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?

When it comes to political elections I personally trust no one and – like pretty much always – base my opinion on the independent media sources, which are primarily internet based.

When I was looking into who was going to make the race in the US presidential elections I was upon my search on Google, directed to a German news site of a conceivably free television station.

I was presented with the result that McCain was supposed to have around 46% or the electoral votes as of October 18th.

Having been made aware of the Islandic project “If The World Could Vote“, which is in part managed by my good friend Hjortur Smarason, I also checked there, expecting that the results would be at least similar. The project, by the way, assumes that anyone of the over 6 billion citizens of the world could give their vote, electing the next president in the USA.

Rolling my cursor over the USA revealed a staggering 18,8% of the voters who had given their voice to McCain.

The initial question which arose was whether one of these sources had somehow miscalculated the information because of the massive discrepancy between the results found.

Investigating further sources on the mass media presented similar presentations of the percentages while looking more into the independent media scene showed a clear trend towards McCain’s opponent Obama.

Of course we have to consider that “only” a small minority of the US citizens had voted on the independent platform. Maybe these, apparent internet users, are the more educated because of their web access?

Have a nice weekend

Lars