IT Advances, Laws and Policies Don't

For the second consecutive day, a major U.S. newspaper published an editorial about government information technology. in an editorial published in today's New York Times, the paper's editors argue that the Homeland Security Department's policy of seizing laptops at airports to search and download files "violates the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures." (Yesterday, The Washington Post wrote an editorial urging Congress to include in a bill a requirement that the Food and Drug Administration create a system to track food from the farm to the dinner table, a position that, as I blogged about yesterday, falls into the be-careful-for-what you-wish-for category.)

In the Times editorial, the paper calls on Congress to pass a law that allows the government to search laptops only when federal agents have a reasonable suspicion that the person poses a threat. (In the same day's paper, the Times published a story about how an email sent to the wrong address eventually led to a former school librarian being charged with harassment and having to appear numerous times in court to try to clear his name -- even when "a mountain of evidence," which only required basic knowledge of how e-mail works, showed the man was not implicated.)

As the frequency of the editorials and articles show, information technology, as most readers of Nextgov know, has become routine in government operations, but agencies' public policies and laws that are affected by IT still lag. Sounds like another agenda item for the next president.