Technology & Digital Government Flashcards

Which type of attack involves flooding a city's public-facing website with traffic to make it inaccessible to residents?

Answer: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

A DDoS attack overwhelms a server with massive volumes of traffic from multiple sources, rendering the targeted website or service unavailable to legitimate users.

A municipality wants to use predictive analytics to allocate code enforcement resources more efficiently. What type of data would be MOST useful as input?

Answer: Historical violation records, property age, and complaint density by location

Historical violation data combined with property characteristics and complaint patterns enables predictive models to identify high-risk areas for proactive enforcement.

Under the Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA) and similar state public records laws, how should local governments treat electronic records?

Answer: Electronic records are subject to the same retention and disclosure rules as paper records

Public records laws treat electronic records equivalently to paper records, requiring the same retention schedules, disclosure rules, and preservation standards.

Which strategy helps municipalities reduce the risk of vendor lock-in when procuring technology systems?

Answer: Requiring open standards, interoperability, and data portability in contracts

Requiring open standards and data portability ensures the municipality can switch vendors or integrate other systems without being trapped by proprietary formats.

A city is piloting an artificial intelligence chatbot for resident services. Which governance step is MOST important before public launch?

Answer: Conducting a bias audit and establishing human escalation pathways

Before deploying AI in public-facing services, municipalities must audit for bias and ensure residents can escalate to a human agent when the AI fails or provides inaccurate information.

Which federal law governs how local governments must handle the personally identifiable information (PII) of children under 13 collected through municipal websites?

Answer: COPPA

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires verifiable parental consent before collecting PII from children under 13 on websites and online services.

A municipality's IT governance committee is establishing a data classification policy. Which data category would typically receive the HIGHEST level of protection?

Answer: Sensitive personally identifiable information (SPII) such as Social Security numbers

Sensitive PII such as Social Security numbers, financial account data, and medical records require the strongest access controls, encryption, and handling procedures.