Last weekend I was able to hear a few things from the well-to-do part of our society. "Russia can bomb them to the ground" and "the farmers are pocket-fillers who leave us with their waste." Really very neat, intelligent, highly educated people. Averse to social media because that is only disinformation of course, they only get their information from reputable media. The next day I read another tweet from @dimgrr. He beats the 'science journalists' and 'fact-checkers' of our renowned 'quality media' with two fingers in the nose, one on style and the other on content. In short, he deserves a wider audience and much more attention. So despite the fact that he disagrees with our figures because of the incomplete and unreliable data, I am posting his Tweet here in full. At the risk of his own life, he can sometimes come across 😅 as a bit grumpy. But it does show what is wrong with the data that we have to make do with.
In an era in which government transparency should be celebrated as the epitome of a modern democracy, the loopholes in the Open Government Act (WOO) seem to function as a toolbox for obscurantism. Ironically, the revamped WOO, which is intended to promote openness of government, is lagging behind for a simple reason: data and documents are no longer the same.
If we take a look at the structure of today's government data, it is striking that it is rarely stored in static documents. Instead, bits and bytes roam through a labyrinth of databases. The result? The government can easily claim that it "does not have" certain data in the form requested under the WOO, since it is not obliged to actively merge data that is scattered across various databases into a new 'document'.
Another scenario comes into play when the government prefers not to share the underlying mechanisms of its policymaking. During the corona period, for example, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport refused to release the models used by the RIVM to draw up the COVID-19 forecasts, The reason? The models would be intertwined with privacy-sensitive data. The suggestion that separating these dates would be an impossible task was later disproved; An illustration of how the government can use modern technologies to withhold information simply by playing the 'privacy card'.
And if the privacy way out has been exhausted? Then there is the tactic of destructive anonymization, where data is anonymized in such a way that it becomes completely useless to the recipient. This method turns data into a digital papier-mâché; Recognizable, but completely unusable.
In a WOO request for a dataset with the number of days between last vaccination and death, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport — after months of insisting that it did not have such a dataset — "found" an almost identical dataset as requested with one small problem just before the hearing before the administrative court:
Instead of the requested week of death, the death was completed on the first week of the month. The result? Someone who was vaccinated on February 15 and died at the end of February was listed as having died in the first week of February in the dataset. The difference between the date of vaccination and the date of death? -15 days.
But that was only with the first shot. In each subsequent injection, such a negative number did not appear. So there is a good chance that if someone died shortly after the third shot, they were booked for the second shot.
All in the context of anonymization and privacy, of course. And the administrative judge fell for it. Apparently, the dataset is 'fit for publication'.
The paradox of this situation is that, although the government itself has access to and uses this data, the citizen – in whose interest this information is supposed to be – is powerless. At a time when public policy is significantly influenced by data analytics, citizens are often left in the dark. This pattern of obscurantism is indicative of an unacceptable practice in a society that praises itself for its progressiveness and transparency. It is high time that the WOO is reviewed not only to address these practices, but also to ensure that public bodies are held to a standard that promotes genuine openness and accessibility. After all, maintaining a healthy democracy requires not only that the government has information, but also that it shares it.
Volgtip!
