You’re traveling down a city street in Anycounty, USA. After a few blocks, every eye is on you. But you don’t know it.

Numerous TV cameras and street motion detectors plot your speed and direction. A satellite, locked in on your phone, knows your location.

That’s the peril and the promise of the new technology that hushed the audience in this scenario as told by a guest speaker during the Technology Summit III in Seattle, Feb. 1–3.

About 230 registrants representing more than 30 states were welcomed to the summit by NACo President and King County (Wash.) Council Member Jane Hague and a host of county and state officials who spoke about information technology, e-government services and the outlook for technical modernization of local government.

Day 1: Privacy
Convened at a different high-tech venue each of the three days, Technology Summit III took as its central theme “the priority of privacy,” acknowledging the challenges, both personal and legal, of embracing the new electronic government age without losing sight of the privacy of constituents.

In the Bell Harbor Conference Center on the banks of Seattle’s Elliott Bay, Harriet Pearson, chief privacy officer, IBM Corporation, delivered the keynote address which offered a roadmap of the way in which government should ensure privacy while protecting citizens.

“To create and maintain a climate of trust with business and government” and to “maintain the confidence of constituents,” Pearson suggested, the following path should be followed:

• Make sure to understand the statutory requirements governing information use in your jurisdiction.
• Make “privacy assessments,” if necessary, to understand how users feel about governments’ compiling of information.
• Look for better or best practices from other local governments and the private sector, such as posting a privacy policy notice on the official county Web page; or look at lessons learned in the Information Practices Project, spearheaded by the National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council and the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA).
• Educate your citizens and your businesses about their rights and responsibilities.
• Adopt and use measures that will achieve the right level of security and privacy.
• Get involved in the public policy debate on e-government so that your interests and those of your citizens will be recognized and reflected in broader discussions.

Pearson also cited a recurrent theme running throughout the summit: There must be a balance between privacy and accessibility to and security of information.

“One simple slipup where a citizen’s confidential information is published on the Net can cause a loss of confidence that won’t be retrieved for years,” she stated.

Privacy panel discussions: The summit linchpin issue
Prior to the kickoff of the privacy panel discussions, the mood was set. NACo President Hague said information culled from the summit “will not only make the county you serve better, but it will also make the lives of your people better.”

The panelists, government and private sector technology leaders, tackled the sensitive issue of privacy in the government domain.

“The balance between ensuring privacy and access is not easy … ,” said Don Pearson, Government Technology, moderator and panelist. “[This is] not something to be forgotten about in 5 to 10 days … ,” Pearson stated. He reiterated, as many participants had, that privacy “is not a technology issue, it’s a governance issue.”

Concurring with that point was Kathy Panfili, manager of market development, Verizon Northwest. “A culture of privacy policy is needed right from the beginning [of e-gov creation],” Panfili said, adding that breaches of security will most probably occur from the inside.

To keep the genie in the bottle, Paul Taylor, deputy director, department of information services, State of Washington, added, security keeps the privacy promise. “There must be trust with the citizen at the point of collection [of the data].”

Taylor encouraged county governments offering e-services via the Web to include a disclosure statement on privacy policy. “[Users] should be able to opt in or opt out,” he said, based on that information. Judith Endejan, member, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs PLLC, reminded county officials that the “right” to privacy is not in the U.S. Constitution. It is, however, evident in Federal Trade Commission regulations and other federal laws, such as the child protection rules that address child pornography on the Internet. “Because the World Wide Web is global, many countries in the world don’t even have privacy guidelines,” thereby putting the user at risk in cyberspace, Endejan stated.

Richard Worrall, professor, Virginia Tech Center for Public Administration and Policy, hushed the audience by taking privacy to the street. He said that traveling a mile in any city brings hidden, nonconsensual surveillance in the guise of TV cameras and traffic flow detectors. “You can even be located in your car by someone tracking your cell phone,” said Worrall.

Richard Purcell, corporate privacy expert from Microsoft, summarized citizen security concerns. “Government is accountable for the proper stewardship of private information,” he said. Also, a flesh-and-blood person should be responsible at the local level, such as a chief information officer.

Day 2: E-government and next steps
Technology experts dominated panel discussions on e-government at the Microsoft Executive Conference Center campus, Feb. 2.

Jack Breese, a researcher with Microsoft, kicked off the day with a fast-forward look at the future of the future: a world where computers become interactive, portable and able to take voice-activated commands.

For example, by speaking into your hand-held computer, you could get simultaneous language translation and readout translations from English into a host of foreign tongues.

This would be a boon for local governments dealing with constituents of multinational backgrounds. Voice-commanded portable computers could perform such household tasks such as activating lights, the oven or the entertainment center. This would have applications for the disabled.

E-government panel moderator Mike Dunham, Center for eGovernance, NAPA, said, “The key to e-government is fostering partnerships with providers who know what they’re doing” and counties contacting counties that have worked with and have learned from e-gov providers.

Steve Kolodney, who directs Washington State’s Department of Information Services, warned attendees that there is a collision brewing between local governments not in the “e-age” and the lightspeed of the Internet. It is a runaway vehicle whether you are on board or not. However, as soon as more local governments develop Web sites and offer e-services, the Internet will “transform relationships between citizens and government,” basically giving government back to its citizens, he noted.

“People want more government services, ” Kolodney said. E-gov is giving citizen empowerment to “real people doing real business in real time,” he said. “It is recrafting of the relationship between governments and citizens.”

In the same spirit of building fledgling e-gov resources, Frank Giebutowski, general manager, state and local government, Microsoft, suggested that going online will revolutionize 911 emergency calls; records management, especially in the courts; public works; tax collection; various applications; and licensing.

