Online Public Access to Federal Agency Computers

J. Timothy Sprehe*

This article discusses the growing phenomenon of Federal agencies permitting online public access to their computers. Many agencies are experiencing public demand for such access, and the article discusses examples of public access programs. An agency’s response to the demand depends on its stance toward information dissemination. Consensus is growing that online public access is inevitable and agencies are seeking to devise relevant information policies.

Under what conditions should the public have online access to Federal computers? Many Federal agencies are now contemplating arrangements that will permit members of the public to connect directly into agency computers in order to query databases and download government information.

Depending on which agency you are talking to, this prospect can seem an exciting new challenge in service to the public, or something terrifying to be resisted at all costs. For agencies that are beginning to participate in the Internet or actively planning for the onset of the National Research and Education Network (NREN), online public access to their computers seems a foregone conclusion, indeed something to be openly embraced. The Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Educational Statistics are designing special programs to encourage the public to explore agency data. For agencies that are just now being pestered by data users to open up agency databases that may include sensitive individually identifiable data on persons, the idea of members of the public wandering around loose inside their databases is the stuff of nightmares.

As with so many other issues, the initial response of program managers to the question of online public access depends, first of all, on the fundamental agency stance with respect to disseminating government information to the public. Agencies that understand information dissemination as being of the essence of their mission and that

* Direct all correspondence to: J. Timothy Sprehe, President. Sprehe Information Management Associates. 1920 N Street, N. W., Suite 210. Washington, D. C. 20036.

Government Information Quarterly, Volume 9, Number 2, pages 199-203 Copyright @ 1992 by JAI Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0740-624X

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have highly active dissemination programs are encountering increasingly sophisticated user communities capable of analytic work equal to the agencies’ own. These agencies also have a highly developed relationship with their user community, the sort of relationship one sees embodied in organizations such as the Association of Public Data Users. They have years of experience in interacting with their user community and a fund of mutual knowledge and shared professional values. These agencies appear to be actively devising new programs that will actually invite users into online access to agency databases.’

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is an example of an agency that is considering such a program. The agency recognizes that perhaps no one but NCES is capable of establishing linkages among several of its large survey databases. NCES is contemplating creating a very large database that would consist of linked datasets and that would be available online to researchers in the public. One downside is that the same linkages that enhance the databases’value to researchers also potentially enhance the likelihood that individuals could be identified and confidentiality violated.

Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control has created WONDER, standing for Wide- ranging ONline Data for Epidemiological Research. WONDER is a computerized information system that provides online access to epidemiologic and public health datasets. WONDER furthers CDC’s mission of health promotion and disease prevention by speeding and simplifying access to public health information for state and local health departments, the Public Health Service, and the academic public health community.

A sizable group of agencies have for many years opened their computers to online assess by what might be called special publics. The Department of Defense has had its Arpanet linking defense agencies and contractors; the Department of Energy has its network of energy laboratories, most at major universities; and so forth. These networks continue to expand and are providing the basic infrastructure and motivation

for the NREN. The Federal Highway Administration has an electronic data sharing program with

state highway agencies. FHWA maintains a number of national databases that are shared online with the states: Federal aid project data; motor carrier data; highway statistics; highway research; a commercial drivers license information system; and a highway performance monitoring system. Under development is CHIPS, the comprehensive highway information and planning system, a joint state-FHWA information system that will integrate various highway-related databases. FHWA is in process of joining two networks, one run by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and one sponsored by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

While these programs are ostensibly restricted and access is controlled, the number of people and institutions involved is so great that the distinctions between who gets access and who does not are increasingly fuzzy. It seems likely that anyone who has a plausibly good reason to seek access to one of these systems could gain it.

The question of online public access also hinges upon the nature of the database itself and the nature of the public’s interest. The NCES and CDC databases consist of survey and other data that have already been subjected to disclosure avoidance techniques to protect against identification of individuals. User interest lies in statistical

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analysis of the data. The Department of Veteran Affairs is like Federal statistical agencies in the sense of having a highly developed relationship with a user community. Indeed, veterans service organ~ations, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the Paralyzed Veterans of America, have a statutorily chartered status with VA and they occupy office space within VA facilities. Veterans service organizations are also avid users of VA data.

However, the nature of the veterans service organizations’ interest in VA data is sometimes quite different from that of the Federal statistics-using public. Veterans service organizations regularly offer to their membership the service of searching veterans’ records to explore whether the veterans are eligible for certain benefits. To this end, they acquire limited power of attorney from individual veterans to access the veterans’ benefit claims records.

