GovernmentExecutive.com

The U.S. Census Bureau has not developed an effective computer-training program for the thousands of temporary workers it plans to hire to interview citizens who may not send in census forms for the upcoming 2010 census, according to a report released last week by the General Accountability Office.

Census officials plan to outfit an estimated 525,000 enumerators with handheld computers. Census hires enumerators as temporary employees to track down individuals who have not filled out census forms. The enumerators will use the handheld computers to input answers to census questions and then later download the data to Census databases. The handheld computers, provided by contractor Harris Corp., will replace the paper-and-pencil process enumerators have used for decades.

But the GAO warns that the Census Bureau's hiring procedures do not look for candidates who have computer skills. For example, crew leaders, those in charge of supervising enumerators, will be in charge of troubleshooting any problems with the handheld computers. But the Census does not plan to ask candidates for crew leader positions if they have computer experience and skills that would allow them to be effective in fixing any problems that may arise with the handheld computers. The GAO concludes:

The bureau is providing some computer-based training on using the handheld computers for the nonresponse follow-up and address canvassing operations and will include visual aids to enhance training on using the handheld computers. Nonetheless, the bureau’s standardized approach to delivering training, including reading training scripts word-for-word over the course of several days, has remained largely unchanged. The bureau has not evaluated alternate training delivery approaches, such as providing video segments, as has been recommended by us and the [Office of Inspector general].

Computer Sciences Corp. announced today that it is part of the Verizon Business team that won one of three contracts under the federal government's Networx Universal telecommunications program, according to an article posted by TMCnet. CSC says it will provide "customer-specific network design support and engineering services, managed tiered security services and anti-virus managed services, which provide detection and removal of system viruses," according to the article.

Google and four state governments have teamed up to make public documents more easily retrievable when citizens conduct online searches, according to an article by the Associated Press.

"Google plans to announce Monday that it has already partnered with four states - Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia - to remove technical barriers that had prevented its search engine, as well as those of Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., from accessing tens of thousands of public records dealing with education, real estate, health care and the environment," the newswire reports.

The way state government computer networks are programmed has made it difficult for users to find public documents stored in state databases, but Google, working with state technology officers, have built "virtual road maps" to the databases where the documents are stored, the AP reports.

But privacy experts are worried that better access to public documents runs the risk of exposing private information, such as Social Security numbers. Many public documents in state databases contain Americans' Social Security numbers and other personal information.

Agencies thinking about using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology should first conduct security and privacy risk assessments, such as considering what the transmitted information will be used for and the risk to the business if the RFID system fails, according to recommendations released yesterday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The purpose of the report is to give agencies and other organizations a checklist of security and privacy risks to consider before developing an RFID system, how to evaluate the risks and recommendations on how to mitigate them, said Tom Karygiannis, the report's author.

Some of the recommendations include updating who has access to sensitive data to include information collected by the RFID system, minimizing the amount of personal data stored on the RFID tags and updating personnel rules on what's appropriate and not appropriate when working with RFID technology and data. NIST also suggests technological controls if feasible, such as encrypting data in transmission and in storage, and a kill feature for the tags, which disables the tag after it leaves the range of the RFID reader.

Some governments remain skeptical about RFID technology, such as California, which is considering several bills to regulate the technology, including placing a temporary moratorium on the use of RFID. Such skepticism, say experts in the field, is subverting federal and state governments from adopting technologies that could improve government performance.

Hat tip: InformationWeek

German intelligence agencies have stopped for now accessing via the Internet suspected terrorists' computers after the practice was publicly disclosed last week.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German interior intelligence agency, had been accessing via the Internet the private information and communications on suspects' personal computers since June 2005, Deutsch Welle reported today. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble came under heavy criticism from privacy experts and from some in his own political party, the Social Democratic Party, that the practice violated "Article 13 of the German basic law, which governs privacy," according to the article.

"Schäuble has called for a change in the law, saying the monitoring is an important intelligence tool and that the practice should continue," according to the article. The German government is considering rewriting the law to allow the surveillance.

Since 9/11, intelligence agencies in the United States have sought an expansion of powers governing how agents collect data and monitor computer habits and electronic communications. The Associated Press reported this month that newly appointed National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has circulated a draft bill that would amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier to monitor email accounts and phone calls.

Federal law prohibits the sale of guns to anyone judged mentally ill, but most states are unable to share mental health records with an FBI computer network that would block the sale of guns to the mentally ill because of privacy laws or state computer systems that are incompatible.

That may change if a long dormant bill in Congress -- revived after the shootings at Virginia Tech -- is passed. The bill would provide $1 billion to states to pay for computer network upgrades and to remove privacy law obstacles, according to an Associated Press article. According to the article:

Privacy laws and lack of technical ability now prevent 28 states from sharing such information with the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System based in Clarksburg, W.Va., according to a Justice Department report.

“Every one of these records that is not transferred is the record of someone who federal law has said is too dangerous to buy a gun,” said Dennis Henigan, legal director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Such a system should have prevented Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech, from buying guns. In 2005, Cho was declared mentally ill by a special judge's order, according to a New York Times article.

The Defense Department is always on the look out for cutting-edge technologies, which can make perusing defense agencies' daily requests for proposals and information an exercise in suspending disbelief.

The latest such request comes from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which recently issued a so-called Broad Agency Announcement requesting information on advanced technologies that could be used to detect and neutralize Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

According to an article posted by Global Security Newswire (a sister publication of Tech Insider and Government Executive Magazine), the agency listed several WMD countermeasures it wants to investigate over the next year. For example,

One item on the list is biomimetic material, which could be used for so-called “living” clothes.

Merging research in the life sciences, chemistry, physics and advanced materials, DTRA officials hope to end up with fabrics that could mimic living processes, including an immune response.

The material would continually check the environment, “possibly give some sort of warning indication” and then release a counteragent, according to the document.

The agency also wants to find out if industry can develop a so-called “brain-machine interface,” which would "detect and neutralize a toxic threat and immediately alert soldiers and commanders to their presence," according to Global Security Newswire. No other details were given.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and information you can easily apply at your desktop.

This week: customizing Google.

As a follow up to an earlier post about simple tricks to make your Google searches more effective, we offer some basic steps to customize the search engine results and display.

Google automatically applies a search-return feature that they call “SafeSearch Filtering," which excludes sites containing explicit material. Google's default setting for SafeSearch is "moderate filtering." But maybe you want to decide what is safe. If you like that idea, here’s how to turn Google's SafeSearch Filter off.

On the Google homepage, click the tiny preferences link on the right hand side of the search box. SafeSearch Filtering is the third preference category down. Set it to your favored level of filtering. Note: For this to work, your computer must accept a Google cookie.

While you’re setting your filtering standards, you’ll see other preferences you can set in Google, too -- such as language. Maybe you only want Web pages written in Arabic. Go to Search Language and check off your favored languages.

Also, tired of clicking on the Google "O's" at the bottom of a search results to retrieve the next page of results? You can change the number of returns displayed by clicking on Number of Results and choosing 10 to 20, 30, 50 or 100.

In another sign of the growing business of information technology outsourcing, Computer Sciences Corp. announced that it has agreed to purchase systems integrator and consulting firm Covansys Corp. for $1.3 billion.

Of Convansys' 9,000 employees, 6,400 are based in India, which leads the world in providing outsourcing IT services. The purchase doubles CSC's workforce in India.

Most of Convansys' business is in the financial services industry, but it also has offerings in telecommunications, health care, and it performs application development and software testing.

Hat tip: webwereld

Not all government e-mails, electronic documents and notes stored on a computer should be considered a public record, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

According to an article published by the Arizona Daily Star:

[Arizona Chief Justice Ruth McGregor wrote in her opinion,] "Every note made on government-owned paper, located in a government office, written with a government-owned pen, or composed on a government-owned computer would presumably be a public record."

She said that logic would make a public record of a grocery list written by a government employee and a report card stored in the desk of a government worker.

"The public-records law was never intended to encompass such documents," McGregor said. "The purpose of the law is to open government activity to public scrutiny, not to disclose information about private citizens."

McGregor said a judge can withhold public records if the exposure would violate rights to privacy, confidentiality or "the best interests of the state."

The ruling was based on the trial of Arizona Pinal County Manager Stanley Griffis, who recently pleaded guilty to six felonies including theft, fraud and tax fraud. He is awaiting sentencing. Griffis was indicted for using money from the Sheriff's Department to purchase weapons for personal use. A court ordered Griffis to turn over all e-mails covering a two-month period.

Automating business processes is supposed to create efficiencies. But for the Wisconsin's Department of Motor Vehicles, a new computer system has resulted in the opposite outcome.

A new system installed in 2004 to reduce the time it takes to receive a license plate and vehicle title has more than doubled the wait time -- from three weeks to seven weeks, according to an article in the River Falls Journal. In addition, the cost of the system ($19 million) also more than doubled what was originally budgeted.

DMV officials now say "adjustments" to the system should drop the wait for license plates and titles to 30 days.

With losses of financial data and personal information on the rise, more universities now offer courses to students on how to combat hackers. An estimated 22 universities in the United States offer such programs, including the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, according to an article on Charlotte's News 14 Web site.

UNCC students learn how to lure hackers into a so-called "Honeypot," a data or network site constructed to look like it stores information that may be useful to hackers looking to steal identities or proprietary information. Students then observe how the hackers navigate the site looking for information, how they break into files, and how to track them. Some of the graduates from the program have gone on to work for the FBI.

UNCC's program is offered by the school's Criminal Justice Department and its Software Information Systems Department. "We're very unique in combining the technical know how and also the criminology aspect," said Bill Chu, chairman of the Software and Information Systems Department.

The General Services Administration has awarded Electronic Data Systems a contract to help roll out the information technology infrastructure needed to provide identity credentials to agencies participating in GSA's governmentwide Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 program.

GSA's HSPD-12 Shared Services Provider II contract, worth an estimated $66 million, will establish the information technology to provide end-to-end compliant ID credentials. It will cover 42 agencies, boards and commissions.

The contract award, a Schedule 70 task order with a 17-month base period plus three option years, provides for up to 1.5 million identity accounts and credentials. The new secure credentials will be issued to federal employees and contractors with access to IT systems.

Michel Kareis, director of GSA's HSPD 12 program, said earlier this year that the contractor selected as GSA's provider would be expected within 90 days of the award to start producing cards that include a digital image of the holder's index finger and a digital certificate.

