15-an-hour labor of his student research assistants at Stanford University. › lit@sfbg.com WISH LIST My family of origin is so nuclear that on smoggy days a mushroom cloud can be seen above the suburb where my parents still reside. During the holidays we gather there to rehearse and stage the roles we will alternately perform and resist in the ensuing year. While Dad tracks holiday cards sent and received on an Excel spreadsheet, Mom dons a pair of felt antlers and holes up in the kitchen. As for me, I revert to fatigued, endless reading, as if by some cruel law of repetition I have returned to that sullen moment in junior high when my only friend suddenly became popular, leaving me with nobody but books as my companions. Without intervention, I might remain in this half-hypnotized state, rereading Flowers for Algernon until the world outside grows dim, like a dream I can barely remember. This year, however, I’m readying myself with an eclectic batch of new books, books that make me want to participate instead of turning into a listless blotch of angst. These titles provide critical frameworks for dissent, suggest avenues for engagement, and probe cultural blind spots generating new aesthetic possibilities along the way. I, for one, like to kick off the holiday season with a powerful dose of well-researched feminist analysis, supplied this year by Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 368 pages, $26). It’s akin to taking vitamins to ward off the winter cold that’s going around the office. I read some Faludi, I ask my brother to help out in the kitchen. Faludi argues that a highly gendered mythology reasserted its virulent hold over the national psyche (as writ large by the national media) in the wake of Sept. 11. Drawing from an abundance of sources, she parses out the myth: strong male heroes rescue helpless girls, feminism is dismissed as a frivolous and dangerous mistake, and cowboys and manly men rise again to keep the home soil safe. In debunking this overblown narrative, Faludi demonstrates that it doesn’t actually help those it valorizes, nor does its rehearsal expedite an increase in national security or political accountability. Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence (Leon Works Press, 167 pages, $15.95 paper) takes up "black presences in European literature, visual art, and film." Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning. Renovating symbolic systems can be hard work, and nothing restores a fatigued body and mind like making changes to the physical infrastructure such as sawing through your drainpipes to divert "barely used" household water from sewers to gray-water systems for gardening and washing clothes. Sexily linking the macro to the micro, the locally grown junta known as the Greywater Guerrillas has expanded its how-to know-how into Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull Press, 416 pages, $19.95 paper), a collection of essays that examine the global plight of water misuse and attendant broad-scale ecological impacts. I don’t think it undermines the gravitas of the issue to mention that portions of the book are a sheer pleasure to read, especially when editors Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole, and Laura Allen (illustrations were supplied by Annie Danger) detail their efforts to "disengage from the water grid" by taking plumbing into their own hands. What James Kochalka takes into his hands in American Elf Book Two: The Collected Sketch Book Diaries of James Kochalka (Top Shelf Comics, 192 pages, $19.95) is his life, tidbits of which he transforms into daily diary comics. Visually and verbally, Kochalka risks a silly, reckless sweetness a sampling of titles includes "Romance of Life" and "Everything was fine until the old wakey wake." The strips are also a little bit perverted and weirdly honest, as Kochalka’s elf-eared stand-in catalogs a receding hairline, farty dairy hangovers, and arguments with his beloved and salty-mouthed wife. As the pages and days pile up, the effect is infectious, such that, while under the diaries’ spell, I began to sense secret fissures of creative potential and magic in the mundane flow of everyday life. Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, and the army of flavor lovers they run with have changed the landscape of vegan cooking. In Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (Marlowe and Co., 336 pages, $27.50), Moskowitz and Romero draw inspiration from a variety of international cuisines, without making any claims to authenticity. The resulting recipes (mole, saag, and lasagna, to name a few) are adventures in surprising flavor combinations. A helpful foreword details how to stock a vegan pantry, and tips offered alongside the easy-to-follow recipes instruct on where to find specialty items or how to organize your cooking tasks advice that, as an unskilled, distractible cook, I found particularly useful. An appendix of menus ranges from rich party foods to low-fat and easy-to-prepare options. Printed in large type, so it’s easy to read when splayed open next to a bicycle, the repair-manual portion of the illustrated Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance, by Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark (Microcosm Publishing, 256 pages, $12), builds from the ground up. Starting with the ethics and rewards of skill sharing, it moves on to detail parts, tools, and instructions for system-by-system checkups and repairs. The book’s second half comprises reprinted issues of the Chainbreaker zine, originals of which were lost when zinester Jackson’s New Orleans home flooded after Katrina. The zines complement the how-to portions with a wider view of the bicycle’s cultural impact e.g., the role of bikes in the women’s clothing revolution, the democratizing potential of this low-cost form of transportation. Note: the book hits shelves in February, but aspiring bike enthusiasts can order it now at www.microcosmpublishing.com. And to come full circle … Sherman Alexie’s first young adult (and graphic) novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers, 240 pages, $16.99), reminds me that a return to YA reading can be the opposite of mind-numbing when undertaken with a book that’s emotionally spring-loaded, linguistically gymnastic, and devastatingly funny in turns. Drawing from his experiences growing up, Alexie tells the story of Junior (a.k.a. Arnold True-Spirit Jr.), a comic-drawing Indian kid who leaves his reservation to attend an all-white high school. Between racism at school and conflict with friends on the reservation, Alexie nails the ups and downs of a young artist learning to navigate by his own radar, amid competing claims from family and a sometimes encouraging but often deviously indifferent world. Ellen Forney’s inspired illustrations channel Junior’s manic, tell-it-like-it-is sensibility and provide a visual anchor for Alexie’s loquacious narrator. What’s newsworthy about Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin changing his vote three weeks ago on Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier charter amendment tightening laws controlling the Ethics, Elections and Sunshine Commissions? Nothing—except the real reason the Chronicle’s running dogs of the press were dragged out of their kennel this weekend to tear into Peskin’s Oct. 23 change-of-heart vote: the Gap’s Don Fisher is pissed off that he poured $185,000 into Prop. H, only to see it fail on the Nov. 6 ballot. So, now, he and his Republican allies are punishing Peskin for having the nerve to place the ultimately successful Prop. A on the ballot, thus defeating their well-heeled efforts to turn San Francisco into a giant parking lot. …they do it dirty and big time A bunch of huge billboards and fliers popped up all over San Francisco yesterday, like some kind of overnight pox, trying to persuade people to vote against Prop. K Prop. K is an advisory measure on this Novermber’s ballot that adopts a policy of restricting advertising on street furniture and City buildings. But until yesterday, when I drove past one of this monster billboards while stuck in traffic, I had never heard of the No on K-Citizens to Protect Muni Services Committee. What caught my eye, other than the enormous ad, was the line that said “Major Funding by Clear Channel Outdoor and Outdoor Advertisers.” Clear Channel numbers, of course, among the folk who would lose big time if ads such as these were restricted, so their opposition is predictable. Clear Channel are also the folks who want to place ads on all the City’s bus shelters, in return for fixing the shelters up and installing new ones. These are also the folks who argued that they don’t have to tell us their projected profits from coating our shelters with signs, because they are “renting” City space, rather than using it for free. Curious, I called the Ethics Commission this morning to find out why I had never seen this Committee’s name before. Turns out that this mystery committee already has $100,000 to play with, so expect to see more of the above ads all over, and expect that Clear Channel isn’t worried about having to pay some piddling, to their mind, fine to Ethics, later on. PS The treasurer for No on K is Bill Hooper, President/General Manager of Clear Channel Outdoor, Nothern California Region. › andrea@altsexcolumn.com Dear Readers: Since the major anticircumcision group is called, rather cleverly, RECAP (RECover A Penis), and since the letter below refers to an exchange in the column going back years, I think a recap might be in order. Way back when, I briefly shared the militantly anticirc bench with the rest of the loons, although I must admit I did not much enjoy their company. By the time I ran the original columns I’d oh hell, here’s the original, slightly edited: "I have actually put a great deal of consideration into my stance on circumcision, or rather, lack of one. Growing up Jewish among Jews, plus growing up American in an era in which American boys were just sort of automatically clipped, like Dobermans, I never really gave it much thought. Then I became a sex educator and a huge advocate of consensuality in all things … and developed a fairly militant opposition to cutting healthy parts off innocent children. Then I talked and talked with men and men … plus attended my nephew’s bris, which was lovely, and by the end I was all, ‘Huh. Well, this is problematic, but I think people are making too much of a fuss.’ "There’s no question that the procedure is both unnecessary and nonconsensual, and it’s obvious that the nerve-rich, self-lubricating, and glans-protective foreskin is meant to be there. But most men get along just fine without theirs … get plenty of pleasure out what they do have, and are able to leave behind whatever grievances they might have against their parents and the medical establishment." While I’m waxing autobiographical, I’ll add that since I wrote that, I found myself rekindling a romance with my roots, having a nearly irony-free traditional Jewish wedding, and eventually not only agreeing to circumcise my son but basically insisting on doing so. I’m still against routine, pointless medical circumcision, but I don’t think I’d be welcome on the radical anti bench anymore. Sorry! Maybe Savage will sit with you. He’s interested in penises. Love, Andrea Dear Andrea: I think it goes a lot deeper than that the sensitivity-loss issue alone. Having part of one’s sex anatomy removed without your consent can tap into some strong and perfectly valid feelings of violation. It can involve a lot more than a simple "OK, I have lost X amount of sensitivity, but hey, I can still enjoy sex, so no big deal." What does one do about feelings one is not supposed to be having and that nobody takes seriously? I liked your statement about American boys being "automatically clipped, like Dobermans." I hope you can see how being treated like a dog can be somewhat dehumanizing. Sure, parents and doctors had the best intentions, and I suppose we can look at it as a medical mistake carried out when there was less medical information and less consideration for ethics and individual rights, but that doesn’t mean we have to take it lying down. Sit idly by and accept that doctors continue to perform the same surgery on infants that should not have happened to me a couple decades ago without speaking up? I wish more people had spoken up then maybe I might have escaped this needless surgery. Love, Another Concerned Penis Owner PS Circumcision is apparently protective against HIV, and we all know Africans can’t possibly be educated and entrusted to use far more effective and far less invasive measures than surgery to avoid contracting the virus. I read a press release that actually listed circumcision first among a list of preventative methods: "All avenues and approaches toward prevention need to be pursued, including circumcision, condom usage and antiretroviral drugs…" I suspect that circumcision does not hold a candle to the efficacy of a condom or a sensible approach to sexual conduct. And what of education? That American doctors might start using this as yet another reason to circumcise babies (despite the fact that the United States happens to have one of the highest HIV rates in the modern world and by far the highest routine circumcision rates) is a whole other topic. Dear Concerned: Well, it is, and it isn’t. I think you’re having a perception problem. While you understand intellectually that routine circumcisions are in fact less common every year in the US, your intense investment in the subject is making it hard for you to see that there is no evil scalpel-wielding cabal for you to rally against. The American Association of Pediatricians is officially anticirc. Even I am on your side. You’re winning. Africa is another question. The sad truth there is that no, education is not enough, and no, condoms are not enough. There has been no shortage of either, and still the epidemic rages. Right now circumcision looks good very good as an additional weapon (nobody’s arguing against education and condoms) against a disease that is wiping out villages and leaving generations of children to starve in the streets. Up against that, a foreskin really is just a few inches of expendable flesh. Love, Andrea Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question. › annalee@techsploitation.com TECHSPLOITATION Two scandals rocked the sci-tech world last week. Not to put too fine a point on it, they reminded us that bad research and implementation can kill. In South Africa, a widely used antiaircraft cannon called the Oerlikon GDF-005 suffered from what many observers believe was a computer malfunction, which killed 9 soldiers and maimed 15 in a training exercise. Its computer-controlled sighting mechanism went haywire, and the gun automatically turned its barrel to face the trainees next to it, spraying bullets from magazines that it automatically reloaded until it was out of ammunition. Many compared the incident to science fiction fare like Robocop or Terminator, in which military bots turn on their masters. In the United States, James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for helping to discover the double-helix shape of DNA, was suspended from his administrative duties at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory over comments he made to the London Times about how blacks are genetically hardwired with lower intelligence than that of other races. Watson has made comments like this about blacks (and women) throughout his career, but apparently this was the last straw. Reporter Charlotte Hunt-Grabbe, who says she has Watson’s comments on tape, quoted