Today I spent the afternoon in Augusta with the Right to Know Advisory Committee. I serve on Maine’s Right to Know Advisory Committee, a committee established by the legislature to review exceptions to Maine’s right to know laws. Each year our committee reviews dozens of exceptions to Maine’s right to know laws. Some seem to make little sense. (Should the marketing plans of the lobster promotion council really be secret?)
Other exceptions reflect the value that we place on individual privacy. The government collects and warehouses reams of highly personal information about all of us. The Department of Education testified today about its longitudinal data system, which proposes to track students from preschool through retirement. The Department of Education has received approval to collect social security numbers for students, over objections from the ACLU of MAINE. Fortunately, social security numbers are protected from dissemination in most circumstances, although our committee has much work to do to establish truly meaningful protections for social security numbers collected by various agencies.
But the line between privacy and transparency isn’t always clear. Today we debated juror confidentiality. It’s very important to the ACLU of MAINE that trials and courtrooms be open, so that defendants, prosecutors, the public and the press can see who the jurors are. At the same time, jurors’ personal information that the government forces them to turn over in connection with juror duty should be safeguarded. Jurors fill out a highly detailed questionnaire. I voted today to continue to keep those questionnaires confidential. But the debate…about these conflicts between open government and individual privacy continues, especially as government agencies use increasingly sophisticated database systems to collect information about all of us. Right to Know Advisory Committee meetings are streamed online and open to the public. I encourage you to help me in this work!