GSA decided last fall against exercising the remaining option years in a contract with BearingPoint for end-to-end ID card services.

A leading cybersecurity association says a report released yesterday by the President's Identity Theft Task Force falls short of adequately protecting Americans' privacy because the report's recommendations for the public sector are less stringent than those recommendations for the private sector.

According to a statement by the Cyber Security Industry Alliance:

[The report] offers several key data security measures for both the public and private sectors. Related to the public sector, the report calls for decreasing the unnecessary use of Social Security Numbers, educating federal agencies on how to protect data, monitor their compliance with existing guidance and ensure effective, risk-based responses to data breaches. For the private sector, the report states that national standards should be established for private sector data protection and breach notifications, better education on the safeguarding of data should be offered among private sector entities and to the general public, investigations should be initiated for data security violations and an online clearinghouse for current educational resources should be developed.

[Liz Gasster, general counsel for CSIA, said], "While the recommendations to limit the unnecessary use of Social Security Numbers, establish a National Identity Theft Law Enforcement Center and execute additional public awareness campaigns are important and necessary measures, one critical element is clearly missing the report stops short of requiring a national standard for the public sector that would mirror the mandatory data protection requirements and breach notification requirements suggested for the private sector. Merely re-issuing data security guidance to agencies is inadequate. Government agencies should be accountable to citizens for safeguarding their data, and compliance should not be optional."

Hat Tip: ComputerWorld

A White House board tasked to oversee possible infringements on privacy and civil liberties from government information systems and programs designed to fight terrorism has ruled that many programs have not compromised Americans' privacy, according to a report the board released yesterday and a brief posted by Wired.com.

In its first annual report to Congress, the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board ruled that controversial programs such as government watchlists and the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of Americans' phone calls did not impose on privacy or civil liberties, Wired reports.

Next year, the board, the members of which were chosen by the White House, plans to investigate the Automated Targeting System (also here), which will give international travelers a threat level rating and data mining efforts by the federal government.

Some education experts question spending on interactive white boards and other advanced technologies that connect classrooms throughout New South Wales in Australia, according an article on the online news site The Age.

The interactive white boards are "the latest high-tech device charged with transforming the state's classrooms, along with broadband links, a student portal, notebooks and digital cameras," the site reports. "But there are doubts in some corners whether the ... resources are being wasted on political techno-daydreams rather then basic school needs, such as toilet upgrades and roofing repairs. It is claimed the whiteboards and their video link allow greater subject choice to students, let gifted pupils take higher classes in other cities, facilitate expert lectures and afford online 'field trips' for children in remote localities."

The theory that computers in the classroom raise academic scores in American schools has been debated for more than a decade. Just today, the Kansas City Star published an article debating the academic value of technology in the classroom.

Charles Havekost, chief information officer at the Health and Human Services Department, told his staff Monday that he will be leaving his position in mid-June to take a position with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria.

Havekost has been a career civil servant at HHS for 29 years. He became the agency's CIO and deputy assistant secretary in April 2004. He led the Grants.gov e-government initiative from 2002 through 2004. At the IAEA, Havekost will serve as the director of the organization's information technology division in its Office of Management. He and his family will relocate to Austria in mid-June.

As instant messaging gains more converts, it still has one big drawback: Users of, say, Google chat cannot instant message users of, say, Yahoo! And then there’s the whole downloading software portion of it -- a pain especially for computer users denied downloading privileges. Meebo to the rescue! It’s a Web site that lets you logon and maintain open sessions in multiple chat from one location, without having to download anything. (Hat tip: ha.ckers.org.)

Looks like those of us here on the Web team at GovExec aren't the only ones giving themselves a makeover. The federal government's Web portal, USA.gov, has a new look. They've reduced clutter, added some images, and merged their "Federal Employees" and "Government to Government" sections into a single section called "Government Employees," among other things. You can read all about it here and tell them what you think of the new look here.

The Justice Department is joining whistleblower suits against Hewlett-Packard, Accenture, and Sun Microsystems, alleging the companies favored technology companies in exchange for kickbacks.

The three companies “submitted false claims to the United States for information technology hardware and services on numerous government contracts from the late 1990s to the present,” according to a Justice release. The suit was unsealed Thursday.

The suit contends that the three companies received payments, often in the form of rebates from more than three dozen IT vendors (including Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, and Oracle), which agreed to push their products. Justice claims that any discounts or rebates the companies offered should have been passed on to the government, InfoWorld reports.

“For example, Accenture received more than $735,000 in payments from IBM for ‘favorable treatment and influence’ on six government contracts between 2001 and 2006, the DOJ filing alleges,” InfoWorld notes.

Former Qwest chieftain Joseph Nacchio is guilty of 19 counts of insider trading.

Nacchio was on trial in Denver federal court for 42 counts of insider trading. The jury found him not guilty on 23 counts. The former chief executive officer sold $100.8 million worth of Qwest stock in 2001 just before the company's shares dropped.

Each guilty count carries a maximum 10-year sentence and a $1 million fine. Nacchio will be sentenced on July 27. The court also could claim Nacchio’s assets in forfeiture, the amount to be determined by a federal judge at a different date. Nacchio was released on bond.

Nacchio’s defense rested in significant part on an argument that Qwest CEO had access to classified information about big national-security-related federal contracts that he thought Qwest would win.

But, according to a Justice Department release, Nacchio’s indictment specifically states that “Nacchio knew that Qwest’s 2001 financial targets were overly aggressive, that Qwest did not have a good track record in growing recurring revenue, that the company’s business units were underperforming, and that there would be insufficient non-recurring revenue sources to close the gap between Qwest’s publicly stated financial targets and its actual performance. It further states that Nacchio was specifically warned about this information.”

Managers are more likely than underlings to take vacation time, according to a new survey of U.S. workers.

New York-based employment agency Hudson found that 53 percent of managers “have plans to take both a full vacation and a long weekend compared to 44 percent of non-managers.”

All workers generally fail to make full use of vacation time, with a clear majority – 56 percent – reporting that they will not make full use of their annual vacation days.

About half – 49 percent – said they get 11 or more vacation days per year. The survey has a margin of error of 2.4 percent.

The survey also shows that even though managers tend to take more vacation than the proletariat, they also have a harder time relaxing. Thirty five percent of managers, compared with 14 percent of non-managers, say they check in frequently with the office while on vacation. “Finally, 27 percent of managers return to the office more stressed than they were when they left. That is true for only 16 percent of non-managers,” according to Hudson. (A Time Magazine editorial makes the same point.)

Hat tip: Information Week

Officials from the departments of Commerce, State and Homeland Security testified Thursday before a congressional panel about the rising threat of computer hackers penetrating federal agency information technology systems.

Key U.S. defense and nuclear contractors and other critical infrastructure are under continuous and increasingly sophisticated attacks from other nations, experts say. Terabytes of highly sensitive information have been stolen and some systems are under the control of the hackers.

Rep. James Langevin, D-R.I., chairman of the House Homeland Security Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity and Science and Technology subcommittee, said he believes that infiltration by foreign nationals of agency networks is one of the most critical issues facing the United States.

According to information presented by Langevin and the hearing's witnesses, hackers using Chinese Internet servers launched an attack on the computer systems at the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security in October 2006. The hackers used a "rootkit" program that allows the attackers to mask their presence to gain access to the system.

Another incident examined by the panel was a June 2006 attack on networks at several State Department locations, including the Washington, D.C., headquarters and the Bureau of East Asian Affairs and Pacific Affairs. The attack was initiated when an employee of the department opened a Microsoft Word email attachment that contained an exploit code, which is a piece of software or data often used to gain control of a computer.

According to officials at State, a temporary fix was put in place but Langevin criticized the department for leaving the system online. "I believe they made the determination that accessibility to data is more important than confidentiality and integrity," Langevin said. "If State really valued the latter, they would have taken the system off line and done a full wash."

Langevin criticized the department for failing to meet the requirements of the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act, which requires agencies to track down and identify all devices connected to the agency's network. The recently released 2006 FISMA report shows that State did not inventory at least 50 percent of its systems.

"I think these incidents have opened a lot of eyes in the halls of Congress," Langevin said. "We don't know the scope of our networks. We don’t know who's inside our networks. We don’t know what information has been stolen. We need to get serious about this threat to our national security."

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and computing information you can easily apply at your desktop.

This week: cookies.

By now most of us know that Web sites deposit little chunks of themselves onto your hard drive. So-called cookies aren’t executable programs (one less thing to worry about), but they track your surfing habits.

Cookies can be good, such as allowing an email provider like Yahoo! to deposit a cookie on your drive so that you won’t have to continually re-log back in. Cookies can go bad, such as when third-party Web advertisers place a cookie on your machine to monitor your Web surfing habits.

People have different tolerances for cookies. Set your own tolerance level in Internet Explorer by going to Tools, choosing Internet Options from the drop down menu, and clicking the Privacy tab.

Then, hit the Advanced button. Check the white box that says Override automatic cookie handling. If you always want to personally approve each cookie, choose the prompt setting for both the First party Cookie and Third party Cookie settings. Don't forget to hit OK.

Chinese police officers are trying out cap-mounted video cameras, reports the online news service Ananova.

The flashlight-shaped cameras, which weigh less than two ounces, have 1 gigabyte of storage, enough to record about 1 hour of video, according to the article, which cites Xinhua, the official China state news agency. About 100 policemen in the city of Chongquing have been outfitted with the cameras.

The police chief for Chongquing said the cameras could gather evidence to refute lawsuits against the police and could be edited for television, according to Ananova.

Hat tip: Pasta and Vinegar

Austin Yerks, president of Computer Sciences Corporation's Defense Integrated Solutions and Services division, has been named the president of CSC's new Defense Division. In his new role, "Yerks will provide executive leadership and strategic direction for the company's Department of Defense business," according to a CSC press release. "The division, which comprises more than 8,000 employees, supports all of CSC's DOD clients, including the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and defense agencies."

Yerks will report to James W. Sheaffer, president of CSC's North American Public Sector business unit.

CSC also named David Browder vice president of business development for its North American Public Sector (formerly called the Federal Sector) business unit's Defense Division. Browder will be responsible for managing teams pursuing government contracts that support DOD. Browder "most recently served as the acting vice president for Federal Sector's Strategic Business Management organization, responsible for managing new business opportunities and proposal development operations." accord to a CSC press release.

