The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

China now has the capability to jam the Global Positioning System, widely used by both the military to, say, guide precision weapons and by civilians to, for example, provide timing for telecom networks, according to the annual Defense Department report
on “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China” submitted to Congress May 25.

According to the report, China acquired jammers from the Ukraine in the late 1990s, which are capable of jamming GPS, and since then the country has probably developed its own jammers.

That is one reason why in January the departments of Homeland Security and Transportation asked for public comments on whether an updated version of the terrestrial Loran (Long Range Navigation) system, which was first deployed in World War II, be used as a GPS backup system.

Loran receivers can determine their location by computing the time intervals between signals received from three or more transmitters, while enhanced Loran (e-Loran) provides more precise signals through the use of an added data channel. The Coast Guard (part of Homeland Security) says because Loran and e-Loran transmitters use high-powered transmitters and low-frequency signals compared with the low-power and high-frequency signals for GPS, both Loran systems are less susceptible to jamming or interruption than GPS.

Besides jamming, GPS signals can be knocked out by solar flares, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in April.

Zachariah Conover, president and chief executive officer of CrossRate Technology, which has developed an integrated GPS/Loran receiver, said the dual threats posed by solar flares and jamming to GPS illustrate the need for e-Loran. Conover, who worked on Loran while in the Coast Guard, said he has learned Homeland Security and Transportation departments have “accepted the recommendation that e-Loran be continued as the long-term backup to GPS.”

This decision has not been announced publicly, Conover said, because the departments are bickering over who will pay for build-out and operation of the e-Loran system. The Coast Guard has spent $160 million to modernize Loran since 1997, and Conover said the funding requirements are minimal, about $30 million a year to operate e-Loran.

“The dickering over whose budget the system goes into is holding up a policy decision that everyone knows needs to be made. And this lack of a decision is wasting both time and money and is keeping the American taxpayer from experiencing the benefits of the e-Loran system while leaving them susceptible to GPS outages,” Conover said.

The United Kingdom has no intention of waiting to deploy its own e-Loran capabilities, which it considers essential as a back up to GPS. The General Lighthouse Authorities (GLA) of the United Kingdom and Ireland – which operate aids to navigation systems and lighthouses – announced May 31 that they awarded a 15-year contract to develop a state of the art e-Loran system to serve the two countries.

The GLA said the e-Loran system will complement GPS and insure users will be able to obtain electronic positioning, navigation and timing signals when satellite service is disrupted. The e-Loran contract award dovetails with the long-term GLA Radio Navigation Plan released May 29, which states that e-Loran is the only viable candidate to provide a backup for GPS.

Sources say that the General Services Administration's Networx Enterprise contract that it awarded today has lower prices than the bigger Networx Universal contract.

GSA awarded five telecom companies a Networx Enterprise contract: AT&T Corp, Level 3 Communications, MCI Communications Services, Qwest Government Services and Sprint Solutions. Many of the same telecom services on Universal can be had on Enterprise -- but at lower prices. That's good news for Sprint Solutions, which lost out on a Universal contract when GSA awarded that contract in March. Sprint was one of two vendors on GSA's FTS2001 telecom contract, the precursor to Networx and which is now expired, so winning the Enterprise contract was a must win for the federal telecom provider.

In a document titled "Networx Enterprise Program Frequently Asked Questions," GSA explains the difference between Universal and Enterprise this way:

The services provided by both sets of contracts are similar. However, most services on the Universal contracts (36 of 48) are mandatory to offer, while only nine services on the Enterprise contracts are mandatory to offer. Hence the Universal awardees offer between 39 and 47 services, while the Enterprise awardees offer between 23 and 41 services.

Enterprise vendors will provide a core set of services, including "IP services, security services, and management services. Among the optional services offered by one or more of the Networx Enterprise contractors are voice, private line, wireless, and optical connectivity services, as well as additional security services and IP-centric applications services such as conferencing, call center, hosting, content management, and teleworking," according to a document GSA provided vendors.

GSA was attempting, with its two-contract strategy, to generate as much competition among telecom providers to drive prices down. "It looks like they accomplished that," one source said.

In case you haven't been able to check Tech Insider on a regular basis, let us direct you to some of the posts that have attracted the most attention as measured by reader comments. Please read the comments and feel free to click the comment link at the bottom of each item and add your voice to the discussion.

Technology Means Being More Republican
The Meaning of Significant
Busting the Myth of Long IT Work Weeks
OMB Catching Up With Social Security Policy
When Do Cyberattacks Become Acts of War?
For Government, IT Matters

A security expert at a national laboratory has joined up with CSO Magazine to provide an online self-assessment tool for security executives.

Roger Johnston, who heads up the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory, worked with CSO Magazine to develop a three-part quiz designed to pinpoint how you rate in 28 potential problems with your security program and provides you with a threat level score based on the attitudes, workplace environment and policies and procedures. The quiz can apply to physical and information security programs.

As expected, New Hampshire will soon join a dozen other states that refuse to comply with a federal law requiring security features to driver's licenses, Reuters reported last week.

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch says he plans to sign the New Hampshire law that the state Senate passed last week banning implementation of the Real ID Act of 2005, which will require states to invest billions of dollars into upgrading information systems to add security features to driver's licenses such as bar codes and digital photographs. The federal government will eventually require that Americans use the new licenses to gain entry to federal buildings, nuclear power plants and commercial airlines.

In March, the New Hampshire House Transportation Committee, in passing the one-page bill opposing the Real ID Act, called the federal law "repugnant." New Hampshire estimated it would cost the state $10 million to comply with the Real ID Act, of which the federal government would have paid $3 million, according to a ComputerWorld report.

The strong opposition has Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, considering introducing legislation to repeal the provisions of the Real ID Act pertaining to driver's license requirements.

The acting deputy commissioner at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service has been given the fulltime job, according to an agency news release.

Barney Brasseux, a longtime GSA employee and member of the Senior Executive Service, will serve as the FAS deputy commissioner under Jim Williams, the FAS commissioner. Brasseux previously served concurrently as acting deputy commissioner and assistant commissioner for travel, motor vehicles, and card services.

“The skills, knowledge, and energy that Barney has already demonstrated as acting deputy commissioner give me great confidence in his ability to lead the Federal Acquisition Service in this role," Williams said in a news release.

