The E-Government Act of 2002 has been an important law for implementing government moving online. CDT also supported it in 2002. This year, the act will be up for reauthorization in senate bill S. 2321. The bill is a straightforward reauthorization of the E-Government Act, while still offering significant improvements.

This reauthorization includes language that instructs OMB to develop best practices for Privacy Impact Assessments. These are reports completed on new systems that aggregate personal information, required by the original e-Government Act. While these were a great idea, agencies were not given enough guidance and the PIAs were implemented very unevenly. The reauthorization would instruct OMB to create best practices for PIAs, and help agencies conduct them effectively. Effective and thorough privacy assessments help the agency to make decisions that protect privacy, and help the public understand what agencies are doing.

Secondly, this bill will add more robust language to make sure that government information is accessible via commercial search engines. Government Web sites disseminate information and make resources available to the public, and search engines share this mission to help users find appropriate and useful resources. In some cases, it seems that government sites are simply unaware that they can make the information they control more accessible through these search engines. Web sites now see most of their traffic coming from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask- or even the USA.gov search engine. The E-Government Act reauthorization will make sure that even more of this information is easy to find through search engines.

Overall, CDT believes that the new language for the E-Government Act reauthorization will help improve the implementation of the act as we move forward.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under CDT, Open Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.