McCain's comments about his lack of familiarity with the Internet (and subsequent blogs about it) continued when he swung through the San Francisco Bay area this week, where he told reporters that he is forcing himself to use the computer more and more every day, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. McCain responded to a question concerning how he could be a 21st century president without being familiar with routine 21st century technology saying his time as chairman of the Commerce Committee for several years gave him intimate knowledge of technology's role in the economy and people's lives. "It's not as if I'm out of the loop," he said. "I understand the criticism, but I don't think it's fair."

Lee Gomes of The Wall Street Journal yesterday continued the debate over whether a president should use a computer. (The whole discussion started two weeks ago when The New York Times published an article in which John McCain said he is "becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need." He added that he doesn't feel the need to e-mail. The comments sparked numerous blogs (including one from FedBlog and two from Tech Insider, here and here) to debate whether that showed McCain out of touch or someone who has reached a level in his career that such mundane workplace practices are distracting.

In his column, Gomes comes down somewhere in the middle. He wrote:

If I were the chief of staff at the White House, I would have some sort of computer, not in the Oval Office itself, since it wouldn't match the furniture, but one office away. I'd push the president to spend, say, 20 minutes a day on the machine -- whether he would complain about the limit or about the mandated time.

The president wouldn't need to worry about his email inbox; a staff would be standing by ready to handle it. . . . The president could use his computer time any way he wished: a favorite blog, YouTube videos, a mind-clearing game of Spider Solitaire. So many of his constituents would be doing the same thing at the same time, it would be a good way to keep up with the common folk.

Gomes' point hits on the subtlety of the argument, although the headline for the column -- "Note to President: Avoid Computers" -- suggests otherwise. It's not that the president should be technologically literate so that he can do his job more efficiently. Rather, by familairizing yourself with the Internet, a president learns how most Americans work, where and how they get information, and what is one of the biggest drivers of the economy. It helps form the context that is so important to informing policy.

The State Department has opened a new exhibit that displays the technology that Cold War-era spies used to eavesdrop to listen in on top-secret conversations or steal sensitive information. Scientific American has a brief writeup on the exhibit and slide show.

One of the more interesting electronic eavesdropping devices sounds like a popular hacking techniques hackers use on PCs today to steal passwords, bank account numbers and other sensitive information. It's called keystroke logging. "Because the Selectric coupled a motor to a mechanical assembly, pressing different keys caused the motor to draw different amounts of current specific to each key," according to a State Department brochure promoting the exhibit. "By closely measuring the current used by the typewriter, it was possible to determine what was being typed on the machine."

State was on to the practice. In what could be described as a patch, the agency masked the electric pulses with "inertia" motors that absorbed the stress on the motor, masking the amount of electricity it was drawing. Not sure if there is an analogous solution for PCs.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has proposed closing the state's $15.2 billion budget deficit by cutting the pay of about 200,000 state employees. But as do most changes in policies, this one has an information technology angle that muddies the water.

As reported in The San Jose Mercury News, California's controller, John Chiang, a Democrat, has said he will ignore Schwarzenegger's order and pay employees. The controller is not permitted to pay state employees without a budget, but the state's Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that those employees paid by the hour and entitled to federal minimum wage, as well as those who work overtime, can be paid without a budget. To do that, California's payroll system would have to be reprogrammed to identify those employees who can be paid -- a job that could take weeks or months, Chiang said.

Whether that is indeed the case is up for debate. The last time such a reprogramming was considered (in 2003), then controller Democrat Steve Westly said the technical changes could be managed. On Monday, Westley told the Mercury News that it would take much longer. Who knows?

The following entry was posted by Tom Shoop.

Newsweek's Anna Quindlen weighs in on the whole John McCain as technophobe issue this this week. She leads with a great quote from the book In Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails, by Tom Wheeler, about Abraham Lincoln's eager embrace of the cutting-edge communication technology of his generation -- the telegraph.

"Lincoln's early-adopter instincts," Wheeler writes, "coupled with his being unburdened by the old dogmas, allowed him to outperform his generals in the ability to see change and harness it to his purpose."