Brasseux joined GSA’s old Federal Supply Service in 1993 serving in a variety of positions in the travel and transportation, services acquisition, and automotive organizations. He also had a stint as the organization's chief of staff.

Brasseux joined the government in 1982 as assistant to the director of the White House Travel Office. He arranged travel arrangements for the White House press corps in conjunction with President Reagan's domestic and international travel.

Brasseux worked in resolving the disagreements between the agency and the National Federation of Federal Employees union as one of the final hurdles in combining the old Federal Supply Service and Federal Technology Service.

With all the conflicting testimony and claims of not being able to remember specific statements that are central to the Hatch Act violations leveled at General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan, one wonders if someone just may have recorded or videotaped the infamous January 26 meeting. That way we would know for sure what was, or was not, said.

Unfortunately, there is no such recording of the meeting held at the General Services Administration headquarters building in Washington, D.C. At the meeting, a deputy of White House political strategist Karl Rove presented to more than 30 agency political appointees a PowerPoint presentation that analyzed the results of the 2006 midterm election. The Office of Special Counsel ruled Doan violated the Hatch Act by inducing "her subordinates to engage in the type of political brainstorming session that is prohibited from occurring while the political appointees are on duty or in a federal workplace." Witnesses testified that Doan asked the presenter how GSA could help Republican candidates in the next election. Doan testified she cannot recall asking the question.

A recording of the meeting would help. But according to a reply to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Government Executive, none of the equipment used to facilitate the meeting -- which included attendees joining the meeting via video conference -- was set up for, or capable of, making an audio or video recording.

The response to the FOIA request states that the GSA video managers responsible for setting up the video conference said that the equipment used for the meeting was a standard Polycom MGC-50 audio/video bridge. The bridge is capable of bringing together 24 video and 48 audio sites on a single conference call, but is not equipped to record conversations.

As the Office of Special Counsel report suggests, the only way to find out what Doan said at the conclusion of the presentation is to rely on the memory of the witnesses, who testified that Doan asked how the agency could help Republican candidates.

As Americans embrace technology, specifically the Internet, they will become increasingly more conservative and, therefore, more Republican.

That's the assessment of Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser. In an article appearing in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker magazine, Rove theorizes that Republicans, despite losing Congress in the 2006 elections and facing low approval ratings, will dominate future elections because Americans are becoming more technologically savvy. His quote from the article:

"There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.

(The other societal trend driving Americans to the right, Rove says, is baby boomers becoming more spiritual as they grow older, which translates into being more conservative. But that topic is for another blog.)

As for the technology-Republican-link theory, we're waiting for a rebuttal from technologist and Democrat Al Gore.

Most of the press accounts about a security and privacy memo that the Office of Management and Budget issued this month focused on OMB's request that agencies reduce the use of Americans' Social Security numbers as much as possible.

The memo, written by OMB Deputy Director for Management Clay Johnson, also gave agencies 120 days to come up with a security breach notification policy. That particular issue has been a sore point for privacy and security advocates.

The memo had four attachments to guide agencies when creating a notification policy. The memo stated:

In formulating a breach notification policy, agencies must review their existing requirements with respect to Privacy and Security (see Attachment 1). The policy must include existing and new requirements for Incident Reporting and Handling (see Attachment 2) as well as External Breach Notification (see Attachment 3). Finally, this document requires agencies to develop policies concerning the responsibilities of individuals authorized to access personally identifiable information (see Attachment 4).

Both federal and state governments have been criticized for not developing security breach notification policies while they either have passed legislation or are considering bills that require the private sector to do so.

Johnson also suggests to agencies that the "greatest benefit" in dealing with security breaches is to be proactive by "reducing the volume of collected and retained information to the minimum necessary; limiting access to only those individuals who must have such access; and using encryption, strong authentication procedures, and other security controls to make information unusable by unauthorized individuals."

Just two months ago, the Cyber Security Industry Alliance criticized President Bush's Identity Theft Task Force for not recommending in its report that agencies be required, as is the private sector, to notify individuals whose private data may have been stolen or compromised during a security breach.

Johnson's memo lays out five factors -- with a number of vague contingencies -- that agencies consider to determine the level of risk that a particular security breach poses to personal data before notifying the public, including considering the sensitivity of the data elements in their context and how likely the data was stolen or breached.

Hat tip: ComputerWorld

The General Services Administration plans to hold a press conference Thursday to announce the second and final governmentwide Networx contract, known as Enterprise.

According to a media advisory sent Monday morning, GSA Administrator Lurita Doan and John Johnson, the Federal Acquisition Service’s assistant commissioner for integrated technology services, will discuss award and program specifics at GSA's central office in Washington, D.C., at 10:30 a.m.

Networx is the largest federal telecommunications acquisition and is the third in a series of programs GSA developed in partnership with other federal agencies. The Networx program consists of the Enterprise contract (worth an estimated $20.1 billion) and the much larger Networx Universal contract (worth an estimated $48.1 billion), which was awarded in March.

It was just a matter of time before Google and the tough privacy laws in the European Union bumped heads. An independent European Union panel has sent a letter to Google asking it to address numerous concerns, including storing personal data of its users for up to two years, the Associated Press reported Friday. The EU has some of the strictest privacy laws on the books, much more so than U.S. privacy laws. Google's privacy officer says Google stores user information to protect it from hackers.

A Government Accountability Office report released last week pointing out major security weaknesses in one of the FBI critical networks was a big topic for bloggers this long Memorial Day weekend. Carl Weinshenk of IT Business Edge was the latest blogger to post biting commentary, writing that "an observer is left to wonder whether the problem is more a lack of accountability and corporate inertia than the possibility that security is being run by the descendents of Benny Hill." (Tech Insider posted an item on the report, too.) Other bloggers offered up hard criticism, too. The story was carried worldwide, all the way to Australia and on newswires. This may be one GAO report that doesn't sit on the shelf.

With the passage of the final fiscal 2007 spending bills earlier this year, the Office of Management and Budget could finally figure out exactly how the proposed fiscal 2008 information technology spending compares with fiscal 2007.

The answer: The fiscal 2008 spending request of $66.4 billion represents a 2.3 percent increase from fiscal 2007, according to an updated annual report. That's a bit lower than OMB's 2.6 percent guess when the budget was released in February. That continues a trend over the past few years of ever smaller increases in IT spending. The Bush administration asked for a 3 percent increase in fiscal 2007.