him saying he’s "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really." He told Hunt-Grabbe his "hope is that everyone is equal" but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true." Nobody compared Watson’s racism to science fiction, though one could bring up Gattaca, Brave New World, or any other genetic dystopia where DNA warlords like Watson whose employer controls millions in research money have created a world where genes are destiny. These two very different incidents demonstrate the fallibility of science and, more important, how the arrogance of scientists can be horrifically destructive. The tragedy in South Africa could have been avoided if the engineers who designed that cannon had simply refused to computerize its sight. With a big gun, computer error can be far worse than human error. Any decent engineer would have known that failure in computer systems is inevitable and come to the conclusion that weapons should not be programmed to function autonomously. Watson’s remarks are another form of scientific arrogance that leads to gross and fatal mistakes. After all, Watson is hardly the first person to use genetics as a way to create false hierarchies of human beings based on "evidence" that some races and sexes are "naturally" superior to others. The history of biology as a discipline is riddled with racism and sexism. Eighteenth-century scientist Carolus Linnaeus, who invented the taxonomy of species we still use today, originally divided the species Homo sapiens into four racial subclasses: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeanus. While Europeanus was "inventive," Africanus was "negligent." Even in the 20th century many geneticists endorsed the eugenics movement as a way to keep the species strong by preventing "dysgenic," racially mixed babies from being born. Today leaders in the field of evolutionary biology like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson routinely say that people are hardwired to behave in certain ways based on their genetic heritage, which is often linked to their racial background or sex. "Scientific" studies on the genetic inferiority of female intelligence are what motivated former Harvard president Lawrence Summers to claim that there are so few women in science because they just aren’t smart enough. So should a computerized gun run amok and a racist geneticist undermine our faith in science? Yes. People who build autonomous weapons systems know their work might kill people, but they do it anyway. And people like Watson derail brilliant research by bringing sex and race bias into the lab. Science is nothing more than the sum of what scientists do. Without ethics, science is no better than Christianity during the Crusades, a dogma that kills out of arrogance and prejudice. * Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who knows that Rosalind Franklin discovered the structure of DNA. The sun may be shining, but it’s raining legal cats and dogs for suspended Sup. Ed Jew. On the eve of a preliminary hearing by the City’s Ethics Commission into charges of official misconduct by Supervisor Jew, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. has granted City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s application for leave to sue in quo warranto to remove Jew from the Board of Supervisors for failure to comply with the City Charter’s residency requirements . The ruling comes a little more than three weeks after Mayor Gavin Newsom initiated official misconduct proceedings against Jew and suspended the District 4 supervisor, replacing him, at least for now, with political rookie Carmen Chu. City Attorney Herrera says that in llight of the Ethics Commission’s preliminary hearing tomorrow, he intends, “to carefully evaluate” the legal options. Tomorrow’s preliminary Ethics Commission hearing takes place at 1:30 p.m. in Room 416, City Hall.
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Sunshine in the digital age
Groovie Ghoulie Kepi is baaack
Groovie Ghoulies back in the day.
The hit man’s big duck
Robert Moses Kin’ and Black Choreographers Festival
Technology in wartime
Law professor to be Supes counsel against Jew
or run with academic lawyer Prof. Robert Weisberg, as outside counsel for official misconduct proceedings against Sup. Ed Jew.
Beleagured Sup. Ed Jew in happier times outside his flower shop on Waverly Place.
Photo by Charles Russo
“We are used to working in gray areas,” said Yin.
“A reasonable estimate,” said Vaca,of the firm’s $24,800 bid to get the project started.
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Shelf help
Pay Back’s A Bitch
When Clear Channel Attacks Prop. K…
tThe guy on the other end of the line had never heard of them either, and it took an hour before someone got back to me and said, ‘Wow, How did you find out about them? They only filed with us today. Which is in violation of Ethics’s own rules.”
RECAP recap
When science attacks
Jerry Brown gives City green light to sue Jew
Photo by Charles Russo
“In the coming days, I will decide how best to represent the City’s interest in concluding a crisis that has clouded the legitimacy of San Francisco’s representative government for too long,” Herrera said in a press release.