McCain's response to the Mac-or-PC question about his computer preferences -- "neither" -- "sounded pretty last-generation," Quindlen writes, "like those execs who have their assistants print out the e-mail. Maybe that's why the McCain camp has suddenly gotten aggressive on the tech defense front, putting out a recent statement that says the candidate is now "becoming more familiar with the Internet." Good thing. It's America's keyhole. It pays to listen."

As Quindlen notes, the issue here isn't that McCain is old. There are plenty of people his age and older who e-mail and use the Web regularly, and some who do much more than that. The issue is that he's willfully ignoring technological advances that are having a dramatic effect on the way the country -- and the federal government -- operates.

The following entry was posted by Gautham Nagesh.

Despite the problems with GSA’s Multiple Awards Schedule vehicles, some in Washington think that an advisory panel might not be the best way to fix them.

Former GSA Administrator Lurita Doan convened the panel in March to look at how GSA could make it easier for companies attempting to do business with the government via the schedules. Companies had expressed increasing frustration with the myriad rules and pricing regulations associated with the contracts.

However, over four meetings from May and June, only one customer agency, the Justice Department, showed up to express its views. Panel members have since invited more agencies to speak, but there is not much indication that interest has grown.

Thursday, though, House Oversight Committee Henry Waxman, D-Cali., sent a letter to acting GSA Administrator David Bibb, questioning whether the panel is “a wise use of taxpayer’s money.” Waxman’s query was based on the indication that no one in the agency aside from Doan and no vendors had expressed the need for such a panel.

The panel last met on July 21. Its next scheduled meeting will be on Aug. 18. Only time will tell if that meeting will come to pass, or if Bibb will heed Waxman’s advice and simply let the panel wither away.

The following item was posted by Tom Shoop.

The Army has long relied on videogames for training purposes. But most of them are straightforward shoot-em-ups that simulate battles.

Now, Danger Room reports, Maj. Kyle Burley, a staffer at the Army War College, wants to develop a new kind of game that "simulates decision-making at strategic levels." It'd be a virtual world, 3D kind of thing, in which players would take on the role of military commanders, choosing avatars and interacting with each other in moderated chat rooms. Kind of like World of Warcraft, except without the mythological creatures.

In WoW, Burley says, "the collaborative element is useful -- you’ve got chat and avatars -- but the actual content and setting aren't what we’d like for having role players have committee meetings with the State Department."

There's a potential major defense scandal brewing. As reported by Government Executive's Robert Brodsky, the GAO released a report yesterday claiming that it "found a too-cozy relationship between management at the Defense Contract Audit Agency and some of the contractors they are assigned to audit. GAO also said auditors who complied with the investigation were subject to harassment and intimidation from their supervisors."

DCAA totally rejects the GAO report, saying in the Washington Post that there was "no evidence to support GAO's conclusions that 'DCAA managers took actions against their staff that hindered their investigations.' "

I don't know how accurate the GAO report is, but in reading it there is an awful lot of thick smoke being produced for there to be no fire, and the GAO only got involved because of numerous complaints to its fraud hotline.

If the GAO report turns out to be true, expect it to rapidly erode whatever little faith is left in defense acquisition by Congress and the public. Defense officials may claim that the acquisition process is not broken, just bent, but this could expose it as being shattered. If DCAA audits don't represent a program's "financial ground truth," it undermines the accuracy of a whole lot of reports to Congress. That would not make it very happy.

At the very least, expect calls from Congress for detailed, additional audits of defense contractors, as well as calls for the mandatory rotation of DCAA supervisors similar to what is being called for (but resisted) at the FAA when its inspectors were found to be too cozy with the airlines. As you may recall, FAA management also denied that there was a problem, until investigations of whistle blower complaints exposed the truth.

Congressional hearing will no doubt soon be scheduled to see whether there really is fire responsible for all that smoke.

NASA has long helped in the battle against wildfires by contributing satellite data and tools to analyze the spread and impact of fires. The agency's unmanned Ikhana aircraft, for example, recently pinpointed hotspots in California.