The details for the IT spending are normally released with the annual budget submission in February, but agencies were unable to produce the information needed for the report due to the delay in completion of the fiscal 2007 appropriations process.

The Federal Aviation Administration's chief information officer, David Bowen, said this week that the agency wouldn't make an impending deadline to comply with a governmentwide mandate for implementing an employee identification system.

We asked the Office of Management and Budget to clarify what the deadline is and how many agencies are likely to meet it. The directive, known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, HSPD 12 for short, requires agencies to complete background checks and issue personal identity verification credentials "to a significant portion of their employees and contractor population by Oct. 27, 2007. In September 2006 agencies submitted updated HSPD-12 plans, and agencies are on track to meet the milestones indicated in their OMB-agreed upon implementation plans," the spokeswoman said.

Asked to define a "significant portion," the OMB spokeswoman replied that the interpretation of a "significant portion" depends on agency-specific implementation plans. The spokeswoman said that OMB expects agencies to have by October 2008 credentials issued to all, or the majority of all, their employees and contractors as indicated in their plans.

The head of a group of tax preparers who provide free tax-preparation services under an IRS program sent a letter yesterday to members of the Senate Finance Committee complaining about the IRS' plans to create an agency web site that will offer the same service, according to a press release issued by the Free File Alliance.

In the letter, Tim Hugo, executive director of the alliance, which provides tax-preparation and electronic-filing services for low-to-moderate income families under an agreement with the IRS, wrote, "If Congress enacts the web portal proposal, it would abrogate the current agreement between the Free File Alliance and the IRS. Per the terms of that Agreement, the Alliance would dissolve and cease to be an entity providing free Income Tax Returns and electronic filing to millions of Americans."

Hugo argues that the IRS web portal would make the government a direct and subsidized competitor to the private companies. Alliance members include H&R Block and Intuit's Turbo Tax. Families with adjusted gross incomes of $52,000 a year are eligible to take part in the Free File program. The Free File Alliance prepared and filed taxes for 20 million Americans this past tax season.

Congress and the IRS are concerned that hidden fees and the poor quality of tax preparation services offered to Free File customers is holding back e-filing of taxes and is driving the government to consider building an IRS web portal for tax filing. "If the tax preparation industry cannot provide free basic filing services without hidden costs and traps, perhaps it is time to consider having the IRS provide a direct filing portal to enable all taxpayers to file electronically without cost," wrote Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Max Baucus, D-Mont., then the committee's ranking member, in a November 2006 letter to IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.

Most taxpayers using Free File must pay a fee to have their taxes electronically filed to the IRS, and alliance members make money by providing other services.

The FBI's effort to upgrade its computer systems -- a program that has had numerous missteps and failures over the years -- is again under fire. This time the Government Accountability Office concludes in a report released this week that the FBI's new network has major security lapses that leave the system open to hackers both inside the agency and out.

The GAO concluded that the bureau hasn't followed some of the most basic security practices when modernizing its computer networks, a program aimed at allowing agents nationwide to share evidence in investigations and to better manage their own cases.

The list of shortcomings is long, including not installing identity management controls to filter out unauthorized users, encrypting sensitive data, not recording or monitoring who accesses sensitive information, or updating software patches on a timely basis to protect the system from the latest viruses and security holes. "Taken collectively, these weaknesses place sensitive information transmitted on the network at risk of unauthorized disclosure or modification, and could result in a disruption of service, increasing the bureau’s vulnerability to insider threats," the GAO concluded in what can arguably be characterized as an understatement.

The unnamed network is part of the FBI's troubled Trilogy program to upgrade the antiquated information networks at the bureau. Trilogy has had a series of setbacks, cost overruns, delays and failures, the most notable of which was the failure of a system to allow agents to share evidence and other information on cases they were investigating, called the Virtual Case File. The FBI killed the system after spending $170 million on the project. Trilogy ran into serious enough problems that Congress began holding hearings on the progress of the modernization effort as early as 2002.

Hat tip: Wired

In one of its recent reports on the U.S. workforce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology workers don't work the long hours that the media and, well, the IT industry have portrayed. The average computer professional works 42 hours and 24 minutes a week, according to the BLS. That's the lightest work week of any professional group save one -- that would be educators, trainers and librarians, who average 41 hours and 18 minutes a week, blogger Eric Chabrow of CIO Insight journal wrote in his blog.

To top it off, Chabrow points out, IT workers as a group had the fewest portion of workers working the insane 60-plus hours a week: 7 percent of IT professionals say they work those long hours. Legal professionals have the largest percentage of workers (15 percent) who say they work more than 60 hours a week.

Another interesting fact in the BLS survey, Chabrow points out: The number of women working in the IT field dropped by 75,000 from 2000 to 2006. Chabrow, using that statistic, busts another myth: Women are leaving the IT field because of the long hours, which leaves less time for family. If that is not the case, then what gives?

As expected, many readers questioned BLS' stats when Chabrow first wrote about the survey findings in April.

Reporters typically try to get both sides of a story. So, when someone alleges or rules that an individual, say, violated a law, a reporter asks the accused for a response.

That's what we did when the Office of Special Counsel ruled that Lurita Doan, the head of the General Services Administration, violated the Hatch Act. Typically, a reporter will get one response. But Doan gave us, over a three-hour period, three slightly different statements.

Listed below are her statements sent via email. The bold portions are words that were either altered or removed in the succeeding response.

Government Executive received its first statement via email from Doan at 2:37 p.m., Wednesday:

I received the staff-drafted report, and I disagree with its preliminary findings. I have concerns with the leaps in logic and the many inaccuracies contained in it, such as an error as simple as citing a non-existent employee in my office. I have an opportunity, which I will take, to work with the Office of Special Counsel to correct the many inaccuracies before the final report is issued.

Doan then sent a second response via email at 5:07 p.m., Wednesday:

I received the staff-drafted report, and I disagree with its preliminary findings. I fundamentally disagree with the approach taken by investigators to include facts and information that were not included in the report. I have an opportunity, which I will take, to work with the Office of Special Counsel to correct the many inaccuracies before the final report is issued.

