Today the pressetext Austria revealed that several top secret documents were found on public file sharing sites.

Amongst these documents are secret evacuation routes of the US chief executive, Barack Obama.

While it is unknown whether the documents are recent or not the question about the capabilities of government is the issue that comes to focus because it’s not the only exceptionally embarrassing failure of e-government and related issues.

A short while back the BBC published an article in which they wrote about an external consultancy who’d lost a memory stick with the data of “thousands of criminals”, and the list of mishaps goes on and on.

I got my personal take on how responsible governments are handling data of their citizens when I ordered my new passport a year ago which required to submit biometrical data, amongst others my fingerprint. When I stood up to put my finger on the reader I caught a glimpse of Microsoft Windows XP Home running on the machine that was obviously going to store my data. If that doesn’t give you a “high security feeling” then I don’t know what does.

In several talks I’ve had with government entities the one thing I’ve learned is that the citizens are very skeptical when it comes to using e-government platforms. And who’s going to blame them considering all of these disasters taking place repeatedly.

The primary issue which all governments should be working on is establishing trust to their platforms, followed by hiring usability consultants because e-government portals in most cases have another major flaw: missing usability and accessibility.

What is your take on applied e-government?