Now the space agency has collected its fire and smoke imagery and data into a new Web site. The site features images of fires around the country and the world captured by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instruments on its Aqua and Terra satellites. --Tom Shoop

Richard Spires, former chief information officer and later deputy commissioner for operational support at the Internal Revenue Service, is leaving. Spires, who oversaw much of the agency's modernization effort, announced this week that he would be leaving the agency "sometime in the next few months."

In an e-mail to staff, Spires wrote, "I believe that, having assisted Linda Stiff in her acting commissioner capacity and now having helped Commissioner [Douglas] Shulman transition into his new position, this is the right time for me to move on. It is very important that Commissioner Shulman be able to build a team that can work with him for the duration of his five-year term."

Spires left his post as president of consulting firm Mantas Inc. to join the IRS in 2004 as associate chief information officer reporting to CIO Todd Grams. He joined the agency at a time when the multibillion-dollar modernization effort was suffering from cost overruns and delays, and is credited with helping turn improve the program's management.

In one of his last interviews with Nextgov.com in March, Spires talked about completing back-office improvements to the Customer Account Data Engine, which replaced the decades-old Master File system. "Through March 7, CADE processed 15.1 million individual tax returns out of the more than 59 million received. In 2007, CADE processed a total of 11.2 million returns," according to the article. "Certainly the volumes speak for themselves," Spires said. "Additional infrastructure capabilities have made the system more robust. We feel good about its performance. It's worked exceedingly well."

Spires says he will pursue new career opportunities after leaving the IRS. His e-mail announcing his departure is posted below in its entirety:

With the primary election just a little more than three months away, articles warning about the problems electronic voting machines may pose are cropping up. Two today: One in The New York Times and another in USA Today.

What may exacerbate the problems is an expected record turnout, which will put strain on understaffed polls. A big problem, too, is the lack of training, which, as has been pointed in this blog before (here and here), can create major issues. Tech Insider blogger Dagne Fulcher also wrote about the importance of training.

The events over the weekend at IndyMac Bancorp reminded me of the scene from Disney's 1964 movie "Mary Poppins," when young Michael Banks accidentally causes a bank run when customers overhear him shouting, "Give me my money!" after Mr. Dawes senior grabs his tuppence.

The southern California bank was taken over by the Office of Thrift Supervision late Friday and reopened for business Monday as IndyMac Federal Bank. The bank was closed because the OTS thought it was "unlikely to be able to meet continued depositors’ demands in the normal course of business and is therefore in an unsafe and unsound condition."

In a major speech on national security yesterday at Purdue University, Barack Obama highlighted the need to face new threats and not continue “fighting the last war.” Loose nukes, bio-terrorism, and cybersecurity were the three themes.

The fact sheet accompanying the speech included a set of strategic proposals (see below) that address both privacy and security in a balanced fashion. These proposals bear careful evaluation, but clearly suggest a broader scope than the current administration’s “Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative.”

The encouraging news is that the most visible leaders in both parties, Bush (no word from McCain) and Obama, have officially recognized the critical national need to invest in cybersecurity. Obama’s engagement in the topic is real, as related in a very readable first-person account of the event by Purdue’s Gene Spafford, executive director of CERIAS, the cybersecurity center of excellence referred to by Obama. At this rate, the Nation may actually be able to get ahead of this continually evolving threat to the very assets that make us competitive and strong in the world.

For more details on the proposal, see my blog on Government Futures.

The following item was posted by Nextgov senior reporter Jill R. Aitoro.

In a House hearing on Wednesday about a proposed plan for collection of non-citizens’ biometric data upon exit from the United States, assistant professor Nathan Sales of George Mason University School of Law made an interesting observation: “Frankly, exit controls are less vital than entry controls. It’s more important to know if we’re keeping [terrorists] out, than to know if they left.”

Sales argued that both an entry and an exit system improve security by tracking foreign visitors in the United States, but his initial point raises some interesting questions about the allocation of program funds.

