New Technology Bringing Government, People Closer : Information: Some of the projects are aimed at restoring faith in the agencies--and they’ve turned out well. But others are costly failures.

It was shaping up to be a typical summer afternoon for Tom Tate, sitting at his computer at the Department of Agriculture, until the message showed up in his electronic mailbox.

“Help. I live in Des Moines, Iowa,” Tate recalls it said. “The water from the floods is starting to spill over and pollute our water supply. What can we do?”

Tate remembered that the government had produced flyers on water purification a year before for victims of Hurricane Andrew. He retrieved the text from the department’s computer memory and transmitted it across the Internet network.

A week later, another message arrived: “You made me a local hero.” Tate’s correspondent, it turns out, was no local bureaucrat in need of federal assistance. He was a teen-ager with a paper route and a home computer. With the aid of other carriers, he had taken Tate’s flyers, printed up copies, slipped them into that day’s newspapers and helped thousands of Iowans purify their tap water. Tate never even learned the boy’s name.

The episode is only one of many examples that hint at another promising new application of technology: making the ocean of information generated by local, state and federal governments more accessible to citizens.

Against a backdrop of dissatisfaction with public institutions perceived as gridlocked and disconnected, technology is emerging as a focal point in efforts to restore the public’s damaged faith in government. After all the rhetoric is stripped away, technology is at the center of the Clinton Administration’s “reinventing government” campaign and is the cornerstone of many current state and local reform projects.

* In Louisiana, the government is experimenting with video telephones that let residents of rural communities be seen by doctors in the city. Patients in one place can stick their tongue out and say “ahh” while a physician peers down their throat from miles away.

* In South Carolina, among other states, officials are developing electronic “parent locater” databases to help authorities track down parents who fail to pay child support. The networks integrate an array of personal records compiled from different states.

* In Hawaii, citizens can use their home computers to obtain information about state jobs and college scholarships, to access university and public libraries, and to retrieve texts of pending state legislation.

* The federal government has launched a computer service called FedWorld that enables citizens to access information from more than 130 government databases by dialing a single phone number. The Government Printing Office generates 15,000 new titles a year; after only 18 months, FedWorld has an inventory of 2.5 million documents and logs some 3,000 calls a day.

Government’s rush to embrace high technology is not without peril. Some projects may prove ill-conceived or prohibitively expensive. California’s effort to digitize its Department of Motor Vehicles records, for example, has expanded from a five-year, $27-million project to a $44-million mess with no clear end in sight.

In addition, opening up government databases to any citizen with a home computer and a modem raises difficult questions about potential violations of privacy. And even the most avid proponents of unfettered access acknowledge that offering up gigabytes of government data accomplishes little if it is presented in a way that most people find unintelligible.

“People have this idea that if everybody had all the information, then we would be a democratic society,” said Prof. Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University. “But the really intriguing question is, what do people do with that information?”

What is missing, Etzioni says, is some kind of “democratic finger,” a digital device that points the way to important information. Otherwise, he said, on-line government may produce little more than widespread confusion and wasted expense.

Nonetheless, much of the creative energy in government today is being directed at finding ways to use computers to streamline, modernize and humanize the government institutions many citizens seem to resent.

The convergence of government and technology has received a big boost from Vice President Al Gore, a dedicated Internet user who headed the Administration’s “reinventing government” task force. Many of that group’s recommendations for making the federal government more efficient involve new applications of technology.

The movement has also benefited from the arrival of a generation of younger, technology-friendly policy activists who accompanied Clinton and Gore to Washington.

When the National Governors’ Assn. recently surveyed state-level experiments with technology, it discovered a few favored strategies:

KIOSKS: Resembling automated teller machines used by bank customers, government kiosks are popping up in shopping malls and grocery stores in several states.

Before long, experts predict, citizens will conduct much of their routine business with government at these kiosks, renewing auto registrations, obtaining benefits and acquiring information about state services without ever confronting a bureaucrat. The objective is to bring government to the places where people generally congregate, rather than making them stand in line at a handful of government office buildings.

California is among the first states to experiment with kiosks. At more than a dozen sites around the state, people can get copies of their birth certificate, register their car and review job openings listed by the Employment Development Department. An even bigger trial, involving roughly 50 kiosks, is under way in Texas.

In Vermont, citizens use kiosk terminals to learn about 2,400 health, education and social services, and to obtain information about state colleges and training schools. In New Jersey, kiosks dispense information about day-care providers. Colorado’s kiosks answer queries about child care, legal issues, business data and recreational facilities.

CARDS: Government-issued cards resembling credit cards enable citizens to obtain state services more efficiently and to cut down on fraud and abuse. Some cards store information about the holder in a magnetic stripe, while others are “smart cards” equipped with tiny computer chips.

In Arkansas, Medicaid recipients present doctors and pharmacists with cards that contain information about their medical status and eligibility for benefits. By June, the state expects to have saved $7.6 million on an initial investment of $5 million.

Wyoming is developing a system in which people eligible for the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children will receive cards containing a silicon chip that contains the bearer’s full benefit record. Each time the card is used to obtain food or health products from designated retailers, the information stored in the chip is automatically adjusted to reflect the purchase.

Other states, including Alabama, Idaho, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina, are developing their own magnetic and smart cards to deliver services.

OTHER EFFORTS: California is developing a statewide environmental resource inventory to be used in planning roads and developments. It is trying to exploit technology to reduce redundant tax reporting requirements and is developing a statewide parent locater to improve collection of child-support payments.

