This sad tale appeared last week:
June 23, 2021 — 7.03pm
Questions have been raised over why ministers did not find out before late March that police were accessing SafeWA user check-in data, with West Australian Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson revealing he was first told about the issue in early January.
Dr Robertson told an upper house committee on Wednesday morning his contact tracing team first told him WA Police were requesting access to the data in early January, which he then relayed to either WA Health director-general David Russell-Weisz or an acting director general shortly after.
The first order to produce the data was made on December 14 in relation to the shooting death of former Rebels boss Nick Martin at Kwinana Motorplex on December 12. Police were granted check-in data for more than 2400 people who attended the motorplex that night.
Police made six more requests for data since December but only one other – information relating to a stabbing in Victoria Park in February – was granted.
When the SafeWA app and mandatory contact registrations were announced in November last year Health Minister Roger Cook promoted them with concrete assurances the data would only be used for health purposes.
Mr Cook said he found out about the access in late March while Premier Mark McGowan found out mid-April, but the news triggered urgent legislation to close the loophole available to police to retain public trust in the app. That bill passed parliament last week.
While Dr Robertson conceded his recollections of when he found out were not exact they put into question the timeline Dr Russell-Weisz has put forward.
In front of the same upper house committee Dr Russell-Weisz said he had “informally” found out about the access requests in late February but it was only raised with him formally by the Public Health Team around March 10, after which he immediately raised the issue with Police Commissioner Chris Dawson.
The opposition raised questions over why relevant ministers found out about the data access months after such senior health figures had been made aware.
Upper house Liberal MP Nick Goiran said he found it hard to comprehend why the ministers were not made aware earlier.
Dr Robertson said police and WA Health were discussing the issues internally and put protocols in place to manage requests.
Mr Cook maintained the earliest he became aware of the issue was at the end of March when he was notified by the director general in a briefing note.
Opposition Leader Mia Davies asked Mr Cook in Parliament whether there had been a failure in communication by bureaucrats to escalate the issue but he said there were a lot of discussions that happened in the background at departments before going to ministers.
A detailed time line follows the article here:
And then we had this:
How a bunch of data nerds shamed government to release vaccine data
A group of community data and digital evangelists have been extracting most of the data the public reads and sees about COVID-19.
Tom Burton Government editor
Jun 22, 2021 – 5.22pm
How many people have been vaccinated in Australia? This is the simple question a group of young data and digital evangelists has been pushing the federal government to answer for nearly four months.
Frustrated by the lack of vaccination data, young Melbourne data specialist Anthony Macali set up a hack to scrape the data from the back of the West Australian health site.
“WA was the only state actually publishing fully vaccinated data for the different states,” Macali explains.
“They have the high level numbers on the site, but if you want to be super precise it’s better to get as many decimal points as you can.”
Using Google’s readily available Chrome developer tool box, Macali was able to scrape the data his data colleagues, media groups and the general public have been yearning for.
“It’s a bit fiddly. You got to know which JSON (on open data-sharing format) source to find and it took a little bit of digging.
“I needed to be confident that this number was as accurate as I could before pointing it out to the international outlets.”
Macali’s collaborators have reverse engineered this data to derive estimates of first- and second-dose data now being published by various sites. It is this data, in the absence of official numbers, that mainstream media have relied upon for their broadcasting, publishing and graphics efforts.
In the absence of official government data, Macali’s site has become the de facto source for Oxford University’s global site, Our World in Data. This is the leading site health authorities and governments from around the world use for tracking COVID-19.
“If you look at some of the other countries missing second doses – countries like China, Saudi Arabia – it’s highlighted that if I had not done this dashboard hack we would be in the same group as them,” Macali said.
On Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s newly hand-picked tsar of the federal government’s vaccine program, Lieutenant-General John Frewen, finally committed to publishing this data. Not immediately but “at the earliest opportunity”.
Frewen’s commitment was met on Twitter by a collective cheer from Macali and his community data wonks, who since March last year have worked voluntarily to get Australia’s COVID-19 data out of the dark ages.
Working in tandem with major media outlets and other volunteer analysts, it is this group that has dragged governments across the country into publishing real time data in easy-to-understand formats on the pandemic.
Apart from Macali, in the loose group of evangelists has been former Sydney Morning Herald web producer Juliette O’Brien, aided by veteran web pioneer Carlos Monteiro and a team of volunteers.
O’Brien’s site, covid19data.com.au, was the first to go live, built on a simple open platform called Wix, and has been visited by more than 2.5 million users.
As the pandemic was breaking, O’Brien was working at the Herald and wanted to put a chart into a story.
“At that stage, Australia had about 40 cases. As a digital journalist, I was kind of used to being a bit of a Jill of all trades, in a digital way. I wasn’t really a data expert or a data person, but I knew my way around the spreadsheet and I was able to pull things together just using a few out-of-the-box tools,” says O’Brien, who 15 months later is still at it.
“I’ve done it seven days a week since March 2020. And the motivation came from the huge wave of public interest there was for up-to-date data.
”If there weren’t so much interest in it then I wouldn’t have continued.”
O’Brien has relied upon about $70,000 of donations to “keep the lights on” and to improve the site, declaring it has been the coalition of collaborators that has made the whole exercise possible.
“I remember back in March last year being on a Zoom at around midnight with a data scientist in Melbourne who I’d never met, figuring out how to chart the exponential growth of Australian cases.”
Another collaborator has been Jessica Urquhart, a Queensland woman who early last year took it upon herself to begin tweeting under the account COVID_Australia the many daily pandemic updates from around Australia.
It has been pulling the data from the various state announcements in near real time, often classified in a mishmash of different categorisations, multiple timings and revisions that has been the greatest challenge for the open data collaborators.
“The data is only a couple of thousand lines and 10 or 20 different metrics. It’s nothing crazy in the big scale of things,” Macali says.
Lots more here:
What we have here, it seems to me, are bureaucracies working hard to make sure the public are misled as to what is being done with their data or preventing the public getting no real data as to what is actually going on!
When did we reach the stage that the public are mealy data subjects to be ignored or ‘mushrooms’ to just to be kept in ignorance? I don’t know but it is time the trend really needs to reverse!
David.
1 comment:
Data exploration is still exploitation. Either lazy, incompetent, or malicious, there is stinking practices and chicanery in high places. None of this gives comfort. We are a nation able to withstand authoritarian nations, we don’t seem to know how to be democratic anymore.
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