Looking back to the presidential election, Jim Adler, president and CEO of VoteHere, said high-tech upgrades to the country’s election systems would cost $2-4 billion, at least. And high-tech upgrades are unlikely to quickly mitigate Election 2000 woes. Rather, Adler sees any improvement as a gradual transition. He envisions Internet voting at poll sites, initially, which would then progress to remote Internet voting, perhaps, at home. It’s a logical extension of absentee voting, he suggested.

“What went wrong [during the presidential election] was that the margin of error was much larger than the victory margin,” he said.

“Local governments should establish goals for e-gov services, align all levels of local government and create security [for databases],” advised Government Technology’s Don Pearson.

Alan Synder, with Management Strategic Industry Solutions, rounded out the first panel discussion by warning that Internet privacy requires total and constant vigilance. It’s like “Y2K with no end date,” he stated.

The second e-gov panel discussion saw Mark Boyer, of Cisco Systems; Chris Thomas, ESRI; Gretchen Sorenson, Oniva; and Pete Dougherty from Ezgov fielding questions on how local government and the “digital citizen” can mutually benefit. They cited listserv dialogues between counties discussing “lessons learned” as especially timely during redistricting, the offering of services around the clock and cost savings over traditional RFP methods prompted by e-procurement.

Next Steps panel discussion
With e-governance issues fleshed out, the scene for the Next Steps discussion panels was set by Hague, who offered “three thoughts” as touchstones to the new e-gov era.

County government officials should ask themselves what they can do to form links between county e-gov initiatives and the private sector. Hague also called on participants to view local government as a “clearinghouse for privacy issues” and a steward and protector of highly sensitive information on its citizenry. And finally, she stated that NACo needs to be the “voice” and soundingboard in the Internet Age for “the people we serve.”

In this spirit, Randy Johnson, NACo past president and chair, Information Technology Committee, said that a first step would be for county officials “to start to look at their [privacy] policies … ,” to track changes in state laws about privacy and to understand that the new technology is “bent and geared to invade privacy” and must be balanced against legislation such as state Sunshine laws.

As guidelines, Johnson read the 1973 Code of Fair Information Practices, fashioned by the late Elliott Richardson, then Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

• There should be no personal data or recordkeeping systems that are secret.
• There must be a way someone can find out what information about a person is in a record and how it is used.
• There must be a way for a person to guarantee that information gathered for one purpose is not used for another purpose.
• There must be a way to correct or to amend information about a person.
• Organizations with information must ensure reliability of data and take precautions to prevent misuse of that data.

Costis Toregas, president, Public Technology, Inc., then said that with the 1973 code as a basis, county governments wishing to get into e-gov services should include three steps in their plan:

1. Establish service delivery, such as online paying of parking tickets.
2. Offer a democratic component: e-voting, for example, and
3. Provide an economic development component for county job growth and creation, i.e. “a rural county could do business in Indonesia,” Toregas said.

By the same token, counties must ensure that the new technology doesn’t create county employee unemployment. Reeducation and retraining are the answers. “Early discussions and involvement are needed to redirect staff resources,” he said.

Marilyn Praisner, chair of NACo’s newly formed Telecommunications and Technology Committee and council member from Montgomery County, Md., called on county officials to enlist their state associations in their e-gov efforts.

“We don’t want to wait for state or federal legislation mandating what we have to do” regarding privacy, accessibility of e-gov services and data security, said Jeff Arnold, NACo deputy director, legislative affairs. There should be no “preemption at the state or federal level,” Arnold stated. He admonished the tech summit audience to work against a “one-size-fits-all” mentality.

Acknowledging that e-government is a fledgling enterprise, Mike Dunham, director, eGovernance, National Academy of Public Administration, asked chief information officers who work for counties and states to “get involved” in President Hague’s initiative.

Day 3: Biotech issues
Experts made presentations on Feb. 3 to participants in a packed auditorium at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Jerry Butler, president, Eden Bioscience Corp., brought technology down to the farm by speaking on efforts his company has made in protecting crops without the use of pesticides or herbicides.

Butler’s company has developed a product made of protein that can be sprayed on plants to stimulate the crops’ natural defense systems. Butler claimed that this system causes less environmental contamination and produces larger yields of cash crops without poisons.

Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., president and director of the host center, talked about the genomics revolution — the mapping of human genetic DNA codes — as a benefit to county, state and national health care. The upside of such technology, Hartwell said, is early detection of debilitating diseases such as leukemia, Alzheimer’s and forms of cancer. County medical communities could realize millions in savings by early detection.

The downside has to do with privacy, accessibility and security issues. If confidential medical records fall into the wrong hands, such information could cause someone to lose health insurance coverage, their job or future employment. “We need to educate at the local level and have an informed public …” about such privacy issues in the medical community, Hartwell said.

Howard Coleman, chairman, GeneLex Bioscience Corp., also spoke about privacy issues regarding law enforcement databanks on sexual offenders, paternity testing as it affects welfare benefits, and death penalty cases.

He said that one of his company’s tests analyzes a patient’s proclivity to adverse drug reactions. Such potentially lethal drug reactions mean $75 billion annually in added costs to county and state medical providers, according to Coleman.

Pharmaceutical issues were addressed by James Gardner, regional counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The lawyer and former Oregon state senator echoed comments that genetic privacy must be maintained. He also said that patient access to U.S. prescription drugs that are cheaper in other countries than in the U.S. remains a torrid political and societal issue influencing health care at the local level.

NACo Past President Randy Johnson announced a $1,000 donation given by NACo to the research facility to thank them for being part of Technology Summit III.