Some projects are tailored to particular regional needs. North Dakota and the U.S. Agriculture Department have linked 37 weather monitoring stations into a central computer system available to any computer user with a modem. The system allows farmers and ranchers to obtain detailed local weather forecasts as quickly as they are issued.

About a quarter of the states, including California, are developing computer systems to help people pay their taxes. Some simply dispense tax forms electronically, while others allow taxpayers to file their returns and transfer funds by computer.

A similar full-service system is being launched this year by the federal government. In the past, taxpayers were required to make electronic filings through an intermediary, such as a tax preparer, but now they can handle the chore themselves.

The new FedWorld database, which was inaugurated during the George Bush Administration, allows anyone with a computer to access the combined files of all federal libraries. Available records include all presidential speeches, pronouncements and press releases. But so far, most users confine themselves to the Office of Personnel Management’s job opportunities bulletin board.

With government agencies going on-line at an increasing rate, politicians are not far behind. In California, gubernatorial candidates Pete Wilson and Kathleen Brown have made all of their speeches and press releases available to computer users so, as Brown puts it, “people don’t have to use snail mail.”

Congress is also experimenting with making itself more accessible. This month, it began posting the text of all House bills on the Internet, along with the official schedule of House action. A year ago, seven House members obtained individual electronic mailboxes on the Internet so constituents could contact them instantaneously. Only 14 months later, 36 House members are on line, and the number increases by two or three lawmakers each week.

So far, the more tradition-bound Senate has not created its own electronic gateway.

But the digital stampede has not been trouble-free. Internet-connected House members, for instance, are not willing to answer citizen queries electronically. Responses are sent by conventional mail, as they were 200 years ago.

The problem, is that anyone could “spoof” an e-mail messager by impersonating a member of Congress. That glitch won’t be solved until “digital signatures” are created to authenticate the true author of a computer message.

Another danger posed by government’s initial forays into technology involve the potential waste of taxpayer dollars. That is one reason that New York set up a Center for Technology in Government at the State University at Albany. Its mandate is to build prototype systems to be tested in university settings. Once perfected, they will be used to create a full-blown statewide system.

California already has made a few costly mistakes. Its plan to computerize the state’s 38 DMV databases went awry, according to Government Technology magazine, because the state was trying to develop new technology and lacked a clear business plan.

The state’s kiosk program, Info/California, was supposed to have 104 machines in operation by now, so far only 15 are up and running. (The only one in Los Angeles is at the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw Plaza Business Revitalization Offices, 3650 Martin Luther King Blvd. Suite 246). Texas, which copied California’s kiosk plan, jumped ahead by renting rather than buying its machines.

Some users find the anonymity of technology appealing, as Info/California project manager Harold Ferber learned when he approached a tattooed biker dressed in leather and chains who was looking for a job at a kiosk in San Diego. Ferber said the biker told him he preferred using the machine because when he showed up at state employment offices, the staff discriminated against him because of his looks.

Some of the most interesting experiments have been ad hoc.

In the White House Office of Media Affairs, aide Jock Gill has been assigned to think about new technology. While attending a conference, he met Tate, the Agriculture Department official, and the two began discussing the possibility of creating an on-line network composed of representatives of any branch of government interested in pooling information.

Their first organizational meeting included representatives of three agencies: Agriculture, Commerce and Education, so they called their embryonic network ACE. Later, they gave the acronym an official name, Americans Communicating Electronically.

“There is a lot of government information laying around in people’s brown folders or in file cabinets that would be of great interest to citizen taxpayers,” Tate said. “But there are lots of barriers and constraints to getting it out.”

The ACE group now has 350 affiliate locations across the country. Monthly meetings are open to bureaucrats and citizens.

In fact, the Iowa paper carrier who messaged Tate about the rising floodwaters located him through the ACE computer group.

“It’s sort of a guerrilla effort,” Tate said. “Not really much like government at all.”

An Internet Phone Book

With a computer and a modem, you can message the White House--and many other government entities--in a matter of seconds. The Internet, a giant web of computer networks that makes this all possible, can be accessed through commerical on-line services. Some of the officials and agencies that can be reached:

THE WHITE HOUSE

The options: Citizens can send President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore electronic messages over the Internet, as well as retrieve White House documents such as speeches, executive orders and press releases. (So far, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has not gone on-line.)

Clinton’s Internet address: President@WhiteHouse.Gov

Gore’s Internet address: VicePresident@WhiteHouse.Gov

To obtain White House publications: Publications@WhiteHouse.Gov

For information about available documents: FAQ@WhiteHouse.Gov

Replies: Because it is easy to impersonate other people on-line, Clinton and Gore answer their e-mail by conventional mail, and the delay can be considerable. All electronic messages to the leaders are downloaded onto magnetic disks by the Secret Service and screened. Federal authorities have made at least one arrest based on a digital threat to the President.

MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

The options: A growing number of House members (but no senators) can be messaged over the Internet.

Menu of individual addresses: Congress@HR.House.Gov. (It takes about 10 minutes to get a menu.)

Replies: Sent by conventional mail. Only about 40 lawmakers are on-line so far, but more are joining each week.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

The options: Computer users can access more than 130 federal databases, including most government libraries in Washington, through a service called FedWorld. The network can be entered through the Internet or with a direct telephone connection using a modem and telecommunications software.

FedWorld’s Internet address: FedWorld.Gov

The direct line: (703) 321-8020

For assistance, call the FedWorld help line: (703) 487-4608

AMERICANS COMMUNICATING ELECTRONICALLY (ACE)

The options: ACE is a group of federal bureaucrats who are trying to use technology to make the government more accessible. The ACE bulletin board is open to anyone.

ACE’s Internet address: ACE-MG@ESUSDA.Gov