Transcript: Government employee blogs

Description: When is the public's right to know more important than a government agency's right to privacy? Bob Artner looks at the legal issues involved in government employee blogs and suggests evaluating them along a continuum.

I'm Bob Artner from TechRepublic. These days it seems like everyone has a blog, and that's true for government employees as much as it is for employees at any other organization. What I want to talk about are some of the legal issues that are involved with government employee blogs. What do I mean? Well, look at a continuum here where we have the public's right to know on one side. You come down on this side and we have the right to privacy. Both of these are important. Both of these are critical in any democracy.

How does it manifest itself in an employee blog? Well, if you work for a state healthcare agency, and you were concerned about the level of funding that the agency was receiving that was causing substandard treatment, you could argue, hey, the public has a right to know about that. I need to blog about this and tell people about it. On the other hand, if I do that and if I blog about it by using medical records or case histories from people who have been in the hospitals and had specific operations and I talk about their treatment, I'm violating their right to privacy. And I can argue that I'm violating this right to privacy for a greater good, the public's right to know, but there's a tension here and what the right answer is along this line really depends on the circumstances, and there isn't a firm yes or no answer.

What about this whole issue of support and loyalty for an organization as another continuum. As a person who manages, say for example if you manage a government agency, you should be able to say you know what? I should be able to expect that my employees support the organization, support our goals and objectives and don't actively undermine them. On the other hand, someone who's blogging would argue-with some justification-hey, the whole point of having whistleblower statutes is to be able to say, you know what? I understand that I'm supposed to support the government's objectives and the agency's objectives, but, if those objectives are wrong and are corrupt or illegal or are actually harming people, I've got not only a right, I've got an obligation to be down here on this side and just standing on any soapbox that I can and telling people about this.

What if you work for an intelligence agency or you work for a security agency, the police department or something. On the one hand, you could say, I'm actually trying to help public safety. If the trains aren't safe, I need to tell people about it. And if my agency doesn't like it, or, you know, tough. On the other hand, you can materially harm the public safety if you release information about how your agency is supposed to respond in a crisis, or release information that details vulnerabilities in infrastructure.

So you can see here that in the case of say intelligence or security, that the stakes on this question get even higher. There are times when it's going to be appropriate to be way over here and err on the side of keeping information secure. There'll be other times where we're going to say, you know what, shout it out, because the risk here to public safety and the risk of not talking are much higher than the risk of spreading that information.

So we're going to see this evolve over time, but that is the tension involved between government employee blogs.

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