The final statement was received by Government Executive at 5:27 p.m., Wednesday:

I received the staff-drafted report, and I disagree with its preliminary findings. I fundamentally disagree with the approach taken by investigators, including the omission of important and relevant facts from the report. I have an opportunity, which I will take, to work with the Office of Special Counsel to correct the many inaccuracies before the final report is issued.

Earlier today Government Executive reported that the Office of Special Counsel concluded that General Services Administration Administrator Lurita Doan violated the Hatch Act. The 21-page report, obtained by Government Executive, is a sharply worded document that calls into questions much of Doan's recollection, or lack thereof, of the charge that she violated the law by hosting a meeting at GSA headquarters, where a special assistant to the president showed a PowerPoint presentation that analyzed the results of the 2006 midterm election. Doan allegedly asked how GSA could help the Republican candidates.

The report is full of details of Doan's testimony and questions of how it contradicts other witness testimony, most of which we could not fit in the news story. We provide some for you here:

-- Throughout the report, investigator Scott Bloch suggests that Doan did not give an accurate portrayal of the events that occurred at the January meeting. For example, according to the report, Doan told investigators that she did not pay attention to the PowerPoint slide presentation on the 2006 elections because:

she dislikes PowerPoint presentations; she was uninterested in the topic; she does not care about polls; and, she felt the presentation had nothing to do with her or what she does on a daily basis at GSA. Lastly, Administrator Doan testified that she was on her Blackberry ... reviewing emails ... and only periodically looked up and down.

In a footnote, investigators report that Doan contributed $226,000 to Republican candidates and Republican organizations and asked Doan why she contributed to candidates and organizations when "she does not care about polls or election results. Doan responded by testifying that the contributions had been 'taken out of context.'" She told the OSC that she does not believe that $225,000 is a substantial amount in light of her other contributions to nonpolitical organizations, such as giving more than $1 million to her alma mater Vassar College, more than a half a million dollars to the New Harman Center of Shakespeare Theatre and more than $50,000 to fund minority businesses.

"Although Ms. Doan again repeated that her donations to these Republican organizations have been taken out of context," according to the report, "she failed to explain why she donated any amount to these organizations whose purpose is to elect Republican candidates."

Also, an OSC review of her e-mail use during the meeting failed to corroborate that she was checking or sending email via her BlackBerry.

-- The report challenges Doan's claim that she cannot remember whether or not she made any remark along the lines of "how can we help our candidates," but the report provides a long list of events at the meeting she did recall:

Administrator Doan testified that as she was getting ready to leave for the January 26 meeting, she was interrupted by a phone call or her personal digital assistant. She testified that she told Meghan and Brittany, her two assistants, that she would be down to the meeting in a few minutes. She remembered that they took with them the cookies she had purchased previously for the meeting. Upon entering the meeting, she remembers being surprised that the video conferencing system and the refresh rate were working. Ms. Doan also testified that she remembered thinking that there were not that many people at the meeting. Administrator Doan also remembered that she sat near Mr. Jennings and was sitting near a "young perky looking" woman, whom she thought might be a new GSA employee. Administrator Doan remembers that Kevin Messner was sitting at the far end of the table. She also remembered that three or four people left during the presentation including her Associate Administrator for Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs. Despite remembering all of these details concerning the meeting, Administrator Doan testified that she could not remember whether she made any comment about "how can we help our candidates.

Doan also told OSC that she did not give Scott Jennings, who presented the slide show, a tour of GSA's offices and did not know if Jennings went elsewhere in the building after the presentation. But Jennings and GSA White House Liaison J.B. Horton told OSC that after the meeting, Doan gave Jennings a tour of the immediate area around her office and talked about the artwork.

-- Investigators report that Doan tried to defend her contention that she could not remember the statement regarding helping candidates by questioning the memory of the witnesses who testified that she did ask the quesiton:

Administrator Doan's implication that the adverse testimony provided by her political appointees should be questioned because of the alleged variations is unconvincing. Administrator Doan is holding the adverse witnesses to a standard which she does not hold herself. First Ms. Doan does not recall or remember anything about Mr. Jennings' presentation or any of the comments that Mr. Jennings' made, yet she claims to remember the statements made by attendees after Mr. Jennings' presentation concluded. Second, with respect to the alleged statements she can remember, they were preface with a caveat that she could not recall verbatim what she said.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that the Office of Management and Budget has asked agencies to limit the use of Social Security numbers when collecting information from Americans so that it can reduce the chance of identity theft.

The small step -- OMB is asking agencies to limit the use of Social Security numbers to the "minimum necessary for the proper performance" of their duties -- is still behind what some states and companies did five years ago to eliminate all together the use of Social Security numbers as unique identifiers. A California law, which took effect in 2002, prohibited companies from using California residents' Social Security numbers as an identifier. Universities, such as Stanford, Wisconsin and Arizona, instituted policies years ago that prohibited the use of Social Security numbers, and the movement picked up steam in 2002 when students at other universities began to demand that their schools not use their Social Security numbers. The next year, IBM required its more than 100 health insurance providers to stop printing Social Security numbers on medical ID cards, claims forms and other documents or risk losing its business.

But as in the case of IBM, limiting the policy to just a narrow part of operations will not do much to eliminate the risk of losing personal information. In March IBM announced it had lost computer tapes containing the Social Security numbers of current and former IBM employees.

The U.S. Postal Service reports that it is one of five finalists competing for an award for "Deploying Wireless Mobility in the Enterprise." The award is part of the larger "Best Practices in Mobile & Wireless" Awards Program sponsored by ComputerWorld.

USPS was nominated for its IT Self Service Administration, which links legacy systems to mobile devices to distribute workload, capture statistics, and automate administrative and reporting functions.

A General Services Administration spokesman confirmed Wednesday that the agency plans to award before the end of the month the second and final governmentwide Networx Enterprise contract. That means the award will come Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday since Monday is a federal holiday and Friday marks the first day of June.

Networx is the largest federal telecommunications acquisition and is the third in a series of programs GSA developed in partnership with other federal agencies.

The Networx program consists of the Enterprise contract (worth an estimated $20.1 billion) and the much larger Networx Universal contract (worth an estimated $48.1 billion), which was awarded in March.

The Federal Aviation Administration has put encryption software on 20,000 laptops in an effort to protect personally identifiable information, the agency's chief information officer said yesterday.

