Wreck Dot Gov: Article in Re:Public

Either no one was interested in organizational charts for the Forest Service, or everyone’s off for Memorial Day already. This story is significant for those hoping to find campsites this weekend.  It’s mysterious how solving these problems seems to elude Admins, Congress, and the usual outdoor industry suspects. It seems to me a Congressional investigation might be helpful, including looking into financial records.

We’ve covered some of Rec.gov before..this story is titled Wreck Dot Gov and it’s free access via the Re:Public site.

That gap is showing up on other public lands. Maybe you’ve driven into a campground to find reserved signs on all the posts, but then watched the sites sit empty. I know I have. The Recreation.gov system was supposed to make it easier to access public lands, and to alleviate administrative work from federal land managers, who already have enough on their plates. Instead, it feels like a breaking point between the digital and physical worlds.

Even beyond bot usage, academics have shown that digital access through Rec.gov is inequitable, and that demand for camping and other public land access is outpacing technology and policy. Rangers can’t do anything about those empty campsites, which they want to see used. People like me are pissed they can’t get outside when they want.

And they’re also pissed that the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton is profiting off of every single Recreation.gov transaction, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

As we work though our frustration about access, it’s worth considering why a consulting company Bloomberg once called “the world’s most profitable spy organization”—one that you might remember as Edward Snowden’s employer when he leaked global surveillance documents, and which recently lost 31 Department of Treasury contracts because a former employee leaked Trump’s tax documents—is holding the keys to our public lands.

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Throughout the system, rangers are bearing the brunt of people’s dissatisfaction. “People booked tickets through Rec.gov or with us in the visitor center, and the systems didn’t talk to each other,” says Walsh. “People would show up and claim they had tickets but couldn’t verify them. That led to stress and visitor conflict, and this was a park that didn’t have security or law enforcement.”

Rangers don’t have a lot of power to correct bad behavior. They can’t open unused campsites until after people don’t show up for their reservation, so the first night of a no-show can’t be used by anyone else. They can’t do anything about unused sites besides marking the user down in notes that are shared internally. One ranger told me he didn’t know if it made any difference—“We’re basically just blocking an email address,” he said. Some rangers told me they see the same group of people show up every year, while other people wait decades for a spot.

When BAH won the contract for Rec.gov, it was required to “provide a means to identify and suppress suspicious transactions including but not limited to web robot activity” and “recognize and prevent potentially duplicate profiles and provide a means to remove duplicate information.”

Both the company and the government acknowledge that there are issues on those fronts. “The site does experience attempted bot activity,” the Forest Service press office replied to me, “but multiple defenses are in place to detect and block large-scale attacks or efforts to capture multiple reservations.”

Healy says BAH has acknowledged the problems with bots enough that it has built availability alerts, which let users know when spots open up, to try to stay ahead of bots, and ahead of new businesses like Campnab or Outdoor Status, where you can set alerts for popular campsites or ticketed activities. In a statement, he emailed: “Booz Allen has implemented multiple defenses to detect, prevent, and mitigate bots that attempt to take advantage of the system; is constantly monitoring potential bot activity on the site; and is partnering with industry-leading vendors to leverage advanced solutions for identifying and mitigating that activity.”

But, he says, it’s tricky to create the right amount of friction to stop bad actors while still making the site accessible. “Believe me when I say the people involved want it to be fair,” he says.

These problems aren’t unique to public land, of course. They plague booking sites from Ticketmaster on down. It’s widespread enough that in 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS) to try to outlaw bots that scoop up tickets, but the law only addresses events with over 200 people. It doesn’t apply to things like campground reservations or hiking permits, where bots are scraping for a single opening at a time. On the bright side, there doesn’t yet appear to be much of a secondary market for scalped reservations.

There’s a difference, of course, between tickets to a Taylor Swift concert and time on public land. But if getting a good campsite becomes a race for who has the most computing power, then can we really say public land is for everyone?

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Do the federal land management agencies suffer from tech-o-phobia? What else is going on? It seems like an issue everyone agrees on except perhaps the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton.  Like I always say, good government performance should cross party lines.  D’s generally want the government to do more things, so a track record of competence is in their interests.  R’s like being careful with/saving bucks so they should also be interested. And here is an apparent low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked.