Seattle Fire Department Doesn't Want You Looking At 911 Data

Earlier this weeek we mentioned a cool map mashup that our sister site Gothamist has. They have feeds for both the police and fire departments in New York City and it makes for a really cool and really useful little application, and it's something that we'd love to have on our site here. However, we've never had a police feed in Seattle and now we don't have access to the fire department's data either. The Seattle Fire Department has decided that it's too dangerous to give the public data on 911 calls in a usable format.

Seattle911.com has the full story of why the feed is no longer available and you should really go digg their article on it. His investigation into why Seattle911 stopped working uncovered the fact that the Seattle FD has decided to release 911 dispatch information only in image form to foil attempts to scrape that data. A department official told him, "I can't go into details but putting the information in text (data) format allows people to pipe the data into other computer programs to instantly analyze patterns. An image makes that very difficult (although not impossible)."

On his blog John Eberly of Seattle911 makes the case that the Seattle Fire Department's data format change makes it inaccessible to those with disabilities who may need to read larger font sizes or have a software based reader give them the information out loud. He even suggests that the new format may be in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The fact is that putting the data into an image instead of text does nothing to stop someone from analyzing trends in the data. It just slows them down while at the same time completely defeating any program like Seattle911 that attempts to legitimately use the information.

Alan Durning at the Sightline Institute can't get his awesome Walksheds mapping project off the ground because they recently lost access to mapping data. Now Seattle911 is off the air because a government agency has stopped providing information in a usable format. The Great Hope of the Internet has always been that small enterprising applications like these will make our lives better, and it's a sign of very bad things to come when they are locked out by the information gatekeepers. It's a Big Deal, and if you think it's not you should go preorder Jonathan Raban's new book Surveillance.

Our personal, private access to data is a huge deal. The government has access to it. Corporations have access to it. The trend seems to be that we're losing access to it.