FAA CIO David Bowen said securing the personal identities of agency employees is a top priority. Last summer Bowen said he talked to senior agency officials about keeping laptops, on which is stored personal information, from "walking out of the building." Because it was difficult for the FAA to determine which computers had stored sensitive information, the IT department decided to encrypt all the data on laptops.

Bowen, who was speaking at a breakfast hosted by the Reston, Va.-based market research firm INPUT, also said the FAA will work to comply with the governmentwide mandate for implementing a new employee identification system, known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, which requires agencies to provide employees with a common identification card that can be used everywhere, from access to buildings to access to computers. Managing the huge effort (an estimated 5 million cards must be handed out) has been challenging for agencies.

"One of the ways we protect our systems is through physical security," Bowen said. "Our intent is to very aggressively deploy the card for physical access and replace our physical access in all of those locations."

The agency has 1,122 business sites, all of which are considered secure locations. The FAA manages the security of those sites from a physical (buildings) and cyber (information and computers) approach. (That management approach is known as convergence.)

Bowen also said that in response to a question from the Transportation Department Inspector General about what the FAA would do if one of its control centers was no longer operational, the agency began studying how to set up a backup facility at the agency's Williams J. Hughes Technical Center near Atlantic City, N.J. " In this new world, we can control air traffic from almost anywhere," Bowen said.

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

Here's more news on health networks.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, another arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, issued May 21 a request for proposals
for a Network of Patient Safety Databases, which will house information on aggregated patient safety information. The data will not have any personally identifiable information.

The network will contain information submitted by physicians on a confidential basis about “close calls” in clinical procedures. The RFP does not define a “close call," but I imagine it can range from prescribing the wrong drug to surgically removing a healthy, rather than a diseased, organ. The close calls will be reported to Patient Safety Organizations, which are just now being created. The PSOs will use the aggregated information to improve the quality of care.

The network contract will run for three years, and although the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality did not provide a value for the contract, it probably is big enough to attract the attention of a wide range of systems integrators.

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information plans to field its first trials of a computer network that will test how Americans’ electronic health records could be shared nationwide.

The office plans to award up to 10 one-year contracts to tie together state and regional health care groups that use electronic health records in their operations to become components of a larger network. The office gave no time frame for the awards.

The national coordinator’s office, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, refers to the system as a “network of networks,” which once built out will be called the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The national coordinator’s office envisions the NHIN allowing clinicians from Maine to California to exchange and view the electronic health records on every patient in the United States. President Bush has set a goal of creating electronic health records for most Americans by 2014.

In November 2005, the national coordinator’s office awarded contracts to Accenture, Computer Science Corporation, IBM and Northrop Grumman to develop regional NHIN prototypes by partnering with regional health care organizations. The upcoming trial apparently is the next stage of testing the NHIN by tying these regional networks together to test how the system could operate on a larger scale.

The national coordinator’s office plans to hold on May 23 a pre-solicitation Webinar on the network of networks trial and also plans to issue a request for proposals in early June. The office said it anticipates awarding up to a third of the contracts to small businesses.

Recent articles cyberattacks on Estonia's government Web sites has posed some complex policy and legal questions for governments -- is a cyberattack equivalent to an armed attack? Slate's Anne Applebaum points out in her article posted today that Estonia is a member, albeit a new one, to NATO, which, according to the alliance treaty, considers "an armed attack on one of its members 'an attack against them all.'" What to do?

When does cyberwarfare, or information warfare as the Defense Department calls it, become an attack worthy of retaliation, cyberbased or armed?

If you have some thoughts, please click the comment link below and let us know.

The following item has been updated to correct a misstatement about the personnel files of GSA employees who had given sworn statements to investigators. The Office of the Special Counsel had requested the files.

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan received an independent report Friday outlining its findings on whether she violated a law that limits government employees from participating in political activities.

The Office of Special Counsel investigated whether Doan violated the Hatch Act, and delivered its findings to Doan Friday, but the findings were not made public, government officials told Government Executive.

A spokeswoman for GSA said in a statement that Doan is "again disappointed in the failure to protect what remains an ongoing and confidential process." The spokeswoman would not comment on the contents of the report, which may or may not be made public. "It would be inappropriate for the administrator to comment on the investigation, until the process has been completed," the spokeswoman said.

A Jan. 26 meeting at GSA’s headquarters is at the center of the allegations that Doan violated the Hatch Act. The meeting, attended by Doan and about 40 other political appointees, included a PowerPoint presentation by Scott Jennings, a deputy to Karl Rove, the leading political strategist at the White House. Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee say the presentation was clearly political. The slides listed Republican and Democratic House districts viewed by the White House as most vulnerable in 2008 and included a map showing the Senate seats up for grabs in the 2008 election and whether the White House believes Republicans will have to play "defense" or "offense" for each seat.

Doan testified before the panel that she thought the meeting was appropriate. But she said she could not remember the details of the meeting, other than that people arrived late, quite a few were absent and there were "cookies on the table."

According to government sources, Doan has two weeks from Friday to respond to the report. After she responds, OSC investigators will review it and deliver a final report to President Bush because Doan is a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate -- known as a PAS. OSC cannot take disciplinary action against a PAS and there is no word on whether OSC will make its report public.

The OSC has requested GSA to provide the personnel files of GSA employees who gave sworn statements to investigators claiming Doan asked at the conclusion of the presentation how GSA could help "our candidates in the next election."

Problems with systems managing voter registration databases continue to pop up. This time it's in Texas, where a database of stored voter registration data did not respond quickly enough to queries and rejected eligible voters during local elections this month, ComputerWorld reports.

In addition to Texas, Sarasota County, Fla., as well as the Dutch have had problems with either voter registration systems or the actual electronic voting machines.

States have less than 18 months until the next Big Election to work out the glitches.

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

Here's more GPS news.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to make signals from Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (Glonass) free to anyone in the world, according to a report by Novosti, the Russian Information Agency.

Anatoly Perini, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, told Novosti that Glonass signals will be compatible with the U.S. GPS system and Galileo, the satellite navigation system planned by the European Union.

Glonass, like GPS, is based on a 24 satellite architecture, and Fernando Echavarria, who works for the Space and Advanced Technology office at the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs said in a presentation at the Space Technology Workshop in Rabat, Morocco, last month that the United States and Russia are working on interoperability between GPS and Glonass. The two systems would be available to civilian users, as well.

