PANEL ON FEDERAL GII ACTIVITIES
CONGRESS ONLINE: A CASE STUDY

Chris Casey

Technology Policy Advisor
Office of Senator Edward Kennedy
Washington, D.C. 20510, USA
chris_casey@kennedy.senate.gov
 
 • A graduate student in New Zealand needs a Senate Resolution from the 100- th Congress.

• A member of Portugal'sParliament wants to reach his constituents online

• A schoolgirl in Moscow is looking for a pen pal.

• A Swedish army officer just wants to say hello.

What do all these individuals have in common? They all contacted Senator Edward Kennedy via electronic mail (senator@kennedy.senate.gov) and prompt-ly received the information or response they sought. Although his efforts are directed to providing information and service to his Massachusetts constituents, Senator Kennedy's presence on the Internet reaches individuals around the world.

During the last two years, a handful of members of the 103rd Congress took their first cautious steps into the information age by setting up e-mail addresses and making information available on the Internet. Senator Kennedy's office, however, has led the way in developing electronic access to a Congressional office.

In May 1993, Senator Kennedy's office began making his statements and press releases available on a network of computer bulletin boards in Massachu-setts. The same materials were also posted to an ftp archive and two Usenet newsgroups (ne.politics, talk.politics.misc) on the Internet. Understanding that any useful communication must be two way, Senator Kennedy's office encoura-ged users to offer their comments and replies to the posted material in the same electronic forums.

In late 1993, the U.S. Senate Computer Center established an ftp/gopher ser-ver to provide all Senators and Senate Committees the ability to put information on the Internet. The House of Representatives followed shortly with a gopher server for its Members. During its first six months in operation, the Senate ftp/ gopher server recorded more than 88,000 separate connections. There is no question that the online public is finding its way to the Senate, but when it arrives it currently finds only 15 Senators there.

In January 1994, Senator Kennedy established an electronic mail address at which constituents were invited to contact him. To handle the potential for elec-tronic mass mailings, and in order to ensure reply-time equity with the postal mail, e-mail sent to Senator Kennedy receives an auto-responder acknowledg-ment and an individual reply sent via postal mail. The ability to configure subject-line commands will soon allow for enhancements such as automated replies to frequently asked question, autoforwarding, and listservs. Cases in which electronic constituent inquiries are answered electronically are becoming more frequent.

The fastest growing part of the Internet, the World Wide Web, provides an easy-to-use graphical interface to explore resources on the Internet. There are currently more than 100 different departments and agencies of the Executive branch of the U.S. government that are using the Web to provide access to informtion. The most notable recent entry was the White House, for which a homepage was unveiled in October 1994. Since May 1994, Senator Kennedy's office has had a homepage on the Web, and he currently remains the sole Mem-ber of Congress on the Web. In October 1994, the Kennedy Web page was accessed by more than 5,000 separate visitors. The only other Legislative branch presence on the Web is the Library of Congress.

As a handful of members of the 103rd Congress have discovered the promise of the Net, a rush can be expected with the 104th Congress, and many more members can be expected to go online. Every member of Congress will be interested in making information available electronically in order to be of better service to their constituents, and every Congressional staff member will benefit from access to the resources of the Net. In addition to information from indivi-dual member and committee offices, there are volumes of Congressional docu-ments that should and will inevitably become available in electronic formats. The Congressional Record, hearing testimonies, committee reports, and the text of bills under consideration are a few of the most obvious examples.

One inevitable consequence of the global reach of the Internet is that the same information is as readily available to individuals around the world as it is to Americans in a particular member of Congress' state or district. What are the advantages or disadvantages of worldwide access to the online resources of the U.S. Congress? Will a member seeking to report back to his or her constituents see this global audience as a plus or minus? What impact might electronic access to the work of the United States' legislature have within foreign governments?

Without question the actions of the U.S. Congress have global impact, and interest in those actions and the underlying process of our legislature is of interest far beyond U.S. borders. All of the same advantages that will bring Congress to participate on our National Information Infrastructure (NII) will also apply to a Global Information Infrastructure (GII): immediate access to information, rapid and cost-effective communications, and increased participation in the process.

