By Gautham Nagesh
Information technology executives and congressional leaders today questioned the progress of the Bush administration's efforts to make public documents easily accessible online and to inform Americans how it is protecting their personal information, as required by law.
John Lewis Needham, manager of public content partnerships at Google Inc., told a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the configurations of many agencies' Web sites prevent search engines such as Google from finding public documents and displaying them in search results. He cited technical barriers including outmoded Web sites and proprietary federal databases that require unique search forms.
The 2002 E-Government Act requires agencies to make documents more accessible to the public via the Internet in an effort to make government policy-making more transparent. The law required the Office of Management and Budget to oversee the creation of a governmentwide portal (now called USA.gov), where citizens can access information from agencies and other organizations. Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., Tuesday introduced a measure to reauthorize the E-Gov Act for another five years.
Full story: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=38804&dcn=e_gvet
