W.H. Posts Pre-Batch of Visitor Logs with Warning About False Positives
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, November 2 2009
No, not that Bill Ayers. On Friday, the White House posted online what you might call a pre-release of White House visitor logs that correspond to specific requests for records made by news organizations and ethics groups. This isn't the proactive bulk data dump of just who visits the White House (with exceptions made for particularly sensitive meetings, like Supreme Court nominee meet-and-greets) that you might have heard the White House promising a short time back. That will come in December, and then will be repeated every 90 days after that point with a slight time lag between actual visits and the records' release. Instead, the 500 just-released records posted using the Socrata online tool only cover specific requests about visits made between the inauguration and September 15th, when the new policy went into effect. This is just a taste of what's to come.
Which brings us to Mr. Ayers. Except, it's not that Mr. Ayers. Instead, it's someone who happened to visit the Obama White House in its early months who shares his famous name. Same goes from Michael Moore and Jeremiah Wright, says Eisen. (Imagine being the White House staffer who invited the other Jeremiah Wright over.) Names don't make great data because they aren't unique identifiers, and Eisen uses the resulting fuzziness to make a point. "This unprecedented level of transparency," blogs the White House's internal ethics watchdog Norm Eisen, "can sometimes be confusing rather than providing clear information." And that's no doubt true, and a smart and important argument that arguably deserves considerably more attention than we're giving it today.
That said, the White House isn't exactly helping matters by releasing files that have data columns named things like "LAST_UPDATED," with no explanation about what, exactly, that refers to. With entries like "YT," "SM," and "LC," you might think that you're looking at perhaps the security officer who last made sort of note on the record. Then you get to an entry like "P6," and unless we're getting into some particularly creative naming, there goes that theory. The White House seems to be extracting records from their WAVES and other visitor check-in systems and not doing a whole lot of scrubbing before putting them online. That might have to change, and the White House might have to take proactive steps to get good data into the system on the front end if they hope to avoid the sort of confusion that Eisen warns about.