The abundant possibilities for how government information and services can be provided on the NII are only beginning to be explored. When applied interna-tionally to the GII through both individual-to-government and government-to-government communications, they can seem boundless. What impact might electronic access to the workings of our legislature have on other countries, and what might we learn from similar access to other governments?

The examples from the beginning of this chapter demonstrate that when mem-bers of Congress go online, they are entering an international community. Pro-viding information to and communicating with the constituents in their state or district will draw members to the NII, but the benefit of their participation will be shared around the world.
 
 

Q & A_________________

DISCUSSIONS
 
 

[Richard Hsieh]

Since Senator Kennedy's office is the very first one of Congress to have a Mosaic Web page, I would like to ask whether it is true or not that it does not take a lot of time to start a Home Page on the World Wide Web (WWW), but it does take time to maintain it and to keep it up to date?

[Chris Casey]

It is not true. Initially our assistant came from MIT, and that's very good help to have when you have a graduate student in artificial intelligence to help you. But I more recently began to work on it myself. I don't have very much technical background myself; I don't know how to program a computer. I know how to use one. That's all. I decided that I have to learn more about the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) so that I can learn how to create Web pages. I started just with HTML Beginner's Guide, and if you visit the Senator's Web page now, at the bottom of it, you will find a link to my personal home page, which I created. It was a very simple thing to do, using any word processor and ASCII text. As matter of fact, it is an online home page with my daughter and myself in the article.

My second effort with the Web page, that I hope will go online soon, is a hypertext guide to the legislative branch. One reason that kept the whole Senate to be slow in coming to the technology, unlike some other government organiza-tions, is that the Senate has 100 different levels of organizations, and everyone else 135 more. It is quite a scary structure for anyone to pull together. I am working on a serious Web page that will essentially permit one to click here to visit the Senate, click there to visit the House, with links to any individual mem-ber with more information if they have put more information on the Internet. So I found it rather easy to do. Myself and another staff in the Senate have been teaching each other how to do this, and I think what's going to make the Congress move faster in this area, depending on our ground-level pushing of it. When we create our own Web pages and are able to tell the computer center, when we have a Web server to give the computer some place to go, then that will make the change in the Congress.

[Beth Boswell]

What do you envision your relationship will be with the Library of Congress's initiative for going online with information on democracy?

[Chris Casey]

As a matter of fact, right now in particular on the WWW I know the White House has its Web page, with 100 different federal departments, and agencies in the legislative branch have two Web pages -- Library of Congress and ours. I certainly see that as more and more members or legislatures provide information online, the possibilities and advantages of government-to-government connec-tions are quite certain. Foreign policy staff will tackle their abilities to send e-mails to their counterparts in other countries or to share copies or appending information of legislation, as well as the example of the Library of Congress. The fact is that the information is now available to people regardless of their locations. In other words, if they got a computer and a phone line, now they are connected to computers in the Library of Congress, or again the computers in their office are connected to that of the White House. That promises that kind of channels of information are unmatched.
 
 

[Wendy White]

There was some important legislation regarding telecommunications and the information highway that failed to pass through Congress prior to the election. Will this legislation be reintroduced? Do you have any other comments regard-ing the current Congress and telecommunications legislation?

[Chris Casey]

I probably should have voted Democrat. The telecommunication legislation which passed the House, passed the Senate committee, but it did not make it to the Senate floor because they were in the last minute of the sessions. It will likely be reintroduced, but how soon the bill will be passed, I can't say. I think it probably will focus much more on the regulatory aspect and perhaps on concerns about the public interest aspect of assuring access. Certainly, in our office, we shall try to protect that. Thank you.

[Peter Young]

I think I have 15-20 minutes for discussion. It occurs to me that this panel re-flects U.S. federal policy. The federal role seems, from comments about football, to be to promote information infrastructure activities for citizens, for scientists, and also perhaps for others globally. I wonder how many of those here are connected to Internet now? I hear that Internet activities in this country involve 20 million people worldwide, and that this is growing at 30% per year. Is that true, Steve?

[Steve Goldstein]

Well, in business circles, they will grow faster.