VA has established a program under which a properly authorized veterans service organization operating on VA premises can link its computer into VA’s mai~rame for purposes of searching an individual veteran’s benefit claims record. Upon establishing the VSO’s bona fides, VA gives the VSO a temporary mainframe account number and password plus the precise instructions necessary to access the veteran’s benefit claims record within a read-only system. Any deviation from the instructions sets off alarms within the system.

During the past year, a VSO requested remote off-site access to VA’s mainframe under this program. In May 1991, VA issued an interim formal policy stating that this kind of access would only be accorded so long as the VSO’s computers were on VA premises and hence subject to VA inspection and security controls; no remote off-site access to veterans’ benefit claims records will be permitted. VA also never permits non- government employee access to veterans’ medical records. The number and kind of requests for online access are such that VA is continuing to review and evolve its policy on public access to computers.

Other agencies have also issued general policy statements on the question of online public access to agency computers. The Department of Agriculture has a blanket, department-wide policy that no public access to agency computers will be permitted. The Department experienced some legislative pressure in the 1Olst Congress, for example, to study the feasibility of permitting farmers to dial into agency computers and query the status of their loan applications. USDA agreed to reassess the departmental policy as it receives more and more requests for various kinds of online public access.

A third factor influencing an agency’s stance on online public access is the perception of the security threat. In 1989, Clifford Stoll, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, became an overnight celebrity for his success in tracking down a hacker who was responsible for a X-cent discrepancy in a Berkeley mainframe’s accounting system. In his book, The Cuckoo’s Egg, Stoll details how he finally traced the hacker to West Germany.2 The hacker turned out to be a kind of freelance spy who was penetrating dozens of classified and unclassified databases in Europe and the United States and apparently selling information to East Germany. Again and again, Stoll encountered system managers in supposedly secure U.S. military and defense- related computer centers who refused to believe they were being penetrated until Stoll proved it to them.

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The cuckoo’s egg hacker was entering through a particular kind of hole in a Unix operating system. St&l’s work was widely publicized in newspapers, talk shows, and congressional testimony. Yet in mid-1991, according to computer experts at the Nation& Institute of Standards and Technology, a hacker penetrated a system in the U.S. using the exact same hole. The system manager had not bothered to close the hole despite the enormous publicity given to the danger.

In my talks with members of the Federal computer security community at NIST, the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center, and elsewhere, I sense a widely shared perception that most Federal computer systems are security disasters waiting to happen. Again and again, security appears to be patched onto Federal information systems as an afterthought instead of being designed in from the outset. Once system managers satisfy themselves they have a secure system, they tend to assume they are impenetrable and forget about security. In particular, when networking grows, agencies and universities tend to overlook ways in which unauth~~~d users can leapfrog from unclassified systems into classified systems.

The simplest way to ensure that members of the public gaining online access to a public use system cannot enter into other systems is to physically isolate the public use system in its own dedicated, stand-alone computer, as the Department of Commerce has done with its Economic Bulletin Board, Often a sophisticated PC is sufficient to handle the public use databases.

If the nature of the databases requires mainframe access, there are still relatively straightforward ways to handle the security problem. The National Computer Security Center advises that agencies should take care to use only systems that do not provide remote software development or debugging access so that there is no way a remote user coutd enter and execute his own software code, NCSC also advises agencies to become familiar with its “Rainbow” series of publications and to select only technology that NCSC has certified as “trusted,” which is a technical designation NCSC gives after an evaluation process. Others point out that it can take several years-an eternity in the fast paced computer world-for a product to receive the NCSC trusted endorsement.

Security is seen as a major barrier to allowing online access in many agencies. The particular security concern is that agency databases contain both publicly accessible information and information protected by the Privacy Act (5 USC 552a) or other confidentiality regulations and statutes, and that the agency has no way of segregating the two kinds of information without great cost. In principle, this is a transitional design problem. That is, as agencies become more accustomed to permitting online public access to their information systems, the agencies will begin to design the systems from the outset so as to clearly separate accessible and nonaccessible datasets.

Even those Federal program managers who oppose online public access to Federal agency camputers seem to recognize that it is almost inevitable. Online access has become technologically easy and inexpensive. There are good answers to the security issues if one will only apply them. More and more, there is no good reason for agencies to say no to public demand. Hence the real question Federal agencies wilt be facing in the next few years is how to organize and administer online public access to yield the least disruption to agency programs and the greatest benefit to information users in the public.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is based on a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Public Data Users, Washington, D.C., November 6, 1991.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Even the Bureau of the Census, which has very strong statutes, a tradition of confidentiality, and almost

tribal taboo against letting anyone into its databases, is no exception to this generalization. The Bureau

is exploring an online system for providing user access to the complex public use databases developed

in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). SIPP is the closest thing the United States

has to a national survey of wealth and poverty.

2. Clifford Stoll, The CuckooS Egg (New York: Doubleday, 1989).