The Homeland Security Department already has spent millions of dollars on the US VISIT program to develop and test a system for checking visitors' identities when they enter and exit the country. (The airlines estimate it will cost $12.3 billion over 10 years to finish and maintain the exit portion of the system.) So far, no proposed procedures satisfy DHS, Congress, the airline industry or other private sector stakeholders. The proposals are either too expensive or they just don’t work.

What no one on the Hill will consider seriously, however, is whether an exit system is even worthwhile. Certainly, an exit system would provide DHS and the intelligence community a second chance, so to speak, to track down potentially dangerous people. But funds are scarce, and the federal government is not equipped to mitigate all existing security risks. There’s the need to prioritize.

Once terrorists get into the country, how likely are they to leave? And if they do, should that be the concern, or should the focus instead be on efforts to figure out how these individuals managed to enter in the first place? Could dollars allocated to an exit system perhaps be better spent improving security in other areas even, such as cargo transport and foreign intelligence? One has to wonder whether any of these questions has been seriously considered.

Often government pursues initiatives because they seem a logical next step, or because they happen to be mandated by a particular piece of legislation. Sometimes these initiatives are well thought out and prove worth the time and money, but other times a closer look reveals that the return on investment is not worthwhile, no matter how much technology is thrown in the mix. Consider the Census debacle, for example.

Should the exit portion of the US-VISIT program be scrapped? The answer is up for debate, but the question is at least worth asking.

The Agriculture Department's announced on Friday that it is going to start telling consumers in 30 days about which retail stores have received recalled poultry or meat. Previously, the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service would announce that there was a recall, provide a description of the recalled product, along with any identifying brand names or product codes, but not where the tainted food products were being sold.

Now, within three to 10 days of a recall notice, the Food Safety Inspection Service will provide the retail store information. According to the Agriculture Department, "the list of retail stores and locations compiled by FSIS personnel during this process will be posted on the FSIS Web site www.fsis.usda.gov and shared with state and local public health officials where the retail stores are located."

As I noted previously, the Agriculture Department and food industry have long resisted the move, but seemed to have changed its mind in the wake of potential congressional action after the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company’s recall of 143 million pounds of beef in February, the largest recall in history. That recall was sparked by video showing apparently sick cows being slaughtered and entering the food chain, something that isn't supposed to happen.

However, the new information only affects USDA Class I recalls, i.e., "a health hazard situation in which there is a reasonable probability that eating the food will cause health problems or death." The Westland/Hallmark recall was not a Class I event (it was Class II, a recall that "involves a potential health hazard situation in which there is a remote probability of adverse health consequences from eating the food"), and therefore wouldn’t have made the cut.

Oh well. At least score one for a little better risk management information being provided to the American consumer.

My colleague Tom Shoop continues a debate in Government Executive's Fed Blog on just how tech savvy government's top leaders need to be. In his blog, he writes about John McCain's comments to The New York Times that he relies on his wife and two aides to surf the Internet for him. But he is "learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. . . . I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

Last year, I wrote about Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates' description of himself as a "very low-tech person" and not using e-mail.

Shoop, who references the Gates' comments, too, wonders how leaders can make it through the day without using a computer. (Please check out his blog and comment.)

Last year, a reader, who had worked at the Pentagon, wondered the same thing after reading the blog item about Gates. In a posted comment, he (or she) wrote:

Recently I had a boss who didn't use e-mail either, whose calendar was booked full most days, and who was not readily available to discuss the day's issues. The result was he was out of the loop most of the time, he didn't know the pressing issues of the day, and he was rarely involved in decisions unless it was a very critical issue. No way to run a trillion-dollar operation in my opinion.

Ironically, the same commenter wrote that the "the smart [Pentagon leaders] that do use e-mail don't say much in them because they have learned that senators like McCain will subpoena them later."

Health services programs aimed at reducing the rate of pregnancy among teenagers may want to check out the latest from Scotland: Use computer games to reduce pregnancies for teenagers.