[Peter Young]

In your connectivity, how many of you here are connected privately, that is, through private connection rather than through federal sponsor or government sponsor?

Regardless, isn't it true that everyone connected to the Internet uses the private sector to link? Isn't that the point Vice President Gore makes? That the federal investment supports the NSF's regional network development. But I think that the backbone is supported by Sprint, so if you are using the Internet now, are you using a public highway supported by private technology? Is this a private-build network?

[Steve Goldstein]

The line is a leased public one.

[Peter Young]

Ah, privately supported backbone and regulated industry.

[Steve Goldstein]

But sometimes they are leased by a private service provider because users need to go through them for private business. Sometimes they are leased by government organizations for the user of government agencies, and so forth.

[Peter Young]

At times I feel like the rules and policies of the Internet are a mixed analogy, like the rules of football, that need to be mixed with basketball, as well as soccer, as well as other sports, creating an extremely complex environment. One of the difficulties, as Chris mentioned about Senate Bill 1822 (and later the 104th Con-gress), was that there are different cultures reflected in the regional Bell-operat-ing companies, The AT&Ts, and the cable companies on what we are going to do with information policy bonus, in terms of entertainment industry holding the copyright and copy ownership of material that everybody exchanges in this multimedia environment. Marjorie, do you have a question?

[Marjorie Hlava]

Well, I have a comment, because I think perhaps a very interesting phenomenon has happened to the Internet. That is, the information "haves" and "have nots" are becoming those people who will have a .edu and who are more likely to have Internet access than the .com. The private companies have to pay their fees all the way. Those who are involved in a government or educational institution really get it absorbed somewhat in their hierarchy. So my paying, whether individually or directly, is fixed, and I know what my monthly bill is. I would guess most people who have Internet access have no idea what their monthly bill is. So it created an inversion of the "have" and "have not" structure. Historically we have worried about the poor, but we actually have a strange inversion now.

[Chris Casey]

Actually it is interesting because Congressional staff are probably much more in that situation than those members in the public are, because in the pages covered in my paper, the congressional staff (at least the Senate) can get Internet access enough to be able to get to and look at that. That's probably not a question of technology not being in place, because the fiber network is in the ground and the connections are there. That's more a regulatory or bureaucratic hurdle within the Senate. In our office in this case, we had decided to go online and bought a PTP channel for $20 a month, which give us 4-hour full Internet access a day. I am paying that out of pocket and find it very affordable, even with two children. I got to change the Internet providers two separate times, because I found a better deal. Some are not charging by hours anymore, and some can give me the PTP connections rather than a dial connection for the same price. I am saying that the competition among the Internet service providers is really driving the prices down to the level of affordability, and that shouldn't be a big hurdle I hope.

[David Penniman]

It may be obvious, but I would like to hear other's reactions. From what I heard from Steve, it is not very meaningful to talk about whether GII or NII is a public network or private network or government run. It's going to be all of those, depending on what works in what region. It is going to be this giant that is made up of many little bits of pieces. Maybe someone views that differently.

[Peter Young]

Of course. Margie, do you have a comment?

[Marjorie Hlava]

Well, Chris's home page and my page seem to be going onto the net. There is an incredible huge race, and yet not everybody can receive all those pages. The home pages are like the old Western towns or a Potemkin villages, and there is an awful lot of emptiness behind those facades. There is a big facade, but just not much behind the home page. I hope we are going to add the content needed.

[Chris Casey]

As a matter of fact, our office certainly recognizes the fact that quite a lot of people have had e-mail-only access. We have made quite an effort and now are reaching about 10 different Massachusetts bulletin board systems, where in each area code in the state all the online materials are available on a local system that charges no user fees and will be a local phone call anywhere in the state, so peo-ple who are online can translate that onto Internet. For different levels of Internet access, we plan very soon to implement our ListServ service to help people with e-mail access to be able to subscribe or unsubscribe these material. We are avai-lable via FTP, Gopher, the Internet user groups, and the home page. So certainly Mosaic and the beautiful Web pages are the brighter part in the Internet right now, but I completely agree that you can't forget the people who don't have that kind of access. The most exciting thing about the Web page, in our case, is that we can point to so much more other resources than just our own. For example, on the Senate Kennedy home page, it points out not only from our office to the Labor Committee, but also we can point to many others. For example, a click on Massachusetts, that can take you to every server in the State of Massachusetts, can point from MA Department of Education as well as to other federal govern-ment services. So, for example, someone can come to our page to read the Labor Committee's summary about health care reform and Senate Kennedy's statement on the issue. Naturally one also can get the Massachusetts Department of Health's summary as well as that from the U.S. Department of Health Services. Hopefully we can provide those links to let people find out what other resources there are. But, as far as lower level access, I certainly agree.

