At a time when there are overwhelming reports citing the opportunities of data to revolutionize how we do business, communicate and live our lives, there is a major battle taking place in the courts regarding access to state public records information.  As surprising as it may seem, the case of McBurney v. Young promises to determine whether a state may preclude citizens of other states from accessing public records that the state affords its own citizens.  Last Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the case.  In August, SIIA joined with a Coalition of companies and association in filing a brief urging that a state’s restriction of access to public data is violation of Constitution’s commerce clause and would have a chilling effect on the flow of critical public records data and the innovation that can be derived from them.

Of course, this isn’t a new issue.  For years SIIA and other advocates of access to public records data have been vigilant in combatting state laws and policies that preclude access to public data.  What is surprising is that this case comes now, at a time when there is broad recognition of the opportunities provided by “big data.”  Just last month, the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) released a report citing the opportunity for states in data analytics:

State government may be described as an enormous data generation engine. And the sky is the limit in terms future data generation based on the growth in mobile applications, sensors, cloud services and the growing public-private partnerships that must be monitored for performance and service levels. The challenge is that many state government agencies are still being run as islands of information versus members of a single state government enterprise. The result is state government is not fully exploiting the data it has at hand.

And the report goes on to say that:

Enterprise architecture becomes even more important as the organizational structure of government encompasses more public-private partnering.

So at a time when states should be capitalizing on the benefits of the data they collect, Virginia and other states are living in the past, trying to hold their data close and restrict access for no good reason.  Lets hope the Supreme Court gets this one right, or the roadmap could be set for states to keep driving around in the dark.

David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy.