Government IT departments don’t respect ROG petitions

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment I, U.S. Constitution

This has created a general principle that within the United States, anyone should be able to ask a government agency to fix a policy which hurts the people – and that they should, even if they don’t act, at least listen. Despite all of the anti-public-action methods and tactics that have been employed over the years across the nation, that has been the standard – that at the very least, when someone finally reaches a real person in an agency, that at the bare minimum they’ll listen and consider whether changes should be made, even if nothing at all is done.

Unfortunately, many government Information Technology departments don’t respect these “redress of grievances” petitions. Change is slow and rare, but that’s a given in our current system; the problem is that no one actually bothers to do their jobs and review policies. In schools, this becomes a major problem, as service blocking and domain blocking gets involved.

For instance, take the following three cases:

• Cerritos College: Rather than actually considering requests to unblock SSH and ICMP, Director of Information Technology Patrick O’Donnell just copied and pasted a (contextually irrelevant) article about SSH security concerns, never actually addressing the point of outbound SSH being blocked (and definitely not addressing ICMP).
• ABC Unified School District: The ABC Unified Information Technology Department has a long-standing policy of not accepting requests about anything from students. All requests have to originate from faculty – and they have to have a connection to the class that faculty member is teaching. The bar for that is high – it must be that there is no other way for the class to be conducted without the service/website being unblocked. The OIC personally has been involved with this, as due to it being a new organization, it’s still on the “newly registered domain” blocklist; while it would not fall under any other category of blockage, the District has refused to hear FM Amy Parker’s petitions asking for it to be unblocked sooner, as they need to originate from a faculty member out of an absolute need. This in turn leads to students having no voice regarding what is blocked on the networks they then have to use – a pattern within ABCUSD.
• Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO): Requests to unblock SSH on the campus’ networks have been completely and utterly disregarded by Information Technology staffers.

These are just three cases of many, as there is a culture within IT departments to not care about the people they subject with their policies. As such, a cultural shift is needed – a shift to actually care about ROG petitions, and care about the people subjected by these policies. At Cerritos College, this is being advanced through the college’s ethics policy, which states that employees have to act with the knowledge “that the District” (agency above the college) “exists to serve students”.

The OIC will continue to seek to change these sorts of disregards for the public. If you have encountered any sort of disregard for your petitions from any government agency relating to information access, please contact the OIC so we can assist you.