A minister in the Australian government has suggested using Web 2.0 applications to help set federal policies, according to an article in the Brisbane Times.

Special Minister of State Gary Nairn envisions the Australian government setting up blogs in which citizens and community groups could comment on proposed public policies. The newspaper quotes Nairn:

Instead of going through the long and iterative process of drafting papers, issuing them to community groups and waiting for feedback, we could be doing this online through blog sites. ... There are a lot of risks but it would be silly not to do it. This is the way the younger generation interacts. A problem the political process has had for a long time is how to get people engaged. Web 2.0 could help rectify the situation, which is exciting, because further engagement builds education.

Nairn gave no timetable in which to establish the blogs and admits the government does not yet have the technology to offer the service.

Wisconsin's government computer projects are failing because of poor planning, cost overruns, delays and a lack of oversight, a report released by a state representative shows.

Sue Jeskewitz, R, Menomonee Falls, who oversaw the Legislative Audit Bureau report, "says we need project managers, for accountability, and the state should think about looking into new contractors. Jeskewitz says the Department of Administration, which was too busy with its own problems to address other problems, has lost credibility," according to an article on Wisconsin Radio Network's web site.

Jeskewitz plans to hold a hearing May 2 of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to review the report's results.

CDW Corp., the parent company of government vendor CDWG, is having a big week on Wall Street. Thanks to an announcement by company officials that they expect to release a report of higher-than-expected first-quarter revenue, the stock jumped late last week about $5 a share to around $67 a share. CDW plans to announce its first quarter results April 24, according to bloggingstocks.com. No details on whether its government business has been better than average. However, CDW comes in fairly low (No. 34) on Government Executive's Top 50 Technology Contractors list.

The Internal Revenue Service encourages as many taxpayers to file electronically as possible. They may have got their wish, but now they have another problem.

So many taxpayers submitted their returns electronically on April 16, the deadline for having your taxes filed, that the servers at Intuit Inc., which processes the electronic tax returns for the IRS, became overloaded and slowed the filing of e-returns by hours, according to an Associated Press article. The delays may have caused many taxpayers to have missed the filing deadline.

Under normal working conditions, it takes a few minutes for an electronic tax return to complete its submission using TurboTax, according to the AP. But by late Monday, it was taking hours.

No word yet if IRS officials will grant amnesty from late penalty charges for those filers who missed the deadline because of the overloaded servers. But the lesson here, says Harry Pforzheimer, an Intuit spokesman, “Don’t wait until the last minute is the moral of the story."

But some IT experts may rebut, quoting the Boy Scout motto: Be prepared.

Another example of why cybersecurity is a matter of trust and behavior, not technology: a USB device that simulates the movement of a mouse.

Some PCs and Web sites will automatically log out users after a period of apparent inactivity, such as a few minutes of no detectable movement of the mouse. The feature prevents a user from absent-mindedly walking away from a computer connected to sensitive information, leaving it wide open for passers-by to read. By automatically logging out an inactive user, the system makes a trust decision for you, particularly that it distrusts you’ll remember to log off.

Insert this USB device into your PC, however, and you’ll override the distrust mechanism, and you’ll take back the decision on whether to trust yourself to secure your PC.

Admittedly, this probably is not an option for federal workers, some of whom must deal with a federal IT shop allegedly filling USB ports with epoxy glue to prevent any USB device.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

The United States isn't the only country concerned about the accuracy and security of electronic voting machines. The Dutch government plans to redo its certification process for e-voting machines after an independent oversight committee criticized the govnerment for failures, the International Herald Tribune Europe reports.

Federal systems integrator CGI Group Inc. could be facing charges of conflict of interest in a $400 million (Canadian) contract it won from Public Works and Government Services of Canada, according to an article in the Ottawa Sun newspaper.

CGI has dozens of contracts with state and local governments in the United States, as well as U.S. federal agencies, including the General Services Administration, which hired CGI to build and maintain its Pegasys system, which integrates more than 4,000 users nationwide and processes more than 40 million transactions annually, according to CGI's 2006 annual report.

TPG Technology Consulting, based in Ottawa, has asked the Public Sector Integrity Office in Canada to investigate the computer support contract because Canadian Public Works Minister Michael Fortier had worked for CGI as the primary investment banker to sell a $330 million CGI stock offering in 2004. At the time, Fortier headed up the Montreal office of Credit Suisse.

Fortier denies any conflict of interest and argues he and his staff do not award Public Works contracts.

Nevertheless, "TPG president Don Powell says his firm ... was the low bidder for the support work," according to the article. "He maintains that public servants involved in the process told him that the technical evaluations were “very close.” TGP vows to take the case to court to stop work on the contract.

New York state Attorney General Andy Cuomo has criticized Verizon, which provides local telephone service on the East Coast, for “chronically poor” telephone repair service, reports Reuters.

Verizon, which became a significant federal contractor when it bought MCI in 2005, is seeking permission from New York regulators to expand “its fiber-optic network to offer high-speed Internet and video services, along with phone services, to compete with cable,” Reuters reports.

But Cuomo wants the company to improve its telephone repair service before expanding. He wants the state’s Public Service Commission to hold Verizon to a promise to repair 80 percent of phone lines within 24 hours of receiving a customer repair request, “but 20 out of Verizon's 35 repair service bureaus across the state chronically failed to meet the PSC's standards, Cuomo said," according to Reuters.

A Verizon spokesman told Reuters the company is improving service levels and that “upgrading to a fiber-optic network would also improve the quality of phone services.”

Blackberry wireless e-mail devices suffered interruptions of service Tuesday evening that appeared to be ending Wednesday morning, according to multiple news sources.

The Blackberry outage appears to have only affected North American users.

An early morning call to the Blackberry U.S. technical support line was answered with a recorded message apologizing for the inconvenience, InfoWorld reports.

An online article from New York broadcaster WNBC says Blackberry company Research In Motion tried to reset their network system, but is concerned that the rush of backlogged data could cause a larger problem. As a result, “RIM officials said messages would be sent out in stages so the system does not crash,” WNBC reports.

InfoWorld quotes market analyst Emma Mohr-McClune of Current Analysis hypothesizing that the network outage originated in one of Research In Motion’s two Canadian Network Operations Centers. All Blackberry traffic is routed through the two Canadian NOCs, Mohr-McClune said.

General Services Administrator Lurita Doan is scheduled to testify Wednesday at a hearing held by the House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee. The subject: GSA's fiscal 2008 budget request.

The hearing was scheduled to be held in one of the smaller rooms in the House Rayburn Office Building, but interest in the hearing prompted the subcommittee to move it to a larger room. The committee's spokeswoman said that they expect this hearing to be one of the "more interesting hearings this week." The subcommittee plans to webcast the proceedings.

The U.S. federal attorney's office and CA Inc. officials aren't saying whether they’ll pursue legal action against CA founder Charles Wang for alleged accounting fraud, InfoWorld reports.

A CA board report released last week accuses Wang, who stepped down as the company’s chief executive officer in 2002, of accounting fraud that led to a steep decline in the company’s stock. Wang’s successor, Sanjay Kumar starts this month a 12-year sentence in federal prison and has agreed to pay restitution to stockholders.

The board report recommended suing Wang for damages, but CA didn't comment on its plans, in the InfoWorld article. Likewise, the “U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York also had no comment on whether it was pursuing charges against Wang,” the article states.

Norman Berle, a criminal defense lawyer who teaches white-collar crime at Fordham University's business school, says a civil action against Wang is likely, but that a criminal action by the federal attorney is less likely.

Everyone knows the legend of the superhacker, the supersmart electronic code breaker tearing through security barriers.

But University of Colorado Law School professor Paul Ohm writes that the incidence and danger of superhackers, or whom he calls "superusers," tend to be exaggerated. Ohm cites a study by two University of Washington professors who found “that sixty percent of reported incidents of the loss of personal records involved organizational mismanagement, while only thirty-one percent involved hackers.”

Unfortunately, Congress has fallen for the superhacker myth, passing laws that Ohm says infringe on civil liberties.

The myth is unlikely to disappear, Ohm says. “Law enforcement officials spin yarns about legions of expert hackers to gain new criminal laws, surveillance powers, and resources. The media enjoy high ratings and ad revenue reporting on online risks. Security vendors will sell more units in a world of unbridled power.”

On a not entirely unrelated note, a sequel to the 1983 hacker flick Wargames is reportedly in production.

Hat tip: Slashdot

In the April 9 issue of New York Magazine, author Steve Fishman writes an in-depth article laying out why so many workers dislike their bosses. Fishman quotes Robert Sutton, a Stanford professor who studies the topic, who says bosses tend to give off "subtle nasty moves like glaring and condescending comments, explicit moves like insults or put-downs, and even physical intimidation." Sutton, who has written extensively on the subject of bosses in academic journals, just released a book on creating a civil workplace titled The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.

Fishman writes that organizations continue to promote people with poor leadership skills not only because bosses tend to promote individuals who are like themselves, but also because employees tend to view rude and inflexible individuals as candidates for supervisory roles. “Employees tend to see the jerk, the narcissist, and yes, even the asshole, as boss material,” the article states.

Hat tip: Slashdot

The Internal Revenue Service will get rid of as many as 2,000 jobs because of its push into electronic tax filing, reports the Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass. The majority of those who will lose their jobs will be seasonal employees, those who process paper returns at the Andover tax return center during the busiest time of the year, from January to June, according to the article. The paper continues:

For years, the IRS collected paper returns in 10 facilities across the country, [IRS spokeswoman Peggy] Riley said. Now, just seven locations are used, including the one in Andover. The IRS has decided to consolidate paper return collections even further, to just three cities: Fresno, Calif.; Austin, Texas; and Kansas City, Mo.

Riley said that nationally, paper filings have dropped from nearly 80 million in 2003 to about 60 million last year. Meanwhile, electronic returns have jumped from 52 million in 2003 to more than 72 million last year. That upward trend for so-called e-filers is expected to continue this year.

Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who oversees the issuance of agencies' security grades, wrote yesterday in The Hill newspaper's Congress Blog why the government's overall security grade increased from a D plus to a C minus. The reason: More agencies like the Department of Homeland Security know what electronic equipment they have, which goes a long way in knowing what you have to protect. Still, Davis says the Defense Department's grade of F "should worry us all."

He doesn't elaborate.

