A couple of weeks ago, Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica, Ben Smith at Politico and others noted a disturbing pattern on the incoming Obama administration’s Change.gov website: polite but pointed user-submitted questions about the Blagojevich scandal and other potentially uncomfortable topics were being flagged as “inappropriate” by other visitors to the site.

In less than a week, more than a million votes-for-particular-questions were cast. The transition team closed submissions and posted answers to the five most popular questions. The usefulness and interest of these answers was sharply limited: They reiterated some of the key talking points and platform language of Obama’s campaign without providing any new information. The transition site is now hosting a second round of this process.

It shouldn’t surprise us that there are, among the Presdient-elect’s many supporters, some who would rather protect their man from inconvenient questions. And for all the enthusiastic talk about wide-open debate, a crowdsourced system that lets anyone flag an item as inappropriate can give these few a perverse kind of veto over the discussion.

If the site’s operators recognize this kind of deliberative narrowing as a problem, there are ways to deal with it. One could require a consensus judgement of “inappropriateness” by a cross-section of Change.gov users that is large enough, or is diverse with respect to geography, time of visit, amount of past involvement in the site, or any number of other criteria before taking a question out of circulation. Questions that have been preliminarily flagged as inappropriate could enter a secondary moderation queue where their appropriateness can be debated, leading to a considered “up or down” vote on whether a given question belongs in the mix. The Obama transition team could even crowdsource this problem itself, looking for lay input (or input from experts at places like Digg) about how to make sure that reasonable-but-pointed questions stay in, while off topic, off color, or otherwise unacceptable ones remain out.

But what are the incentives of the new administration’s online team? They might well find it convenient, as Julian writes, to “crowdsource a dodge” to inconvenient questions–if the users of Change.gov adopt an expansive view of “inappropriateness,” the Obama team will likely benefit slightly from soft, supportive questions in the near term, though it will run the risk of allowing substantive problems, or citizen concerns, to fester over the longer term. And that tradeoff could hold much more appeal for the median administration staffer than it does for the median American.

In other words, having the administration’s own tech people manage the moderation of questions directed at the President may be like having the fox guard the henhouse. I agree that even this is much more open than recent past administrations, but I think the more interesting question here is what would be ideal.

I suspect this key plank of the new administration’s plans will never be able to be fully realized within government. The President needs to answer questions that a nonzero number of his most enthusiastic supporters are willing to characterize as “inappropriate.” And for that to happen, the online moderation needs to take place outside of .gov. A collective move toward one of the .org alternatives, for this key activity of sifting questions, would be a great first step. That way, the goal of finding tough but honest questions can plausibly sit paramount.

On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle published a story about the salaries of local government employees. Headlined “Understaffing costs Houston taxpayers $150 million in overtime,” it was in many respects a typical piece of local “enterprise” journalism, where reporters go out and dig up information that the public might not already be aware is newsworthy. The story highlighted short staffing in the police department, which has too few workers for all the protection it is required to provide the citizens of Houston.

The print story used summaries and cited a few outliers, like a police sergeant who earned $95,000 in overtime. But the reporters had much more data: using Texas’s strong Public Information Act, they obtained electronic payroll data on 81,000 local government employees—essentially the entire workforce. Rather than keep this larger data set to themselves, as they might have done in a pre-Internet era, they posted the whole thing online. The notes to the database say that the Chronicle obtained even more information than it displays, and that before republishing the data, the newspaper “lumped together” what it obliquely descibes as “wellness and termination pay” into each employee’s reported base salary.

In a related blog post, Chronicle staffer Matt Stiles writes:

The editors understand this might be controversial. But this information already is available to anyone who wants to see it. We’re only compiling it in a central location, and following a trend at other news organizations publishing databases. We hope readers will find the information interesting, and, even better, perhaps spot some anomalies we’ve missed.

The value proposition here seems plausible: Among the 81,000 payroll records that have just been published, there very probably are news stories of legitimate public interest, waiting to be uncovered. Moreover (given that the Chronicle, like everyone else in the news business, is losing staff) it’s likely that crowdsourcing the analysis of this data will uncover things the reporting staff would have missed.

But it also seems likely that this release of data, by making it overwhelmingly convenient to unearth the salary of any government worker in Houston, will have a raft of side effects—where by “side” I mean that they weren’t intended by the Chronicle. For example, it’s now easy as pie for any nonprofit that raises funds from public employees in Houston to get a sense of the income of their prospects. Comparing other known data, such as approximate home values or other visible spending patterns, with information about salary can allow inferences about other sources of income. In fact, you might argue that this method—researching and linking the home value for every real estate transaction related to a city worker, and combining this data with salary information—would be an extraordinary screening mechanism for possible corruption, since those who buy above what their salary would suggest they should be able to afford must have additional income, and corruption is presumably one major reason why (generally low-paid) government workers are sometimes able to live beyond their apparent means.

More generally, it seems like there is a new world of possible synergies opened up by the wide release of this information. We almost certainly haven’t thought of all the consequences that will turn out, in retrospect, to be serious.

Houston isn’t the first place to try this—it turns out that the salaries of faculties at state schools are often quietly available for download as well, for example—but it seems to highlight a real problem. It may be good for the salaries of all public employees to be a click away, but the laws that make this possible generally weren’t passed in the last ten years, and therefore weren’t drafted with the web in mind. The legislative intent reflected in most of our current statutes, when a piece of information is statutorily required to be publicly available, is that citizens should be able to get the information by obtaining, filling out, and mailing a form, or by making a trip to a particular courthouse or library. Those small obstacles made a big difference, as their recent removal reveals: Information that you used to need a good reason to justify the cost of obtaining is now worth retrieving for the merest whim, on the off chance that it might be useful or interesting. And massive projects that require lots of retrieval, which used to be entirely impractical, can now make sense in light of any of a wide and growing range of possible motivations.

Put another way: As technology evolves, the same public information laws create novel and in some cases previously unimaginable levels of transparency. In many cases, particularly those related to the conduct of top public officials, this seems to be a clearly good thing. In others, particularly those related to people who are not public figures, it may be more of a mixed blessing or even an outright problem. I’m reminded of the “candidates” of ancient Rome—the Latin word candidatus literally means “clothed in white robes,” which would-be officeholders wore to symbolize the purity and fitness for office they claimed to possess. By putting themselves up for public office, they invited their fellow citizens to hold them to higher standards. This logic still runs strong today—for example, under the Supreme Court’s Sullivan precedent, public figures face a heightened burden if they try to sue the press for libel after critical coverage.

I worry that some kinds of progress in information technology are depleting a kind of civic ozone layer. The policy solutions here aren’t obvious—one shudders to think of a government office with the power to foreclose new, unforeseen transparencies—but it at least seems like something that legislators and their staffs ought to keep an eye on.