The idea is that the young women most prone to becoming pregnant are also the least likely to participate in, or respond to, the traditional classroom health education course aimed at reducing teen pregnancy. But they play computer games, according to the Scottish government. So, playing a virtual mother, which shows the work involved in raising a child, can reduce pregnancy rates, the government has shown.

W. Hord Tipton, who was chief information officer at the Interior Department for five years before retiring in January 2007, has been appointed executive director of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, which certifies information security professionals.

Tipton began serving as CIO at Interior shortly after a U.S. district judge ordered in 2001 that employees in the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs and other offices disconnect from the Internet. The ruling, which was part of a class action lawsuit filed against Interior for mismanagement of Indian trust accounts, was made after court-appointed specialists had hacked into the department’s systems and accessed data in the accounts, which track royalties paid to Indian tribes for payments covering such things as mineral rights, oil and grazing.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled in May that BIA and the other department offices (the Office of Hearings and Appeals, the Office of the Special Trustee and the Office of Historical Trust Accounting) could reconnect to the Internet, arguing that "it is not my role to weigh IT security risks."

For the second consecutive day, a major U.S. newspaper published an editorial about government information technology. in an editorial published in today's New York Times, the paper's editors argue that the Homeland Security Department's policy of seizing laptops at airports to search and download files "violates the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures." (Yesterday, The Washington Post wrote an editorial urging Congress to include in a bill a requirement that the Food and Drug Administration create a system to track food from the farm to the dinner table, a position that, as I blogged about yesterday, falls into the be-careful-for-what you-wish-for category.)

In the Times editorial, the paper calls on Congress to pass a law that allows the government to search laptops only when federal agents have a reasonable suspicion that the person poses a threat. (In the same day's paper, the Times published a story about how an email sent to the wrong address eventually led to a former school librarian being charged with harassment and having to appear numerous times in court to try to clear his name -- even when "a mountain of evidence," which only required basic knowledge of how e-mail works, showed the man was not implicated.)

As the frequency of the editorials and articles show, information technology, as most readers of Nextgov know, has become routine in government operations, but agencies' public policies and laws that are affected by IT still lag. Sounds like another agenda item for the next president.

As of today, nearly 1,000 people have been sickened, one person has died, and at least $150 million has been lost by tomato growers and sellers (and probably more now that peppers, onions and cilantro are becoming suspects) because of a salmonella outbreak as of yet unknown origin.

Not to worry, though. It isn’t a big deal.

To quote Dr. David Acheson, food safety chief of the Food and Drug Administration, “We’re a nation of 300 million people who eat two-to-three times a day. To have 800 people sick is not that big of a deal.”

OK, Acheson has a point: 1,000 out of 304,554,835 (according to the US Census population clock as of this post) is only 3.2834809534381550698415278811778e-6 percent, if my fingers hit the calculator correctly. [Which they didn't the first time - it should be .00003% - which a sharp reader caught - see comments below.]

But that perspective leads, of course, to the question of what does the FDA believe is a BIG DEAL?

Is it 3,000 people sick? 100,000? Even a million is only a statistical blip.

Or how about deaths? About 5,500 people die every day in the United States. One person dying from salmonella over a couple months is not a Big Deal either to the FDA, I gather from Acheson’s comments.

So, exactly what is the level necessary for the sick or dying to be considered a Big Deal?

Of course, not only do we need to know what a Big Deal is in relation to a single event, but also from a multiple event perspective.

Over the last decade, there have been 13 salmonella outbreaks from tomatoes alone. And this count doesn’t include other food-borne problems, like E. coli or Hepatitis A. (Remember spinach and green onions?)

Once we know what FDA's Big Deal risk threshold is (and what's the Agriculture Department's as well for meats and dairy products -- remember Taco Bell?), we can then start to figure out the true cost/benefit to putting in a food tracing system that Allan Holmes wrote about.

In fact, we may find that we don’t even need an FDA, as the late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman argued.