[Steve Goldstein]

I would like to make a short comment very quickly.

Remember, information is power. Those who control information derive power from it. I think a lot of what we would like to see happen is that govern-ment organizations are no longer the sole controller of information, but indivi-duals will be able to access information or publish information, free of central control. One of the foreign ambassadors spoke to me recently, and I won't men-tion the country 's name, but basically said, "If we can give everybody a compu-ter and an Internet address, that will be real tough for the bad guy to take over again." I had a conversation with a Russian chemistry colleague of mine two years ago, when I was first helping to bring some connections there. He said: "Right now we don't have any chemicals, and we don't even have means to pay our salaries. Information is life for us. It's our professional life. It's our personal life." So we are talking about new information technologies, and I think the focus here should be on how technology can serve to bring this information and what information can do for us, not to put emphasis on the technology. These World Wide Web (WWW) pages are just steps to information, but people keep improving this capability of using this WWW technology. Now the users are actually beginning to be able to control the environment on the other side. This is sort of like people having a robot arm, and by actually maneuvering a robot re-motely using Mosaic, you can position the robot with a TV camera on it. This is just a toy right now, but that's a preview of some of the things that can happen eventually. Users will be able to reach out and control the remote environment. So this is not the end, but when people are talking about digital things like TV, computer, telephone, and so forth, all of them can be converted to nothing but digital bits. So, once they are in 0s just make a little electronic components, make them all intercompatible to each other. So at home when one is using something, call that computer, intelligent TV, or whatever, you will be able to store and retrieve archives, maybe download the movie you want, documentary movies if you will, and all kinds of other stuff that are stored digitally. So the technology we have today is nice and is enabling a lot of things and empowering a lot of things; it is a step in the direction where the things are heading. But, please let's not lose sight of the power of information, and the power some people or organization has, because they control the information. Thanks.

[Marinus Swanepoel]

May I add to that. Currently there is the large third-world component in my country. There is a vast difference between the haves of the first world and have-nots of the third world. It seems to me that we should concentrate on the content of information itself more than on the infrastructure. The infrastructure contri-butes to the haves having more and have-nots having less, and that's why infor-mation poor becomes poorer, and the information rich is becoming richer. That is something we should take into account, specifically when information on the infrastructure is not all that available to provide equal access for all population groups.

[Peter Young]

It is a fascinating concept to think of individuals not as information haves or have-nots, but as the foundations for haves and have-nots in the global context. In that regard, I am wondering how many here, who are connected to the Internet from non-U.S. nations, are connected because of their governments? Because of their federal policies? Because of their academic community initiatives? The academic communities in certain cases are harder to track than the federal struc-ture. So what is going to make the real difference in the next 5 years in terms of the federal policies? What will increase the number of citizens, the number of scholars, the number of people who have access? Is it changes in technology in terms of faster bandwidth and cheaper access? Is it changes in federal policies with regard to telecommunication regulation? Is it foundation sources for fund-ing, for infrastructure development? Or is it education?

[Marjorie Hlava]

Of course, many of you know, I love technology as much as you. But I am con-cerned about the content issue. You point out that because data do have to be digital to get on to the information highway. I am concerned that this discussion in the next few days concentrates only on digital information. If so, then we are missing the lion's share of the world's information. So we need to talk a bit about information which is not and may never be digital.

[Peter Young]

Perfect. I am really interested in having everybody participate. You should talk on whatever subject you think important. Is there anyone who wants to jump in?

