When I was an undergrad, I had a summer job updating the database of large donors to a university art museum. I pretty soon realized there was a problem: the database didn't allow for two people at the same address to have two different last names - ie, it would not allow me to automatically generate printed address labels for Elizabeth Goodman and Mike Kuniavsky. Apparently, the database designers simply had not conceived of a couple in which one partner did not take the last name of an other. As you can imagine, for an art museum with a substantial number of gay and lesbian donors, this was a major donor relations problem. For the first few weeks, I just typed up those "special" envelopes by hand. Painfully. On a twenty-year-old manual typewriter.
Then the stupidity of the situation hit me - it's not like there were going to be fewer couples (whether straight or same-sex) with different last names in the coming years. And typing up those envelopes was just as likely to create typos. Why not just redesign the database and the entry forms so that we could avoid any chance of insulting wealthy donors who should never receive incorrectly addressed letters?
It took a week.
Apparently, that's not how it works in Maryland.
Under the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), Maryland law enforcement infiltrated law-abiding protest groups and labeled 53 Americans, who had done nothing wrong, as "terrorists" in a state database shared with federal authorities. (It turns out, their law enforcement database didn't have categories for anti-war activists. Police created "terrorism" categories to make filing easier. How reassuring.)
Every now and again, I'm reminded of the continuing importance of studying how classification systems are made - with Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out the essential guide:
What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification--the scaffolding of information infrastructures.
In the case of my undergrad art museum, the problem easily solved by changing the default settings for address labels. I understand that changing categorization options for a massive government database is harder. I do. But it's the sheer malignant sloppiness that gets me about the Maryland case.
Either the troopers didn't believe that there would be no consequences for labelling members of an anti-war group "terrorists," or - what's worse - they didn't think there was a difference. There was no way the database problems could be corrected, because the information infrastructure of the War on Terror both promoted and was created by those types of classification decisions.
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