The EU had planned to charge for highly precise signals broadcast by its planned 30-satellite Galileo constellation, but that plan foundered last week due in part to the free signals available from GPS. Putin’s announcement – made the same day as the EU and Russia concluded a testy summit, appears as a way for Russia to tout its technological prowess and allay any suspicions of technological inferiority created by its decade-long struggle to make Glonass a reality.

But Glonass has it own set of problems, Novosti reported last month. "The Russian mission control center said only 12 out of the 19 Glonass satellites now in orbit are currently operating," the news agency reported. "Four more satellites now orbiting the Earth may be commissioned in the future, enlarging the Glonass cluster to 16 spacecraft.”

But some of the operating satellites are "obsolete" and "may stop functioning by late 2008," Novosti reported. "In this case, Russia will have to launch 17 new satellites by the end of 2009. And working out the required launch schedule would be a mind-boggling task. “

The "GPS Race" may just be heating up.

If you needed a reminder that government information technology does have an impact on the daily lives of the public, consider what has been playing out in Maine for the past two plus years.

The state, along with contractor CNSI, have spent the past six years building a computer system to process Medicaid claims that doctors, hospitals and other health care clinicians submit for payment. Right from the start, however, the system had numerous software problems, which caused many Medicaid recipients to not receive health care and which delayed payments to health care providers, creating serious financial problems for many. After spending more than $70 million on the system (the original cost was $15 million), the state decided to kill the system and seek to outsource the claims processing. (I wrote about the problems in a feature for CIO Magazine last year.)

Despite the system's improved performance and the fact that Maine plans to outsource the work, Maine health care providers, advocacy groups and citizens still are expressing anger, as a sharply worded editorial that appeared last week in the Kennebec Journal illustrates. "Discredited functionaries" is how the editors described the state's public managers. That editorial drew an equally strong response today from the commissioner of Maine's Department of Health and Human Services. "Perhaps hyperbole has no bounds," Commissioner Brenda Harvey fired back.

Maine plans to contract with a private firm to manage the claims processing work and to provide a system that can expand as the federal government's Medicaid program demands increase. That contract should be awarded in about three more years.

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

It’s going to be real hard for anyone outside the Defense Department or its contactors to get even a peek at the request for proposals for the advanced Global Positioning System III satellite contract. The Air Force Space and Missiles Systems Center in beautiful downtown El Segundo, Calif., has limited access to contract documents to folks with a Defense Common Access Card (CAC), capable of digital authentication through a Pubic Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate.

The GPS III satellites, which the Air Force intends to start launching in 2012 represent a quantum leap in capabilities from today’s existing GPS satellites. So, it would be helpful to read about the specifications the Space and Missiles Systems Center has in RFP.

But the Air Force said in a notice on the procurement released May 18 that the GPS III RFP and its attachments are located in the bidders library at the GPS Joint Program Office, accessible only with a PKI equipped CAC or a Defense approved External Certification Authority PKI and handed out to industry partners or other organizations with which Defense wants to have secure communications.

This limitation on access to the GPS III RFP has been in place since early April, and when I first made a phone call about it last month, spokespeople at the GP JPO and the Space and Missiles Systems Center agreed on two things:

1. Even though I am a nice guy, they do not intend to issue a CAC card with a PKI certificate to me or any other reporter and;

2. The GPS III RFP should be a publicly available document, just like any other solicitation.

The Air Force has slipped the release of the GPS III RFP from May 21 to May 23, so maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by then that the contract documents have magically appeared on a Web site accessible to the public. My cynical side tends to doubt it.

A group of former and current State Department employees is calling into question the merits of an award-winning computer system designed to speed up the process of conducting security clearances, calling it "garbage in, garbage out."

The Concerned Foreign Service Officers, a group formed in 2005 by State Department employees who are concerned about abuses of the security clearance process, issued a press release Friday questioning the recognition that the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security has received for developing a computer system that decreases the time it takes to issue security clearances. The security-clearance process has strained under an increased demand since 9/11, with the backlog of security clearances remaining at more than 100,000 and taking more than a year to complete.

State Department employee Donald Reid "recently received an IT Leadership Award from Government Computer News, for innovation in the use of automation to facilitate the security clearance process," according to the press release. The security clearance system also received the Guardian Award from the Office of Personnel Management, according to the press release.

The Concerned Foreign Service Officers group agrees the system is an undeniable improvement over the paper-based system and reduces the time necessary to gather information for security clearance adjudications, but:

It is important to understand that the speed of information gathering is the ... least important aspect of the security clearance process. Two other aspects are considerably more important: the quality of investigative reports and the quality of adjudications. Like medicine or science, a security clearance adjudication is a qualitative function. To focus on the speed of the process is a bit like focusing on speed of intake, rather than diagnostic or treatment abilities, in a hospital.

In its press release, Concerned Foreign Service Officers congratulate the Bureau of Diplomatic Security on increasing the speed of its security clearance process, but "we only lament that the primary result of this improvement is that DS now makes bad determinations faster."

The State Department public affairs office declined to comment.

This following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

The European Union’s ambitious plan to build its own satellite navigation network to rival the United States’ Global Positioning System has run into a snag, with an industry consortium balking at financially supporting the effort.

The EU and the consortium – a who’s who of the European space and communications industries, including Alcatel-Lucent, European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, Inmarsat, and others – have not been able to negotiate a contract to fund the European navigation system, called Galileo. That has caused a ”serious threat” to the project, said Jacques Barrot, European Commission vice-president for Transport. If Galileo is to become reality, EU member countries and taxpayers would have to foot the bill, he said.

Galileo industry partners were expected to pay for two-thirds of the cost of the system and the EU one-third, with the investment paid back by the sale of satellite navigation services, the BBC reported. The BBC estimated the market for navigational services would hit $650 billion a year by 2025.

Despite the alluring revenue stream, maybe the industry consortium figured out the obvious: Why would anyone pay for precise location and navigation services from Galileo when they could get the same thing free from the U.S. backed GPS system, which is only going to get better.

The Times of London doubts if Galileo will ever get off the ground when it has to compete with free GPS service. “Europe’s desire to offer a competing system has been stymied by the free service provided by GPS,” the Times wrote in an opinion piece. “How do you persuade a minicab driver to subscribe to a Galileo navigation system when he can get GPS gratis?”

