Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

access. It will be necessary to allow other channels for government communication,
such as telephone call centres.
Another aspect of the digital divide is that people in developing countries
have less access than those in developed ones; this exacerbates the differentials
between rich and poor nations. The lowest usage of the Internet and e-government
are in developing countries. In India, only 20 people in 1000 have telephone
access; only 3 in 1000 have access to a computer (Holmes, 2001, p. 26).
Although governments in such circumstances are trying to bridge the gap it is
obviously more difficult than in developed countries.
Privacy and security
E-government 197
The advances in information and communication technologies do offer much
for governments as well as offering enhanced service delivery for its clients.
However, the problem is that ‘these capabilities have the potential for surveillance
and control’ (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998, p. 86). Safeguarding privacy and
security are important aspects of e-government. While files are technically able
to be shared between agencies for efficiency reasons, they also impose problems
of privacy invasion.
E-government does bring with it an enhanced surveillance capability over
the citizens in a society. Internet or e-mail usage is recorded and able to be
traced far easier than ordinary mail or telephone calls; both leave electronic
traces and can be stored for long periods of time in an easily accessible form.
All e-mails can be searched for key words of interest to police or intelligence
agencies, where intercepting telephone calls or mail in the traditional way is
much more labour intensive and usually confined to a few suspects. It is technically
possible for many more people to be under surveillance electronically
for the same level of police resources. The FBI in the US, for example, has programmes
to tap the Web and can collect data and read the e-mail of criminal
suspects (Holmes, 2001). The police in the UK have powers under the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act passed in 2000 to require Internet
service providers to install interception devices on e-mail and Internet activity
and relay it back to a government monitoring centre. Other governments have
enacted similar legislation, such as Singapore, and as The Economist argues
(24 June 2000):
Singapore’s somewhat authoritarian government is probably not too worried by the threat to
privacy or civil liberties. The point of the Web is that it is a two-way street. E-governments
may be more transparent and accountable than the old-fashioned kind – a risk Singapore
seems willing to run – but they will also know far more about their citizens than they do
now, and have much more efficient ways of putting to use what they know.
Computer security is also currently inadequate. Hackers have been able to
find their way into government computers. The systems for the electronic use