The futures Web site Poolitics.com offers a betting pool on whether General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan will stay or leave. The site allows visitors to bet $1.20 on whether Doan will remain in or leave her position by June 1. The closing date on wagering is tomorrow.

Poolitics describes itself "as the world's first and only parimutuel predictive polling outlet. ... New Pools are posted to the Marketplace daily — each one posing a question about the future outcome of an event or issue in the news, and offering entries for sale covering all of the possibilities."

Education Department officials are considering temporarily shutting down access to a student loan database due to some users accessing students' private data without permission, The Washington Post reports.

Some student loan companies have allowed marketing firms, collection agencies and loan brokerages to mine the database to collect information from the 60 million records in the system, the Post reports. The database, part of the National Student Loan Data System, stores sensitive financial information on students such as family income, Social Security numbers, addresses and other information.

A culture of corruption pervaded the security software company and government contractor CA Inc. almost from its inception, according to a report issued by the company's corporate board Thursday.

According to the report, founder and former CEO Charles Wang oversaw “accounting fraud lasting more than a decade at the software company,” once known as Computer Associates, reports The New York Times.

CA, which makes network management software, was 46th on Government Executive’s list of top 2005 federal technology contractors. It captured $117,763,017 worth of federal contracts in fiscal 2004, or 0.25 percent of the federal technology market. CA did not rank in the top 50 during fiscal 2005.

Wang’s successor, Sanjay Kumar was sentenced to12 years in a federal prison and agreed last week to pay $800 million in restitution to stockholders who lost money when it was revealed the company overstated earnings.

Wang has not been indicted, but the CA board charges he “masterminded accounting gimmicks that led his company to report inflated sales and profits,” the Times reports. CA “is still struggling to rebuild the trust of employees and shareholders, the report says. ...'Fraud pervaded the entire CA organization at every level, and was embedded in CA’s culture, as instilled by Mr. Wang, almost from the company’s inception,' according to the CA board."

In a statement, Wang called the report "fallacious" and blamed Kumar for the company's woes.

A former Social Security Administration employee was indicted Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for stealing identities from an SSA database, InformationWeek reports.

Jennifer Batiste, 45, allegedly received $20 for each query she made to an SSA computer network to collect social security numbers and other information needed to steal identities to apply for bogus credit cards, according to a government report. She allegedly handed the information over to Craig Harris, 50, and other co-conspirators, who used the data to make about $2.5 million worth of unauthorized charges to credit card accounts, the indictment alleges. Harris "pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy and unlawful possession of a means of identification. Harris, who faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, is scheduled to be sentenced on July 17," according to the article. Batiste faces a maximum of 15 years in federal prison.

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan plans to meet Monday with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel as part of the investigation into whether she violated the law that limits political activity in federal agencies, government sources confirmed.

The meeting with the independent federal investigative agency was expected to be arranged after allegations were leveled at Doan for violating the Hatch Act, a law limiting on-the-job political activity in government offices. Legal experts are divided on whether Doan broke the law.

OSC is investigating a Jan. 26 meeting at GSA's headquarters, which Doan attended with about 40 other political appointees. At the meeting, Scott Jennings, a deputy to Karl Rove, the leading political strategist at the White House, gave a PowerPoint presentation that listed Republican and Democratic House districts that the White House views as most vulnerable for the 2008 election. The presentation also included a map showing the Senate seats that are up for election in 2008 and whether the White House believes Republicans will have to play "defense" or "offense" on each seat.

Biometrics is becoming more popular in government as a security tool. Using digital fingerprints is a favored biometric because of its supposed infallibility – a belief that this video from the Discovery Channel show "MythBusters" proves to be misplaced.

In it, two innovative hackers manage to foil a door lock that doesn't use a key but rather an individual's fingerprint to identify those who are allowed access. The average person would have trouble replicating the hackers' methods, but they also use a low-tech method to gain access. They manage to lift the fingerprints of someone who has access to the fingerprint door lock by handing him a plastic CD case, and then retrieving the case and lifting the fingerprint. (For those of you who think the show gives hackers a "how to" manual on lifting fingerprints to break into laptop computers and door locks, the MythBusters producers inform viewers that they left out "one crucial step.")

Hat tip: ha.ckers.org

A review of the General Services Administration's daily briefing shows that several opinion pieces and news articles on the conduct of the agency's chief Lurita Doan were excluded. GSA's daily briefing is sent to all GSA employees and acts as an official archive of news coverage of the agency.

For example, a review of the daily brief by Government Executive shows that the March 26 news article by The Washington Post revealing that a deputy of Karl Rove was involved in the videoconference at GSA, which is under scrutiny for violating the Hatch Act, was excluded. Also excluded was an April 11 news article in the Federal Times that revealed that Doan pushed a contract award to Sun Microsystems despite learning that the agency's inspector general had considered notifying the Justice Department about allegations of fraud.

Most recently, a news article in Friday's Washington Post on the missing Karl Rove e-mails was excluded. The article references the "alleged politicization at the General Services Administration."

Edward Blakely, the agency’s associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Communications and in charge of the briefing, said he is exercising "responsible filtering" in an attempt to improve the "diversity and variety" of the daily briefing. "If there is nothing new in the negative stories that are being published I don’t put them in there," Blakely said. "I make sure that every clip that is relevant gets out there. ... If there's not a new news hook on this, we shouldn't put it out there."

Blakely included in the daily briefing a hard-hitting April 3 editorial that appeared in The Washington Post titled, "Playing Politics at the GSA," citing Doan's "willful disregard of the Hatch Act."

Still, the two GSA employees that compile the briefing are under orders to forward all negative stories to Blakely and he makes the final decision on whether they are included, according to sources. Blakely said his approach to the briefing is an "ad hoc" policy he implemented, and neither Doan nor her staff asked for stories to be removed. When asked to give examples of neutral or positive stories that were excluded because they contained repetitive information, Blakely could not offer examples.

GSA included in the briefing more than a dozen stories on the recent announcement of the multi-billion-dollar Networx contract.

Mark Corallo, the founder of a crisis communications media services firm and former chief spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, told Government Executive that he had not heard of an agency censoring its daily briefing. He said that while he was at Justice, his staff included all news articles or editorials.

"There was no censoring," said Corallo, who had represented Doan until last month. "Basically anything that came up [was included]. We saw lots of bad news."

Officials in the public affairs offices of eight agencies, including the Homeland Security Department and the Office of Personnel Management, said that excluding news articles and editorials from the daily briefing could put agency employees at a disadvantage because employees need to know what the public is reading.

The following is a list of articles that mention GSA but were excluded from the daily brief:

March 28 Cox News Service news article, "Democrats blast GSA chief for politics at agency."

March 28 Federal Times news article, "GSA chief grilled about alleged improper partisan presentation."

April 1 New York Times editorial, "The Rovian Era."

An April 2 Federal Times editorial, "Unfit for the job." (Unavailable online. GSA excluded the editorial calling for Doan's resignation, but it did include Doan's response in the following week's edition.)

April 4 column by Marianne Means, "Bushies remember they can't recall."

April 5 Washington Post column by Ruth Marcus, "Fox-in-the-Henhouse Government."

April 5 Cox Newspapers columnist Tom Teepen, "Tom Teepen: Contempt for government."

April 6, Philadelphia Enquirer editorial, "Karl Rove and the GSA."

April 11 Los Angeles Times editorial, "Send RNC emails to Congress."

April 12 Salon.com's Sidney Blumenthal, "Upending the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Maine's Department of Health and Human Services will pay another $7 million on a failed Medicaid claims processing system before it can kill the project, according to an article in Maine's Times Record.

The total cost of the claims processing system could surpass $70 million, close to five times the amount Maine agreed to pay in 2001, when it awarded a $15 million contract to CNSI to develop the system. When the system was switched on in January 2005, it immediately began to have processing problems. IT program management experts blamed the state for not following best practices for project management, as reported by CIO Magazine.

Maine decided earlier this year to scrap the system in favor of privatizing the claims processing system.

In a recently released white paper, Information and Privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada, Ann Cavoukian, and biometrics scientist Alex Stoianov, argue that a new biometric technology removes the privacy risks and concerns leveled at traditional biometric technology. Biometrics, which uses personal characteristics such as digital fingerprints and iris scans to identify individuals, has been criticized for its vulnerability to abuse by governments and to identity theft. Some U.S. agencies rely on digital fingerprints for identification, such as the U.S. VISIT program, which fingerprints visiting foreigners entering the United States. Those fingerprints are stored in a database.

In their white paper, Cavoukian and Stoianov acknowledge that "done poorly, biometric technologies can be highly privacy-invasive. Biometric data, once collected, can be stored, shared and used for numerous secondary purposes, inviting potential discrimination and identity theft."

But an emerging technology called Biometric Encryption dispenses with the need to store an image of, say, a fingerprint in a database in favor of using "the fingerprint [image] to encrypt or code some other information, like a PIN or account number, or cryptographic key, and only store the biometrically encrypted code, not the biometric itself. This removes the need for public or private sector organizations to collect and store actual biometric images in their database."

The technology, however, may not be enough to assuage fears in the European Union, which is facing strong opposition from citizens in all 27 EU countries to a proposed central fingerprint database, the London Times Online reports.

The following post was written by Tim Clark, editor and president of Government Executive.

It was a long day of technology talk at the Press Club yesterday. The security event (see below) began at 7:30 a.m., and another event, sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Resources Management ended at 7:30 p.m. I moderated both.

At the AFFIRM gathering, I moderated a panel on the topic, "Beginning a National Conversation: Using IT to Improve Government Services to Citizens."

Some might think that that conversation has been going on for close to a generation. But it turns out that what the AFFIRM organizers are really after is more engagement on the part of Congress.

Of course, Congress has been funding federal IT to the tune of $70 billion or so per year. And a lot of good things have happened:

• IRS electronic filing
• Electronic delivery of food stamps
• Veterans Administration development of electronic health records
• Fantastic military applications such as the very sophisticated systems for managing the Predator aircraft flying over Baghdad. I saw this first-hand during a trip to the Persian Gulf sponsored by the Defense Department last October.