The EU has touted the accuracy of Galileo as better than GPS, with Galileo providing locations within one meter. But the Air Force plans to release a request for proposals this Monday for GPS III satellites, which will rival the accuracy of Galileo.

John Duddy, GPS program manager for Boeing, which with Lockheed Martin is on the Air Force short list for the GPS III contract, told Tech Insider that Boeing believes it can build GPS satellites that will provide accuracy “down to around a meter,” coupled with a more powerful signal than existing GPS birds.

Barrot said that EU member states must come up with funds for Galileo quickly to meet the service date of 2012. But considering the level of effort needed to get buy-in, the United States may well beat Galileo into orbit with the new GPS III satellites, which will provide four signals for civilian users and new jam-proof signals for military users.

James Miller, senior GPS technologist, space communications and navigation at NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said in a presentation last month at the Satellite Positioning and Application Research Center in Tokyo that the first GPS III satellite should be launched in 2013 or close to when the EU originally planned to turn on Galileo.

The Customs and Border Protection is not properly tracking whether foreign goods sent into the United States under a federal program allowing the goods to delay payment of duties and inspection are in fact being assessed duties and being inspected at another port, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Under the in-bond system, some foreign companies sending imports to the United States are allowed to delay duties and inspections until the goods reach another port. Many of these imports include goods that eventually will leave the United States bound for another country. The program was designed to keep goods moving quickly through crowded U.S. seaports, where infrastructures have not been able to keep up with a dramatic increase in imports. (The value of U.S. imports more than doubled in an eight-year period, from $881 billion in fiscal 1998 to an estimated $1.82 trillion in fiscal 2006, GAO reported.)

Under the in-bond program, the CBP must charge duties and inspect the goods if necessary when the goods reach another, less busy, port, reconciling the charges and inspections with the importer's in-bond documents in a computer system. But many of the documents are not reconciled, GAO charged. At the Newark, N.J., port, more than three-quarters of all in-bond shipments were unreconciled, and some ports, such as Los Angeles, the port with the largest amount of in-bond shipments, could not provide any data on how many in-bond shipments remained unreconciled.

GAO concluded that the large percentage of in-bond shipments that are not reconciled means a loss of revenue, a potential for fraudulent goods being dumped on the U.S. market and ultimately a security risk. "Lack of accurate information on the value of in-bond cargo prevents CBP from accurately determining the extent of any lost revenue," GAO reported.

CBP agents use information systems to reconcile the documents. Agents will be able to use a new trade system called the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) is expected to improve the process but is not expected to be ready for more than eight years, GAO reports. Development of the system, however, has been plagued by numerous problems. In its report, GAO wrote "that CBP faces long-standing management challenges and new risks associated with the development of ACE."

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

It’s time to put into perspective this kerfuffle over the Defense Department barring access to MySpace, YouTube and other video and social networking sites.

Yes, "War Is Hell," and that means troops in an all-volunteer military sometimes just don’t get everything they want or what is readily available to people in civilian life. Or, to update the best recruiting slogan ever hatched by my branch of service, the U.S. Marine Corps, “We Never Promised You a Rose Garden or Internet Access.”

The firestorm over DOD barring access to Web sites was kicked off by a tear-jerker of a lead in an Associated Press article carried by us and newspapers around the world from London to Perth, which said that a change in DOD policy barring soldiers’ access to social networking and video-streaming sites meant “soldiers serving overseas will lose some of their online links to friends and loved ones back home."

Somewhat true, but balderdash.

We have the most connected fighting force in the world. Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen today can communicate with their loved ones by email, cell phones, regular phones and computers in Internet cafes not hooked up to military networks. They also can go the old fashioned route: Write a letter via snail mail.

The only thing they can’t use as of this week are bandwidth hogging sites for the simple reason that no one, even DOD, has an unlimited amount of bandwidth to fritter away on social networking streaming video sites. There is a war on.

This wide range of communications options available to troops today stands in stark contrast to my experience in Vietnam, where a letter took days to reach home, or the experience of my father, who served in the Philippines during The Big One, and who had to wait weeks for his letters to reach home. U.S. military personnel today (including sailors and Marines floating around the bounding main) are far more connected than I or my father ever was.

The caterwauling by the chattering class about DOD and MySpace (The Washington Post declared this week that MySpace was “A Casualty of War”) also ignores one of the real harsh realities of war: The troops who most need access to creature comforts – the grunts who do the dirty work – have the least amount of access. Based on my experience, grunts don’t have high-speed Internet access, let alone access to essentials such as soap, water and hot meals. But, instead of focusing on that, folks such as Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass) are beating on DOD about barring access to MySpace over military networks.

Finally, I suggest anyone wasting time blogging or bloviating over DOD and MySpace in the greater Washington area can put their time to much better use by driving to Baltimore Washington International Airport to greet the soldiers coming off the charter flights from Iraq, look the soldiers in the eye, shake their hands and say, “Thank you for your service.”

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin

Vultures can stay aloft a long time without expending a lot of energy by riding thermals. So it makes sense that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has code named a program to develop an aircraft that can stay airborne for five years “The Vulture Air Vehicle Program.”

DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, released a solicitation notice Wednesday that asks industry to provide ideas for developing a 1,000-pound aircraft that can stay aloft for five years with a 99 percent-plus probability.

DARPA did not define the mission of the aircraft, but it probably includes using it as a way to gather signals intelligence or as a photo reconnaissance platform.

The research agency appears open to almost any idea that will help it achieve this goal but did rule out any aircraft powered by radiology or those that use any form of buoyant flight. That rules out blimps or dirigibles.

Based on the limited amount of information in the solicitation notice, DARPA appears to be leaning towards an electric aircraft which derives its energy from solar or fuel cells or a remotely refueled airplane. DARPA said,

architectures selected and the specific approaches taken by the Offerors will determine the range of technical areas that are developed, including, but not limited to, environmental energy collection, high specific energy storage, extremely efficient propulsion systems, precision robotic refueling, autonomous materiel transfer, extremely efficient vehicle structural design, and mitigation of environmentally-induced loads.

The electric powered option makes AeroEnvironment Inc., based in Monrovia, Calif., a likely candidate for the job. The company developed its “Helios” fuel and solar-cell powered flying wing for NASA, which in 2001 set an unofficial altitude record for a non-rocket powered aircraft of 96,863 feet. (View image.) The Helios developed structural problems on a test flight off the Hawaiian island of Kauai and crashed on a test flight in 2003.

