As hacktivists and open-data advocates continue to find themselves on the wrong side of the law, the idea of “civic hacking” aims to redirect young programmers away from breaking things and toward rebuilding them.

Code for America has deemed itself a kind of “Peace Corps for Geeks.” The fellowships program, which uses technology to solve infrastructural issues, closed its application process on March 31 for city governments seeking to take advantage of the program.

Cities that apply for the fellowships would be assigned a team of programmers, developers and designers for one year that would then devise creative solutions for the problems facing the area.

One project that fellowship developers launched was the BlightStatus site in New Orleans. This site allows citizens to see blighted properties in the area in order to help the city rebuild.

While it sounds nice to program for the public good, it will be difficult to convince young programmers it’s worth working for a nonprofit when the private sector can offer a much more lucrative salary.

Projects like Code for America can also seem like a potential waste of money, as there are some problems facing our cities that technology can’t actually solve. Apps aren’t magic wands, and pouring more taxpayers’ dollars into technology that few will use doesn’t seem like the right answer to more complex problems like obesity or growing crime rates. But at least it’s a start.

Code for America is working with other nonprofit groups, like Random Hacks of Kindness and Rally for Impact, to sponsor the governmental initiative, “The National Day of Civic Hacking.” The event is scheduled to take place nationwide from June 1-2 in a bid to coax techies away from the dark side of hacktivism.

The initiative will attract more than 15,000 participants at about 67 locations using “publically-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country,” according to the official website, hackforchange.org.

The irony in this little branch of the hope and change rhetoric is that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has allowed for an overbroad definition of what the government considers to be criminal activity in the digital world.

Therefore, those who join these kinds of “good guy” initiatives may do so more out of fear of prosecution than unflinching support for the public good.
If government officials were really concerned about transparency, they would be less concerned with public relations initiatives like “The National Day of Civic Hacking” and more focused on changing overbroad policies like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

This act has allowed government officials to decide at whim which kinds of public application programming interfaces are considered criminal or not.

In addition, the act allows the government to trap anyone who might “exceed authorized access” to a computer. This ambiguous statement has been used to prosecute open-data activists like Aaron Swartz.

Hackers are being seen as vigilantes committed to civil disobedience, when many are just dynamic problem-solvers looking to participate in the systems that affect our lives.

The point of a democracy is that all citizens should have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, and gaining more access to data that is already publically available will help us become active participants in a healthy government.

Our governmental processes are evolving and, in an age where surveillance within a police state seems like an inevitable reality, we must continue to protect our rights.
Kat Smith is a senior creative advertising major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter at @WhateverKat or by telepathy, if possible.

Published on April 4, 2013 at 2:08 am