Congress has funded these kinds of projects, and there have been big payoffs in agency capabilities. Less easy have been efforts to develop cross-cutting e-government systems. I observed that there have been at least two thrusts here:

• Measures to increase standardization and thus bring efficiencies within the four walls of government itself. An interesting example was provided at the morning GE-SANS event on cybersecurity: OMB’s mandate that agencies use a common set of security standards for Microsoft systems that command most of the government’s desktops.
• Measures to serve citizens of the United States that range beyond agency stovepipes. Citizens, especially needy citizens, often are beneficiaries of a number of government programs, yet often have had to travel from office to office, dealing with bureaucracy after bureaucracy, to get their due.

It’s notable that one effort to solve this problem now is a finalist in the Kennedy School’s Innovations in American Government contest: Govbenefits.gov. Here’s what the Labor Department had to say about it this past Friday: “GovBenefits.gov offers extensive benefit program information for veterans, seniors, students, teachers, children, people with disabilities, dependents, disaster victims, farmers, caregivers, job seekers, prospective homeowners and more. … The Web site has attracted more than 25 million visitors since it went online in April 2002, increasing citizens’ access to benefit programs and information they may not have known existed.”

What a great idea.

Other projects have struggled. And one reason has been reluctance of Congress to fund them. Congress has never appropriated more than $5 million to fund such cross-cutting e-government projects. And it has resisted subventions among agencies, seeing the pass-the-hat method of funding as violating appropriations’ turf boundaries. One committee report last year said: “Many aspects of the initiative are fundamentally flawed, contradict underlying statutory requirements and have stifled innovation by forcing conformity to an arbitrary government standard.”

One of our panelists was Richard Burk, chief architect in the Office of E-Government and Information Technology at the Office of Management and Budget, who is also current president of AFFIRM. He, and others in the audience, expressed the fervent hope that Congress could step beyond the stove-piped approach endemic in its authorizing-committee and appropriations-subcommittee structure. That’s needed if Congress is to get behind governmentwide, and intergovernmental, IT initiatives.

We had a lone but game person from Congress on the panel, Charles M. Phillips, who is minority policy counsel on Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, responsible for technology and information policy issues under ranking minority member Tom Davis, R-Va.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Phillips said, in essence, that it would be a very cold day in the hottest precincts of Hades before Congress got behind multi-agency, cross-cutting IT initiatives. My words, but that was the gist. I think he and Davis probably approve of some of them, but most of Congress has no interest at all.

To its credit, AFFIRM isn’t giving up, and will continue to work on “beginning” the conversation.

The following post was written by Tim Clark, editor and president of Government Executive.

A bit of skepticism has been flying around about the government’s effort to achieve significant advances in cybersecurity by standardizing agencies’ use of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Or so our own reporting would suggest.

But yesterday, an all-star panel of those who have worked on the effort made a case, persuasive to my ear, that the simple, one-page memo issued March 22 by the Office of Management and Budget has the potential to block most of the intrusion attempts that plague federal networks.

The panel spoke during a breakfast session sponsored by Government Executive and the SANS Institute, the country’s leading educator on cybersecurity and manager of the Internet Storm Center, providing the nation with early warning against broad-based cyberattacks. The panelists included Karen Evans, OMB administrator for electronic government and information technology; Kenneth M. Heitkamp, assistant Air Force chief information officer for life-cycle management; Tony W. Sager, chief of the vulnerability analysis and operations group at the National Security Agency; Lisa Schlosser, CIO at the Housing and Urban Development Department; and Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute.

Just what is the real achievement here? Well, Alan and I worked together to frame the two-hour session. My introduction was apparently lucid because an NSA staffer came up to me after the session and said they’d like to use the introduction in their own materials describing the new security initiative.

I started by saying that our session would address one of the top problems confronting government technology: the vulnerability of its computer networks to penetration by criminals, foreign agents, terrorists and other bad actors. We were gathered, I added, to learn about a big development that will go a long way toward mitigating the government’s security problem. And I said that the OMB mandate would also materially assist with cybersecurity in the private sector.

More from the opening spiel: OMB is mandating that when agencies deploy systems using Windows, they do so with security settings that make the system harder to crack than systems using the security settings that are standard on most Windows computers. Windows systems cover nearly all the desktops and most of the servers in government and contractor sites.

NSA has analyzed how many of the common attack vectors are blocked by these secure settings and found the answer to be more than 85 percent. Such a change is an obvious benefit to security, but that’s actually not why the initiative is so important.

Two principal security problems confront government today:

1. Security vulnerabilities are endemic in the systems and applications agencies deploy on their networks.
2. The all-too-human vulnerability of users, who are fooled into letting cybercriminals and spies into their networks.

The OMB mandate won’t make federal employees smarter or more careful, but it will radically reduce the vulnerabilities in federal systems. It reduces vulnerabilities because it solves the central dilemma facing security managers every month. When Microsoft releases patches, every organization has to decide whether to install them right away or wait for extensive testing. It’s a Hobson’s choice.

If they install immediately they face a significant threat that they will cause applications to break. If they do not install immediately they face a significant threat of their systems being exploited. Most agencies take the “wait and test” approach.

The same dilemma arises when trying to implement secure configurations. When agencies implement secure configurations, some applications break.

If agencies could keep applications from breaking, they would solve the problem. But they cannot because they don’t control the applications. And applications break because every application vendor changes the Windows security settings or simply use the unsecured version. Vendors rightfully objected to building applications to fit secure configurations when there was no agreement on what those configurations would be.

The big breakthrough in the OMB mandate is that federal users have agreed on a set of secure settings and now can insist in procurements that systems be configured that way. This will shift responsibility for making applications work safely on those secure configurations to the vendors. Only the vendors can fix this problem. Each time a vendor solves the problem for one federal agency, it solves it for all agencies and for every other organization that buys that application and uses the secure configuration.

In other words, here the federal government is leading by example and making security less expensive and more effective for everyone.

It took four important initiatives to bring these benefits to all of government and industry.
• First, to reach broad agreement on what constitutes a secure configuration. This was done by NSA working with a non-profit group, the Center for Internet Security.
• Second, to persuade the operating system vendors and computer suppliers to build systems with the secure configurations baked in and to maintain those systems and test patches on those systems. Here, the Air Force took the lead.
• Third, to demonstrate that the secure configuration can be deployed to hundreds of thousands of people, without any disruption in their work. Here again, the Air Force made it happen.
• Fourth, to extend the program to all of government so application vendors will build well-behaved applications (with security baked in, once again) that work well on the secure configurations. This is where OMB stepped up to the plate with its one-page mandate directed at every federal agency. Evans said at our session that OMB has set a June 30 deadline for agencies to bring procurements in line with the new security settings.

We actually gave awards to people who were key to these developments. You can find out more by watching a webcast of the session on govexec.com. It will be edited and ready to view early next week.

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and computing information you can easily apply at your desktop.

This week: View your IP address.

As a follow up to last week’s post on anonymous surfing, we thought it would be useful to remind you that unless you cloak it, everyone online knows your Internet protocol address.

For example, click here to see it. Or here, which also helpfully informs you which browser you’re using.

You can also try looking it up directly from your computer. Activate the Run from the Start menu, and type in cmd. In the command window, type in ipconfig/all/. Your address will appear.

An undetermined number of e-mails sent by White House aides from a Republican National Committee account have been lost, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said some e-mails were lost because they had no clear policy for archiving the emails.

"This sounds like the administration's version of the dog ate my homework," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told the AP. Congressional oversight committees are seeking White House emails sent via RNC accounts in connection with the recent firing of eight federal prosecutors and a potential violation of the Hatch Act by General Services Administrator Lurita Doan.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

This post was written by Karen Rutzick, staff correspondent for Government Executive Magazine.

NASA is retooling their Web site, and they’re doing their homework first. NASA Internet Services Manager Brian Dunbar is conducting extensive interviews with Web site users, including the media, such as this reporter.

Dunbar says they’re “kicking off a full re-design of the site,” including the media section. He wanted to know how useful the current offerings were to reporters, what else could be added, how often sections were used, and other information.

NASA’s reaching out to members of the general public for feedback, too. A customer satisfaction survey asks Web site perusers to weigh in on the ease of reading the site, the clarity of its organization, search results and trustworthiness.

Software design experts routinely warn that one of the pitfalls of system and web development is not to ask users for input. An article in The New York Times last month (which ran with the headline: "How to Improve It? Ask Those Who Use It") discussed the advantages of so-called "citizen product design." Here're some tips on interaction design offered by Asktog.com, operated by the usability designers Neilson Norman Group.

The two latest Candorville comic strips (one that ran April 10 and another that ran today, April 11) have an eerily familiar ring to them -- especially for anyone who has followed the congressional hearing investigating General Services Administrator Lurita Doan's role in the possible violation of a law that prevents political activity within government offices. We'll let you be the judge.

One of Microsoft’s main selling points of its new operating system Vista has been the platform's built-in security features. Beefing up security also was the primary reason why the Office of Management and Budget last month issued a mandate requiring all agencies to follow a standard Microsoft platform.

But, writes ZDNet blogger Ryan Naraine, several critical security patches that Microsoft has issued in less than one month is testing “the carefully crafted image of Windows Vista as the most secure operating system of all time.”

That high rate also puts pressure on the prediction of Ben Fathi, the former head of Microsoft's security group and now the chief of development in the Windows core operating system group, that he made in February. At the RSA Conference 2007, Fathi said that if Vista had half the security vulnerabilities that Windows XP had, he would consider Vista reaching a "great goal." Microsoft issued 30 security bulletins for Windows XP, with many of those bulletins containing more than one vulnerability. (Read Tech Insider item "The Chink in OMB's Windows Mandate," with comments.)

The U.S. Holocaust Museum and Google Earth have teamed up to bring satellite map images of the effects of the atrocities in the Darfur region of the Sudan, the Associated Press reported yesterday.

Holocaust Museum and Google Earth executives say the project, called the Crisis in Darfur, will bring the acts of what many believe is genocide into the homes, offices and on computer screens worldwide to emphasize the violence in hopes of building support to end it. Users can zoom into villages to see burnt houses, and into refugee camps to view the crowded conditions. Photographs, statistics and eyewitness testimony are also included. Google Earth has more than 200 million users.

According to the Holocaust Museum's web site, "Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond."

Continuing a long streak of government data losses, the Department of Community Health in Georgia disclosed yesterday that a contractor lost a CD containing the personal information of 2.9 million Georgians, according to CNET news.

The department's claim processor contractor, Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services, lost the disc sometime after March 22, CNET reports.