Another likely bidder for the DARPA Vulture is Scaled Composites Inc., Mojave, Calif., headed by Burt Rutan, who flew around the word in 1986 in one of the company’s aircraft without refueling. (View image.)

Neither AeroEnvironment nor Scaled Composites responded to a query from Tech Insider by deadline. DARPA also could not comment by deadline.

DARPA wants anyone with a good idea for the Vulture project to soar into industry day planned for June 7 at the Westin Arlington Gateway, Fitzgerald Ballroom (2nd Floor), 801 N. Glebe Road Arlington, Va. Just follow the circling birds.

Electronic voting has had its critics, the loudest of which warn of security breaches and susceptibility of the machines to viruses. Now it seems theory has become reality.

Last October, in Florida's Sarasota County the Slammer Worm, which has been circling the Internet allies for five years, breached the county systems' firewalls to infiltrate a database containing registered voters, ComputerWorld reported yesterday. The infection occurred Oct. 23, the first day for early voting in Sarasota County. The system was down for two hours, leaving voters standing in line waiting to be confirmed as registered voters.

A Sarasota County "Security Control and Incident Report" concludes the Slammer Worm infected the system.

The delay could have played a big part in the outcome of the election. Sarasota County is part of the 13th congressional district, the site of a hotly contested election between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan. Buchanan won the election by 369 votes. Did the wait dissuade some from voting?

But there are other unanswered questions. Election officials also are concerned the worm or an unrelated computer malfunction of some kind may have affected the electronic voting machines themselves. Sarasota County reported a high rate of undervotes, about 18,000 in total, which represents 15 percent of all 13th District voters who showed up to vote early, according to a Bradenton [Fla.] Herald article posted today. Undervotes are votes that are cast but cannot be counted because of some technicality. Undervotes also include voters who actually voted in an election but chose for some reason not to vote for a candidate in a particular race, in this case choosing not to vote for a candidate in the congressional race.

Some have postulated that those missing votes were not the result of voters consciously choosing not to vote, but rather the result of the electronic voting machines not recording their vote for the congressional race. A New York Times Op-Ed in November called the 15 percent of voters who supposedly chose to skip voting in the highly contested and publicized 13th District congressional race "extraordinary" and compared the high rate to the "more plausible" 2.5 percent of undervotes found in paper absentee ballots.

There's also the issue of why Sarasota County had not patched its systems years ago to protect itself from the Slammer Worm, raising concerns about the thoroughness of the security and IT managers hired to maintain these systems.

Government workers aren't the only individuals who lose laptops, hard drives and computer tapes containing personal information. Private-sector employees, even those working for companies hired to protect personal data, do too, as IBM recently experienced. The company announced this week that it had lost tapes containing personal information including Social Security numbers for an undisclosed number of current and former IBM employees.

The loss is particularly uncomfortable for IBM, because, as ComputerWorld points out in an article on the loss, IBM lost the "personal employee data even though parts of its business and solutions portfolio are dedicated to securing and protecting that very type of private data for customers."

Still, that doesn't stop the public from complaining loudly and sharply about government agencies' failure to protect personal data. A case in point is a recent USA Today opinion piece, which Tech Insider linked to in a post. The article prompted one reader to comment, "Reading comments on a USA Today article should be mandatory for federal managers, so each can understand the proportion of USA Today readers who detest government and government employees."

A record number of taxpayers electronically filed their individual tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service for the 2007 tax filing season, the agency reported Tuesday.

The 76.7 million e-filed returns the IRS accepted through May 4 topped the 73.2 million electronically-filed returns received for all of 2006, with most of the increase coming in March and April, the IRS reported.

The agency's Web site, IRS.gov, also hit a record, receiving 140 million visits. A record 22 million people filed electronically from their home computers.

“E-file and our other electronic services helped us deliver a strong filing season for the nation’s taxpayers,” IRS Acting Commissioner Kevin Brown said in a statement. “Again this year, millions of additional taxpayers gave up paper tax returns to file electronically."

According to the IRS, the 2007 tax season saw a surge in electronic filing among last-minute filers, a group that has traditionally sent in paper returns. During the week that included this year’s tax-filing deadline (April 14 to 20), the number of electronically-filed returns received by the IRS jumped 35 percent over the comparable week last year. The overall number of returns (paper and electronic) received during that week rose only 12 percent, the IRS said.

Despite the positive numbers, the popularity of the Free File program -- an alliance of companies that offer free return preparation and electronic filing on their Web sites to eligible taxpayers -- for electronically filing federal income-tax returns continues to decline, according to the Government Accountability Office. According to an April GAO report, taxpayers' use of the Free File program declined 5.5 percent from the previous year. Free File, now 5 years old, is available to taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of up to $52,000 or about 70 percent of U.S. individuals.

The following item was posted by Bob Brewin.

The Defense Information Systems Agency has started to deploy throughout the Defense Department a Wi-Fi network monitoring tool dubbed “Flying Squirrel,” according to an internal agency briefing obtained by Tech Insider.

The name Flying Squirrel, I’m told, has nothing to do with DISA – whose headquarters on Courthouse Road in Arlington, Va., is pretty much in a squirrel-free zone – or with the actual device itself, but rather it’s just a moniker that caught the fancy of an unnamed developer at the Naval Research Lab, which created the monitoring tool. DISA, on the other hand, calls the system a “Wireless Discovery Tool.”

The Flying Squirrel provides the most basic defense of any Wi-Fi network against intruders who may monitor radio activity around a DOD facility or base, I’m told by an industry source well versed in its development.

Flying Squirrel’s software, the development of which was overseen by the U.S. Strategic Command’s Enterprisewide Information Assurance and Computer Network Defense Solutions Steering Group, sniffs for users on a Wi-Fi network and, once it finds one, captures the user’s unique identifying address and geolocation. Network personnel then check the address to determine if the user is an authorized or unauthorized user on the wireless network.

My source told me security personnel load Flying Squirrel on a notebook computer equipped with a Wi-Fi card or chip and then drive around the perimeter of a DOD base to locate Wi-Fi networks and users. The software, this source said, owes a lot to open source Wi-Fi sniffing tools such as NetStumbler or K