A Disaster Waiting to Happen
by Mitch Stone, the Accidental Expert
Call them refugees, call them evacuees, or call them survivors. Call them what you like, but get them some help.
That seemed to be the overriding message of the past few weeks, as the winds diminished and flood waters receded behind the twin disasters called Katrina and Rita.
But some victims of the Gulf Coast hurricanes were in for another nasty surprise. While registration for federal assistance was supposedly available online, they found it could only be accomplished on a PC running Windows.
As a number of hurricane survivors discovered, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s online Individual Assistance Center refuses access to any computer not running Internet Explorer 6.0, a version of the browser Microsoft produces only for Windows. FEMA invites non-Windows users to register by phone.
The glitch in the FEMA website was almost certainly unintentional, an artifact of inexperienced or lackadaisical Internet programmers using Microsoft’s Web design tools on their default settings. It should come as no surprise, this practice produces Web pages that attempt to lock out competing browsers.
But make no mistake, it’s a thoroughly contrived barrier to access. In fact, if a computer user knows how to alter an arcane browser setting called a “user agent,” other browsers can be forced to identify themselves to Web servers as Internet Explorer. Employing this masquerade fools the FEMA Web servers, and bypasses the blockade.
So it’s clear that this restriction isn’t about technology, it’s about commercial interests — which government agencies are unwittingly promoting with our tax dollars. In this and many other instances, this practice works to the detriment of any U.S. citizen who elects not to buy the latest and greatest software from Microsoft.
We should take no comfort in any lack of competencies by government agencies, and not especially where the increasingly pervasive deployment of technology to access government services is concerned. And with all the questions being raised currently about the ability of federal, state and local agencies to assist us in times of great need, the fabrication of entirely artificial roadblocks between citizens and their government should be evaluated within a broader context.
When this issue came to light in the days following Katrina, FEMA promised a fix. It should have been a quick and simple one. But these many weeks later, the Individual Assistance Center site still demands Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows.
As it happens, this particular FEMA snafu is just the tip of the technological iceberg. Local, state and federal agencies across the nation routinely saddle their online services with proprietary restrictions, sometimes in violation of their own access policies.
Fortunately, solutions are in the works. A consortium called the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is collaborating on common, open standards for documents and other computerized information. These formats aren’t owned by any single company, and consequently, can’t be manipulated to anyone’s advantage.
One recent product of the OASIS group is a non-proprietary file format for office productivity software, called OpenDocument. Unlike documents created in Microsoft Office, a file saved in the OpenDocument format can be opened by any other application that supports it. Predictably, Microsoft is a vocal opponent of the effort.
The company expressed alarm when the commonwealth of Massachusetts recently adopted OpenDocument as a part of their open technology access initiative. The stakes are high. Unless the company changes its tune, Microsoft will be locked out of the state’s software procurement process, threatening millions in sales.
Deploying transparent, non-proprietary standards like OpenDocument are small steps towards open access to government services, but in the right direction. Every local, state and federal agency should emulate Massachusetts by mandating them wherever the public interfaces with their government.
As the recent FEMA experience illustrates, we can no longer pretend that unobstructed access to government services, technological or otherwise, is somehow optional. In fact, we might even say, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
3 Oct 2005 |
|