A Washington Post editorial on Tuesday called for the Food and Drug Administration to develop a system "to trace food and produce from the farm to the dinner table." Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., has called for such a system but has yet to get anything passed by the House. She introduced a bill last year that would require the FDA to develop a system to track meat products, but the bill hasn’t gone anywhere. She also tried, as the Post editorial points out, to get a provision in the 2008 Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act to require the agency to build a system to track food.

When Congress starts mandating technology solutions to problems it can create headaches for agencies. One needs to look no further than the U.S. VISIT system to know what not to do when writing technology solutions into law.

Barack Obama arguably has been the most adept at using the Internet during his run for the presidency. He's raised records amounts of money online and, as The New York Times reported today, has hired one of the founders of Facebook to develop social networking features for his Web site that the campaign can tap to quickly organize armies of supporters. Obama has credited the Internet with much of his success so far.

But John McCain now has someone talking up his technology qualifications: Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer at Hewlett Packard Co. She says McCain knows that technology is a big part of the economy, according to a Los Angeles Times blog. Fiorina, who has appeared in public for weeks talking up McCain and who is mentioned as a possible member of Cabinet if McCain is elected president, was in Washington, D.C., on Monday talking to reporters about McCain's technology prowess, as well as other issues.

But it's not so clear what McCain's tech strategy for government would be. Obama has suggested he would appoint a chief technology officer to oversee the federal IT infrastructure, presumably to foster innovative, governmentwide e-government programs and applications. Nothing much on how McCain may leverage technology to operate government.

Unlike past elections, could information technology – other than the regulatory environment – become a larger part of debate?

A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on broadband adoption has some sobering news for the next president – if he wants to expand electronic government. The first statistic that jumps out of the report, "Home Broadband Adoption 2008," is that the percentage of low-income Americans who have a broadband Internet connection dropped from 28 percent in March 2007 to 25 percent in April 2008. For African Americans, the percentage that had broadband grew only slightly 43 percent from 40 percent during the same period.

And it won’t change anytime soon. Of those that use the slower dial-up connections, almost two-thirds said they had no desire to change to broadband, and almost one out of five said nothing would make them change.

Another statistic that should worry e-government advocates is that 27 percent of Americans have no Internet access, with most of those being either elderly or low-income. And PEW found that only 10 percent of the non-Internet users have any desire to become wired.

These are the hard-core resisters – and there are millions of them. That means if government wants to move ahead with providing more electronic services – including services that may require faster and more robust connections that broadband provides – a large portion of Americans may just not care. And these resisters are exactly the demographics that government tends to serve.

Cracking that resistance, or finding a way to deal with it, will be a tough one.

In April, Commerce Department Carlos Gutierrez told a House appropriations committee that the Census Bureau planned to not use handheld computers to record answers from households who did not send in their census forms -- called the follow up count. Development of the devices was running behind schedule, coming in over budget and there were concerns the computers wouldn't work as well as the bureau had hoped. The decision was made to revert to the old way of conducting the census: paper forms. But the change would increase the cost of the census by up to $3 billion, with at least $230 million needed for fiscal 2008. But Commerce Department Carlos Gutierrez told a House appropriations committee that the bureau would not need any extra money because it planned to move money form other programs to pay for the shortfall.

Somewhere along the way, Congress didn't get the message. Included in the supplemental war spending bill President Bush signed on Monday was $210 million in emergency spending for the bureau -- to cover the extra costs for the 2010 census.

Circuit Court judge issued an unusual ruling Friday in a lawsuit in which an advocate for open government is suing four members of the Venice, Fla., city council for allegedly discussing city business via e-mail and not in a public forum, as required by Sunshine laws. Robert Bennett ruled that the council members, who include Venice Mayor Ed Martin, could sift through their e-mail, along with the attorneys, to remove any messages that may threaten their privacy, according to an article posted today by HeraldTribune.com. The e-mails then can be copied.

Protecting privacy in the face of e-discovery (the term used to describe the inclusion of electronic documents – including e-mail – in the official part of the discovery process during a lawsuit), has been evolving. What would be interesting to note is what the defendants' attorneys consider private and what they do not. Implications for federal employees?