[Marjorie Hlava]

Well, you take Russian sci-tech information, for example, VINITI has 31 million records, of which about 11 million is digital. Even in the U.S., we started automation in the 1970s, and quite a large amount of information previous to the 1970s on fundamental research is not online. Research information can be traced back to more than 300 years ago. Now for the U.S. most online information started only in the 1970s, while other countries may be in the 1990s, or may be in 2000. All that information prior to the electronic age may be lost!

[Herbert Achleinter]

A critical issue among some intellectuals in Latin America is the fact that much data/information about a particular country is collected by nonnative experts with their own paradigmatic perspective and ideologies. This raises the issue -- among Latin Americans -- of interpretation, accuracy, and manipulation of data. Another concern is that these data are stored in foreign data banks and not easily accessible.

There are many valuable data sources that are not easily accessible in their own country because they have not been officially identified. Partly this is due to historic reasons. For example, in the case of Paraguay, valuable sociological data about the country are hidden in NGOs. The previous government's hostility toward sociologists and historians made it necessary to act sub rosa. However, NGOs are a critical resource for political, social, and economic information. They are often the only source for historical information.

[Lisbeth Levey]

There is another related issue to that. At AAAS, we are looking at the interna-tional commercial databases and how often research information is reflected in those databases. Comparisons were made on databases produced by a couple of countries in Latin American, such as Brazil, Chile Argentina, and Mexico. And what we are finding is that the research information isn't in them. So you have a problem in that the information is not necessarily in a digital form and it is not accessible, but it is nevertheless valuable information. So how you make it accessible and give people the power to hold the information?

[Herbert Achleitner]

Almost all funding of NGOs comes from external sources, with many different countries and foundations providing operating funds. Some NGOs, at least in Paraguay, have started to organize their data and information resources, including the creation of databases, with the thought of making these resources commercially available.

[Daniel Duncan]

I would like to respond to the comments on the information haves and have-nots. I think that the new information technologies are always useful in creating information. Information is power, but also a commodity, and as such adds value to society at all levels. It is a product and service -- like other more tangible ones -- that is subject to market forces.

[David Penniman]

My responce to Marjorie is to caution her that having all the information exist in digital form is not the issue. I believe we can create digital pointers to infor-mation of all types. Probably the greatest source of information that is not in digital form is the knowledge held in the heads of people. What was pointed out earlier, being able to send out an e-mail query to a certain population, is just one example of digital access to nondigital information. We always said that infor-mation stored in archives is measured in feet, and we have other kinds of collec-tions where just awareness that the collections exist can be extremely helpful. So I don't think everything is going to be and has to be in digital form to become accessible on this net.

[Peter Young]

I like the concept of brainware.

[Kari Marklund]

I come from Scandinavia, where quality is always in the forefront in our country. As a matter of fact, I can tell you that the Swedish government now has women in control (before it was men), which is outstanding in the world. That's equality. So, in the Scandinavia countries, the information infrastructure would be very much put forward by different governments; we have been working together as small nations for a long time. So what is happening in Scandinavia is that we are focusing on the schools, that everybody in the future should have the same opportunity to get the information highway into their school system. Emphasis on schools is something that's been going on in Sweden since 1850, or something like that. But we always strike for equality for the whole nation, for the school system. It means also that the government of Sweden has decided to invest a large sum of money to the schools, not to buy equipment. For that, they have to get by themselves somehow. So this is in a way my answer to a couple of your questions from a Scandinavian viewpoint.

[Helene Slezakova]

I think there might be another problem that has to do with the language barrier, because it seems to be that most information available for academic research is in English. In the Eastern European world, for example, we have learned mostly the Russian language. So, although the information might be accessible, in fact, only a small population can access it effectively.

[Neal Kaske]

Information have or have-nots in the U.S. have a couple of groupings. One is the freenets, which is community based. I think that it is quite important to relate to any country, for its community, city, towns, and schools, for human resources and economic reasons. We have a few examples in the U.S. of public libraries providing free access to those who come in. Some of those receive some increas-ed coverage for those people who were homeless, or actually for those who start small businesses by using public libraries' free access to networks.