Reports of government agencies losing personal data have been mounting. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported this month that the IRS lost 490 laptops during a three-and-a-half-year period ending June 2006, as we’ve blogged before. An Army laptop containing names, social security numbers, and payroll information was stolen from a privately owned car at Ft. Monroe, Va., according to the public affairs office for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. Last week, the University of California at San Francisco notified 46,000 students, faculty and staff that their personal data may have been stolen.

The California Senate plans to vote on bills this week that would limit the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology in documents the government issues for personal identification, ComputerWorld reports. According to the article:

Two of the bills would impose a three-year moratorium on the use of RFID technology in California driver’s licenses and in public school ID cards, while a third would create interim privacy safeguards for existing RFID-enabled government IDs, such as those that students use in the state college system.

A fourth bill would make it a crime to “skim,” or surreptitiously read, data from an RFID document.

The remaining bill addresses fears that companies might try to force their employees to undergo an RFID implantation, noted [the bills' sponsor Sen. Joe] Simitian.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) vetoed similar bills last October.

As the use of RFID technology spreads, opposition to the technology has increased. The Electronic Privacy Information Center provides a web page containing a compilation of reports and articles written about RFID.

The Internal Revenue Service has nearly completed encrypting all of its laptops in the wake of an internal audit that showed nearly half of its laptops tested for security contained unencrypted personal financial data, ComputerWorld reports. The article quotes IRS Commissioner Mark Everson, who was interviewed by National Public Radio this past weekend.

Earlier this month, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported that the IRS lost 490 laptops during a three-and-a-half-year period ending June 2006.

Many chief information officers and information technology managers view encryption as costly and administratively burdensome. Only 16 percent of organizations say they follow an encryption policy, according to a survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute. CIO Magazine last month offered some tips on how to approach an encryption strategy.

This week’s The New Yorker investigates the phenomenon of commuting, nominating Washington as a “worthy candidate” for one for the country’s worst commutes. (Article not yet available online.)

The article, “There And Back Again,” reserves the worst commuting honors for Atlanta and analyzes the experience of commuting in general. Simply put, commuting is overrated. People “tend to over valuate the material fruits of their commute – money, house prestige – and undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun,” author Nick Paumgarten states.

According to political scientist Robert Putnam, whom Paumgarten quotes, there’s a simple rule of thumb for commuting: “‘Every ten minutes of commuting results in 10 percent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.’”

When choosing numbers, humans tend to choose certain types of numbers, such as prime numbers, more often than other kinds of numbers, a fact that impacts the way humans choose passwords and other security related features.

For example, choose a number between 1 and 20. Is it 17? If you’re like an unexpected large percentage of people, that's the number you picked. If you didn’t choose 17, the odds are that you probably chose another prime number instead -- most likely 7, 13 or 19, in that order. Which brings up another pattern. Humans also tend to pick odd numbers more frequently than even numbers.

Cognitive Daily posted earlier this year the results on an online poll with 347 respondents who picked seventeen 18 percent of the time. A computer random number generator picked it less than 5 percent of the time.

People also gravitate toward prime numbers because they seem more random. Humans pick prime numbers about 60 percent of the time, compared to a computer, which picks prime numbers about 40 percent of the time.

Since random numbers are an element of cybersecurity, it would be risky to rely on humans to generate the numbers. They follow a fairly predictable pattern.

Hat tip: Bruce Schneier’s blog (which also links to this funny Dilbert cartoon) and ha.ckers.org

A blogger who writes the Philocrites blog (on "religion, liberalism and culture") claims that a reader accessing his site from an Air Force computer has been blocked from accessing his site.

Chris Walton, who says he writes about the Unitarian Universalist movement, posted an item on his blog reporting that an Air Force employee sent him an image of the message that pops up on the employee's monitor when he types in Philocrites web site address www.philocrites.com. "The Site You Are Trying To Access Is Prohibited," the message begins. "Category of Blocked URL: "Forum/Bulletin Boards. Monitoring of Your Web Activity is Being Performed."

The reason for blocking access to the site, according to the message, was because of "unauthorized personal use."

But Walton wonders if the reader was blocked because his site is considered liberal. He provides links to stories about the possibility of federal agencies blocking access to liberal Web sites, one from the political blog Daily Kos and another from Federal Computer Week. Wikipedia describes the Unitarian Universalism as "liberal."

Walton also writes that readers from other federal agencies have not been blocked from accessing his site, including one from the Justice Department who visited his site in March.

Tell us if you have had any problems accessing sites considered liberal or conservative by clicking the "comments" link below.

A spokesman with the Office of Special Counsel, the independent agency investigating General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan for violating a law that limits on-the-job political activity in government offices, says investigators do not know when they will complete the investigation. Some investigations involving alleged Hatch Act violations take a month and others take many months, says an agency spokesman.

For example, OSC announced in February the completion of an investigation involving a 2004 presidential campaign appearance by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at the NASA Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex’s Debus Facility Center in Florida as well as a 2006 awards banquet in Texas involving NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s alleged endorsement of Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas. The spokesman said that he does not expect the Doan matter to take as long, but he could not be more specific.

Once the investigation is complete, OSC will send the results to President Bush, completing the process. The spokesman said that it would be likely that OSC would make a public statement about the completion of the investigation then.

Agency insiders say that the potential Hatch Act violation is the only allegation against Doan that could result in any serious consequences. Experts say that it's difficult to know now whether Doan violated the law by attending a Jan. 26 meeting at GSA's headquarters, which included a PowerPoint presentation by the leading political strategist at the White House.

In the February issue of the International Journal of Health Geographics, two University of Georgia scientists mapped the possible effect of a nuclear explosion in metropolitan Washington, D.C., as well as three other cities (New York City, Chicago and Atlanta).

According to the article, a 500 kiloton bomb detonated close to the surface of Washington, D.C., would create a blast intensity of at least 1 pound per square inch (which can knock people off their feet) from Takoma Park, Md., to about Alexandria, Va.

Using weather data from April 22, 2004, and simulation models from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the scientists show that the early fallout plume could reach the Baltimore area.

The problem is that “the highest impacts of radiation generally occur when people are caught in the open, or, are tied up in traffic jams trying to escape in vehicles,” according to the article. The authors conclude that Washington needs better planning for fallout response.

Hat tip: Bruce Schneier’s blog

What’s a toasted bagel plus avocado in a CD container? Lunch! Click the link above for a neat way of re-using CD spindles (the plastic container for a pack of blank CDRs, for example) as a high-tech variant to the tin lunch box to bring your bagelwich to work.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

A GSA official told Government Executive Friday afternoon that Sprint informed the agency that it will not protest the Networx award. Sprint lost its bid to be part of Networx, the next generation government telecommunications contract announced last week. As an incumbent on GSA's precursor telecom contract FTS 2001, Sprint sold about 30 percent of government telecommunications services.

A Sprint official verified that the company will not file a protest and provided the following statement:

The Sprint team met with GSA on April 4th for a debrief on the Networx Universal award. After a thorough discussion, Sprint has decided to move forward and focus on the future and continue to aggressively pursue the forthcoming Networx Enterprise contract.

Col. Charles Lambert, program manager of the Army’s Logistics Modernization Program, recently gave a speech at a gathering of contractors about how to change business processes. “The first thing with any American worker, just like an American solider, is explain to them why they’ve got to do something, what the value is in doing it, and they’ll embrace it,” he said. The explanations have to go "all the way from the executive to the shop floor."

Read our other blog posts from the annual Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems industry day here, here, and here.

As part of its strategy to move away from building large proprietary information technology applications in favor of buying packaged commercial applications, the Defense Information Systems Agency said today that it will use an Army contract to buy the commercial services instead of developing its own contract for the services.

DISA plans to buy off the Army’s Information Technology Enterprise Solutions-2 (ITES) contract, which offers services from 16 companies, to develop its next-generation Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for use throughout the Defense Department. A SOA allows an organization to use software applications throughout an organization, rather than in just one business area. DISA views SOA as a means to speed the delivery of new technology to DOD.

Bernie Skoch, a retired Air Force brigadier general who was principal director for customer advocacy at DISA and now a consultant for Suss Consulting, said DISA’s decision to use the ITES contract instead of running its own procurement could save the agency as many as two years time in developing the SOA and free up acquisition personnel for other projects.

DISA and DOD plan to use SOA as the foundation for a new way to deliver information and data to users worldwide, modeled on commercial Web services such as Google and online travel sites, which bundle a wide variety of information into one Web site. DISA said it will use the ITES contract for development, deployment and operation of its Net-Centric Enterprise Services Architecture (NCES) program, which is designed to deliver a variety of services including military versions of instant messaging, Web-based chat systems and online conferencing. DISA awarded IBM a $16 million NCES contract last July for those services.

In his April 4 Washington Post editorial, "The IG Ideology," Harvard professor and federal procurement expert Steve Kelman argues that federal government's inspectors general, by issuing critical reports on government operations, foster a culture of negativism and fear that perpetuates poor public management and retards efforts to improve government performance. "Many interpret IG reports as dishonoring employee commitment to the public good, a source of deep pain," Kelman concludes.

One of the problems with IGs, Kelman says, is that they rarely, if ever, offer creative solutions to the problems they uncover. Kelman writes in his Op-Ed:

When was the last time you heard an IG call for agencies to do more to develop creative, innovative solutions to problems? These aren't words IGs use, and this isn't how IGs think. Their remedies almost always involve the application of hoary management tools from the turn of the last century, such as having armies of inspectors check for defects rather than preventing problems in the first place, and constant surveillance of employees, who are assumed to be venal or incompetent.

There are at least some examples of IGs calling for creative solutions. Here’s one from 2004. That's when Robert Skinner, the IG at the Department of Homeland Security and the author of one of the reports Kelman cites in his editorial as having contributed to the corrosive IG ideology, issued the report "Major Management Challenges Facing the Department of Homeland Security." On page 8 of the report, Skinner criticizes top DHS management for not making the DHS chief information officer "a member of the senior management team with authority to strategically manage departmentwide technology assets and programs." (Skinner wrote the same conclusion in the 2005 management challenges report.)

Skinner then lists numerous shortcomings in the CIO's authority, but then he offers this: "The department would benefit from following the successful examples of other federal agencies in positioning their CIOs with the authority and influence needed to guide executive decisions on department-wide IT investments and strategies."

