media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Turned Off

(Sept. 8, 2011)  When I read that the federal government might close eight local post offices I thought: Do we still need rural free delivery? Who needs snail mail these days more than once a week? It seems the last time I needed mail service was back in the 1990s. As a business reporter I needed annual reports. To get one you called someone and then wait two days for it to arrive in the mail. Now I get what I need online, including my paycheck. We once depended on the mail through rain, snow, sleet and hail. Now we have the Internet. But can we count on the digital mailman?

For the Thursday Night Talk show on KHSU last month I planned to speak to guests about prison realignment in California — the shifting of felons convicted of non-violent crimes from state prisons to local jails. I wanted data on jail capacity. I Googled it on a specialized Google search engine called Uncle Sam that searches all federal, state and local government databases. For years it has been a kind of secret search engine. Google didn’t list it with Shopping, or Images, Scholar or Books or any of the myriad specialized engines it offers. Which was always weird, because Google Uncle Sam was great. Combined with the Google’s advance search function, which appears after any initial Google search, you can search government databases for Powerpoints, Excel spreadsheets and PDFs.

This time it just bounced me back to the main Google page and kept doing so, even after I yelled at it. So I Googled my problem to the web of people-who-spend-too-much-time-online-solving-Internet-problems-for-strangers.  I wrote in the search box: Where can I find Google Uncle Sam? The answer came back. I can’t.

Google took it down back in June. The one search engine that filters out useless corporate, fluffy material and gives you back only info the government has collected. Now why would Google do that?

There was no announcement. Apparently Google argues that its main search engine is now so sophisticated, you don’t need the specialized one. I don’t even know if that’s true. I got it from a posting by someone as peeved as I. Funny, because Google hasn’t taken down the engines for finance, shopping, products, or videos. I guess if I wanted to shop for government data that would be a different story.

I worry about the power Google has amassed. If information is power, Google is like Megatron. I only know the name because I Googled “evil characters from Transformers.”

One of my most frightening reading moments was in the middle of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. In the book, a reactionary force took over the United States. The new government stripped all women of property and froze their bank accounts. The main character found out when she tried to buy something and her debit card didn’t work. They had shut down the digital financial network.  I haven’t read the book in 25 years, but I was able to pull it up on Google Books to double check my memory.

Information is currency. I don’t fear government control of information, but I do fear government/corporate collaborative control. Why shut down a search engine that helped citizens search their own government’s databases for publicly available information?

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