Citizen Empowerment on the Basis of the new Freedom of Information Act in Austria - Make Information Freedom Great Again

Abstract

Austria is the only country in Europe that has official secrecy, so called “Amtsgeheimnis”, as a constitutional principle. In contrast to other countries, this has consequences for citizens in their dealings with the authorities. Information is therefore not free per se, but is only released under certain conditions. These are severely restricted. This leads to a number of problems, for example, Austria is already among the worst 10 countries in terms of freedom of information. A new Freedom of Information Act is intended to change this. In this paper, the authors present a prototype that enables query processing between citizens and government agencies. Cloud services are used, and the data does not leave the respective data sovereignty.