The idea of a CIO who has the authority to influence the strategic direction of an organization, while not entirely new, is a concept that only a small minority of executives running private-sector organizations have fully embraced, much less an idea adopted by federal agencies, if any have at all. A CIO with the authority to take part in strategic planning decisions is hardly a "hoary management tool from the turn of the last century."

To be sure, more positive suggestions from IGs (with more details on how an agency may accomplish the recommendation) are needed. IGs would help promote government performance by doing so. But IGs' creative ideas are out there. Besides, with an increasing number of investigations into questionable, unethical, or possibly illegal, management practices within agencies, one can argue a culture of oversight may be a reasonable reaction.

Does your experience indicate that IGs are fostering a culture of fear and not actively promoting solutions? Let us hear from you by clicking the "comments" link below.

Using your privately-owned laptop at work still doesn’t mean you have a right to privacy for non-work files stored on that computer, CNET reports.

A technically-minded police officer in Glencoe, Okla., was troubleshooting a network problem on a laptop owned by city Treasurer Michael Barrows, who had been bringing his personal laptop into work. The officer found child pornography on Barrow’s hard drive. But the officer had not obtained a search warrant when he found the illegal material. Therefore, Barrows challenged the indictment on the grounds that he “‘had an expectation of privacy when he took his personal computer to his workplace at the town hall. It was his private property and was not used by any of the other city employees,’” according to the article.

A 10th Circuit judge disagreed, ruling Barrows had taken no steps to make his laptop private, such as using a password to gain access to the system. Barrows “was sentenced on August 25, 2006, to six years and six months in federal prison. He was also required to register as a sex offender and was sentenced to an additional three years of supervised release.”

Researchers now attribute a December 2006 disruption of the Global Positioning System to a solar flare, Reuters reports.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “observed two powerful solar flares on December 5 and 6, 2006, emanating from a large cluster of sunspots,” according to the article. “A giant radio burst followed, causing large numbers of receivers to stop tracking the GPS signal.”

The flare has researchers worried about the next “solar maximum” peak, expected sometime between 2010 and 2012. The sun goes through 11-year cycles of minimum and maximum phases of charged particle ejection that can disrupt satellite communication. The last solar maximum occurred in 2000, but "in December, we found the effect [of solar flares] on GPS receivers were more profound and widespread than we expected," said Paul Kintner, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University in New York.

Before the December storm, researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., warned the next solar maximum peak would be "30 percent to 50 percent stronger than the previous one," said researcher Mausumi Dikpati, in this 2006 NASA article.

The recent IRS inspector general's s report concluding that the Internal Revenue Service had lost at least 490 computers between January 2003 and June 2006, exposing possibly thousands of Americans' personal tax information to possible theft, is yet another reminder that many agencies have yet to heed security experts' advice that physical security of information is part of an overall cybersecurity plan.

According to the IRS IG report, many of the losses occurred because employees left their laptops in unlocked vehicles, on buses, trains, at airports, or checked their computers as airline baggage, according to a Washington Post article. "The report attributes the newly identified shortcomings at IRS offices 'to a lack of emphasis by management,'" the Post reported.

The lack of management attention to physical IT security is widespread throughout the federal government. IRS joins a growing list of other agencies having reported lost or stolen laptops. As a reminder, here are some of the others: Last spring, a Veterans Affairs Department laptop containing personal information on 26.5 million people was stolen from a VA analyst's home. That was followed by laptop losses at the Navy and the Government Accountability Office, the Energy Department, the Transportation Department, the Education Department and then just about every agency according to a House report.

A couple of months after the VA's chief information Officer Robert Howard said that another data breach was unlikely, the VA lost a hard drive at a Birmingham, Ala., Veterans Affairs Department facility containing highly sensitive information on nearly all U.S. physicians and medical data for about 535,000 VA patients. The case is still under investigation.

As security experts have advised for years, physical security of data, such as keeping track of laptops or encrypting data, is a significant part of any cybersecurity plan. It's called convergence.

The chairman of the House's oversight committee has asked the head of the Republican National Committee to produce e-mails stored on the committee's servers related to the use of federal resources for political purposes.

In a letter dated Wednesday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., asked RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to provide all electronic messages sent or received by White House advisor Karl Rove, his deputy Scott Jennings or any other White House officials using RNC e-mail accounts.

At issue is a Jan. 26 meeting at the General Services Administration's headquarters, where Jennings gave a presentation that listed 20 Democratic members of Congress whom the White House is targeting for defeat in 2008 and a list of Republican members the White House considers most vulnerable. GSA chief Lurita Doan attended the meeting and was the subject of a hearing last week investigating allegations that the meting violated the Hatch Act, which bars government workers from engaging in political activity on the job.

Waxman wants the RNC e-mails because documents obtained by GSA show that Jennings and his assistant, when organizing the meeting, used a "gwb42.com" e-mail account, which is maintained by the RNC, rather than their official White House e-mail accounts. In the e-mails, they described the presentation as a "close hold" and said that "we're not supposed to be emailing it around."

Waxman requests all emails that relate to the Jan. 26 meeting, the presentation of any similar political briefings at other federal agencies, to other federal employees or the use of federal agencies or their resources to help Republican candidates.

Experts are divided on whether Doan violated the Hatch Act. Democrats on the committee say the evidence shows that Doan has violated the law, but the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service only would say that she could have violated the law. According to a White House spokesperson, "this is regular communication from the White House to political appointees throughout the administration."

The Defense Logistics Agency has a new strategic plan available online.

In the plan, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Dail, DLA's director, reports that the agency seeks to extend “beyond its traditional wholesaler responsibilities.” The agency has just finished a multi-year information technology and business process modernization effort, merging six siloed systems into a single enterprise resource planning system. Some of the previous systems were 1960s vintage legacy systems running on COBOL. The new system is an SAP commercial-off-the-shelf system.

Now that their modernized system is up and running, DLA officials want to extend DLA’s reach closer to warfighters. Dail outlines three goals: extend the enterprise, connect warfighter demand with supply, and deliver supply chain excellence.

CIO Magazine recently interviewed Dail about his views on how IT can deliver on DLA's strategic goals.

Russia is making a serious bid to compete with the U.S. Global Positioning System, the New York Times reports.

“By the end of the year, the authorities here say, the Russian space agency plans to launch eight navigation satellites that would nearly complete the country’s own system, called Glonass,” according to the Times.

Russia says it is pursuing its own satellite navigation system as a matter of national security. (Foreign governments fear the U.S. GPS system, operated by the U.S. military, could be turned off during a crisis.) “‘In a few years, business without a navigation signal will become inconceivable,’” said Andrei G. Ionin, an aerospace analyst with the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, which is linked to the Russian defense ministry,” the reported. “‘Everything that moves will use a navigation signal — airplanes, trains, yachts, people, rockets, valuable animals and favorite pets.’”

Russians are not the first to compete with the U.S. GPS system. The European Union has been working on its Galileo system. China has sent up satellites to build its Baidu GPS system, named after the Chinese word for the Big Dipper, but “Russia’s system is furthest along, paid for with government oil revenue,” according to the article.

They don’t call it “death by PowerPoint” for nothing. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that presenters who use PowerPoint presentations and read verbatim their display slides are making it harder, not easier, for the audience to understand the information.

John Sweller, a University of New South Wales professor who developed the "cognitive load theory," harshly criticizes the popular Microsoft program that is so heavily used in virtually every presentation from the private board room to the government meeting. “'The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster,’ Professor Sweller said. ‘It should be ditched,’” the Herald reported.

But Sweller, who is pictured in the Herald giving a PowerPoint demonstration, doesn't say graphic presentations are bad per se.

"‘It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented,” he is quoted as saying.

Hat tip: Slashdot

Welcome to Tech Insider’s Tip Thursday, in which we bring you computing tips and computing information you can easily apply at your desk top.

This week: anonymous Web surfing.

From time to time, employers decide to block a Web site they have determined that their staff shouldn't read. Employers and agencies certainly have the right to block Web sites. But as a purely intellectual exercise, we wonder if an agency's blocking policies have been fully implemented. There may be ways around the blocking policies.

The concept of anonymous surfing is simple. If a user points a browser directly to a blocked URL, the local Internet gateway detects the URL as forbidden and stops the user from accessing the site. Using anonymous surfing, a user accesses a third-party Web site, which anonymously redirects to you the blocked URL. A system administrator can detect Web traffic to the third-party site but cannot detect where the traffic is being redirected. Administrators, of course, can block access to these free Web-based sites, which include Proxify, VTunnel and Anonymouse.

People who have software downloading privileges onto hard drives can download anonymizing software such as Tor (which is free) or Anonymizer (which is not, but offers a 30-day free trial). Torpark, a version of Tor, is designed to be accessed from a USB flash drive.

Web RSS readers also may not be picked up in an agency's URL blocking policy. A Web RSS reader, such as free ones from Google and other companies, allow users to sign up for certain blog feeds and read them by viewing individual postings through the Web RSS reader.

Jack Penkoske, director of personnel at the Defense Information Systems Agency, said Wednesday that he hopes other agencies do not embrace telework. Speaking tongue-in-check on a panel at the Excellence in Government conference (sponsored by Government Executive) in downtown Washington, Penkoske said that if other agencies keep refusing to allow employees to telework, it will be easier for him to hire people who are interested in the concept.

DISA has one of the largest telework programs in the government, instigated partially due to the agency's move from Northern Virginia to a military base south of Baltimore. But the relocation isn't the only reason DISA has embraced telework, Penkoske said. The agency has found that it's a great recruitment and retention tool, because employees are looking for a high quality of life in addition to more pay.

About 18 months ago, DISA started allowing eligible employees to telework two days a week, which with compressed work schedules, gives them the opportunity to work outside the office five out of every ten days. The number of teleworkers at the agency has grown eight-fold since the change was made.

Penkoske said that the lack of telework adoption across the government is the fault of supervisors, who he said, not only fail to fully embrace the concept, but fail to make sure employees are properly trained for telework. Penkoske said at his agency some employees initially would put up automatic "out of office" replies on their email when working from home and would tell people not to call them at home.

Penkoske said that managers should not obsess about employees looking to use telework to goof off on the job. He said that slackers will be slackers no matter where they work and "superstars will be superstars no matter where you put them."

He said that the government has all the telework policy it needs in place and that agencies "just need to start doing it."

Deborah Cohn, deputy commissioner of trademark operations at the Patent and Trademark Office, said that the agency's "hoteling" program, in which teleworkers book office space for the times they're in the agency's headquarters, has been a huge success. She said that the agency has given up three floors of office space, which amounts to $1.5 million in annualized savings.

"You put that in your business case and people take a second look," Cohn said.

PTO expects to have 3,300 employees participating in its telework program -- one of the most extensive in the federal government -- by 2011.

Mobile wireless networking, coming to an airplane near you! The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. airlines will start offering in-flight WiFi connections within the next 12 months.

“If broadband connections at 35,000 feet are as popular as they have been at hotels, airports, homes, schools and coffee shops, airplanes will likely be fitted with the relatively inexpensive technology rapidly,” writes Journal travel columnist Scott McCartney.

And, he notes, this probably means that in-flight cell phone service is probably around the bend, too. Though the Federal Communications Commission is keeping a cell-phone ban in place for now, the chances for in-flight cell service are rising, McCartney says.

With airlines in Europe and the Middle East set to allow such service later this year, the pressure will be on American carriers. “Air travel is a copycat business,” McCartney notes. Tech Insider recommends a prompt investment in industrial strength noise-canceling headphones.

The latest thinking in federal Semantic Web technology should be on display April 25 when the Semantic Interoperability Community of Practice (SICoP) holds a conference in Reston, Va. (Click here for the agenda; the event is unclassified and free.)

The Semantic Web could revolutionize the Web and the world by making data machine-readable and setting up software agents to make inferences based on that data. As we’ve blogged, it is not without its skeptics, and faces high hurdles to implementation. But, many feel its potential is too high to ignore. And as the agenda shows, the intelligence community continues to remain interested in it as a way of connecting the dots.

The CEO of an electronics supplier charged with exporting U.S. defense technology with missile applications to India pleaded not guilty Tuesday, the Associated Press reports.

Parthasarathy Sudarshan, an Indian national who heads Cirrus Electronics, is being held at least until Thursday when he faces a bail hearing. “Prosecutors said he worked closely with Indian government officials to ship heat-resistant memory chips, microprocessors and other equipment to prohibited government agencies,” the AP reports. Also arrested was Indian national Mythili Gopal, the company's international sales manager; he faces an April 17 court date. In addition, two Cirrus employees in Singapore were indicted.

“The FBI says all items were exported in violation of the U.S. arms export control act and has accused two unidentified Indian government officials - including one posted at the Indian Embassy in Washington - of being part of the conspiracy,” reports CNN-IBN, a 24-hour India news network broadcast in English.

The Indian Express reports that the official Indian government response has been minimalist. “We are looking into the allegations. Now they are only allegations...we will get back to you when we have something to say about it,” the newspaper quotes Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon as saying.

“The closest thing the Internet has to a governing body seems to want the same kind of immunity from national laws that the International Red Cross and the International Olympic Committee have enjoyed for decades,” says CNET blogger Declan McCullagh.

McCullagh cites a recent report by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the California nonprofit established by the federal government in 1998 to oversee Web domain names and Internet protocol addresses.

Under ICANN's recommendations, the organization “could become largely immune from civil lawsuits, police searches and taxes, and its employees would have quasi-diplomatic privileges,” McCullagh adds. But, he adds, the idea doesn’t appear to enjoy much support in the Bush administration.

Google has great fun with its April Fool's Day press releases. Among this year's, for example, was an announcement of the debut of Gmail Paper. But now the company is having to convince people it's serious about another piece of news: A three-foot python is on the loose in its New York offices.

Competing defense industry behemoths Boeing and Lockheed Martin have submitted final bids for the air, maritime/fixed station portion of the military’s Joint Tactical Radio System. Contract awards to one of those two companies should be made sometime in the third or fourth quarter of 2007, Boeing program director Leo Conboy told reporters Friday.

The project, a centerpiece of the Defense Department’s push toward netcentric warfare, is an effort to create a software-programmable radio. Existing radios process radio transmissions (called waveforms) though specifically designed hardware, making interoperability difficult to achieve. JTRS seeks to decouple waveform processing from hardware and make it a function of software, analogous to applications running on a desktop computer.

In submitting its final bid, Boeing decided for now to concentrate on developing capabilities for the Wideband Networking Waveform as the JTRS AMF interoperability component, despite its earlier suggestions that it might integrate the Tactical Targeting Network Technology waveform.

On Friday, Conboy said the requirements for the first increment of JTRS AMF are to use the Wideband Networking Waveform. The waveform will carry Internet Protocol, enabling it to packetize transmissions and so enable interoperability between other, different waveforms, Conboy added.

JTRS is organized into four domains: a ground domain for vehicles, soldiers, sensors and weapons systems; an airborne, maritime, fixed station domain; a network enterprise domain to develop waveforms; and a domain of special radios for special operations forces.

The National Reconnaissance Office, which the government refused to say existed for the first 40 years of its life (it was formally acknowledged in 1992), is the subject of this touching official video overview.

A montage of shots of military hardware, Fidel Castro, satellite dishes and such, the video is also overlaid with a song whose chorus is “keep the peace alive!”

The video was first posted by The Memory Hole, but was just rediscovered by Boing Boing.

The Office of Personnel Management's annual report on the status of telework in the federal government is expected to be released in the next couple of weeks, an agency spokesman said Tuesday morning. The last report, released in December 2005, showed that the number of federal employees working away from the office grew by 37 percent in 2004.

With new telework legislation on the table in Congress, advocates of telework in the government are itching to know where the government stands.

Google is restoring post-Katrina imagery of New Orleans to its geographic information applications. The company, which swears it “can make money without doing evil,” put imagery of the hurricane-devastated city back into Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday, according to a company blog.

Google was the target of much criticism when “as part of a regular series of global data enhancements,” (as the company put it in its blog posting) it swapped out post-Katrina images for pre-hurricane ones. Among the latest to add a chastising voice was Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology's Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Miller sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt on March 30, decrying what Miller called “the airbrushing of history.”

John Hanke, director of Google Maps and Earth, defended the company, noting that it had always made the Katrina imagery available on a dedicated site.

Hat tip: Information Week

IBM wants to give the Defense Department $45 million worth of Arabic-to-English translation hardware and software, AP reports. IBM Chairman and CEO Samuel Palmisano made the offer directly to President Bush after hearing from company employees who had served in Iraq about shortages of translators. Under the offer, IBM would provide 10,000 copies of its Multilingual Automatic Speech Translator software and 1,000 devices equipped with it. The only problem is that the Pentagon's not sure it can accept the gift. Procurement lawyers are checking that out.

Sprint Nextel Corp. is having a rough time lately. Denied a slot Networx Universal, the General Services Administration’s big governmentwide telecommunications procurement, Sprint is also performing sluggishly in the private sector, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Many of the problems revolve around Nextel, the cell phone carrier Sprint acquired for $35 billion in 2004. Subscribership has declined amid complaints of poor service. Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee recently laid off 8 percent of the company's workforce and “has promised that a turnaround will start by the end of the second quarter,” the Journal reported.

Sprint is betting heavily on broadband wireless technology known as WiMax, which it intends to roll out in several markets this year. Whether WiMax will help the company much in the federal market is an open question, however.

"Initially, it's going to be driven by consumer customers," Tony D'Agata, general manager of Sprint's government systems division, told Government Executive late last year. It could take a while for the technology to migrate from the consumer sector to the government.

Congress wants the Army to expand its use of firm fixed-price contracts, according to its top procurement executive.

But no single contracting method can reform the acquisition process, said Claude Bolton, assistant secretary of the army for acquisition, logistics and technology.

For one thing, the Army has used plenty of firm fixed-price contracts in the past. “Some of you may harken back to the 1980s when we did that more…You harken back to the World War II, you’ll see it again. You go back to the Civil War, you’ll see it, too,” Bolton said Thursday at the annual Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems industry day in Bethesda, Md. (For more blog entries from the conference, click here.)

Good contracting requires training, Bolton said. He told a story of meeting with a logistics program manager who, despite huge contractor cost overruns, was confident of the outcome because the contract was firm fixed price and the contractor was tied to a large parent corporation.

“This young man said, yessir! …‘I’ve got a core firm fixed price contract! They’ve got to book it!’” Bolton recalled. But, it turns out the parent corporation was divesting itself of the contractor, which means there would be no one to absorb the costs. “The manager almost fainted,” Bolton said. “You have to educate and train the people,” he later told Tech Insider.

One of a series of professional-looking advertising shorts to support the Army’s struggling $120 billion Future Combat Systems features an earthquake-devastated city resembling Los Angeles. (Click here to watch it; scroll down to “Aftershock.”)

The video, released earlier this year, highlights the airborne networking capabilities FCS should provide, its robotic components that allow mounted video cameras to poke around in dangerous situations, and --best of all -- a cute beagle that leads soldiers to his trapped master.

The Army wants to overcome challenges to passive radio frequency identification tags -- which, unlike active RFID tags that are powered by batteries, only emit radio signals when a scanner provides energy by scanning the tags. Although the service is under a Defense Department-wide mandate to adopt passive RFID tags, it’s not clear whether the technology or Army tactics are ready for them yet, said Army Col. David Coker.

Coker, program manager for Army logistics information systems, spoke last week at an annual Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems industry day in Bethesda, Md.

Passive tags are about 10 times cheaper than active tags, which means they could be attached to far many more things.

“Passive is great if you’ve got fixed facilities,” Coker said. “Army facilities are designed to be mobile and on the move, so the infrastructure that supports that has to be able to move.” The error rates of passive readers might also be a problem, he added.

But maybe most challenging of all, there’s the issue of how the Army will incorporate all the new information passive RFID tags will supply. The Army is striving for "total asset visibility" (whereby it knows where exactly everything in the supply chain is located), but can’t presently incorporate the flow of information that would result from tagging items at a deeper level than it already does.

I laughed and laughed yesterday when I saw the April Fool’s edition of CNET News. Luckily, they have a permanent link. My two favorite fake news stories:

• Homeland Security backs privacy plan: DHS official Stewart Baker says monitoring Americans through remote activation of computers' built-in video cameras will identify terrorists. "What do you have to hide?" Baker wondered.
• Wikipedia founder's bold experiment: Diagnosed with cataracts, Jimmy Wales invites first 100 people who show up at his home to perform surgery. "There may be some trial and error, but I'm confident the community will make the right decisions," Wales said.