Policy Archives

The smartphone's rise in overseas markets is a "key development" that the State Department is watching over the next year, an adviser said Tuesday, signaling the agency's interest in using mobile technology to advance foreign policy goals.

The deployment of 3G and 4G mobile networks will enable more people to connect to the Internet at the same time and "up the stakes politically," said Ben Scott, Policy Advisor for Innovation at the Office of the Secretary of State. Mobile broadband penetration in the Middle East and Africa has lagged behind basic cellphone use. How international networks grow over the next 12 to 18 months will be monitored closely, said Scott. With that expansion, "there is going to be a whole lot more money on the table for pushing policies for attracting investment," he said.

Scott spoke at a panel discussion on the flow of Internet information hosted by Media Access Project, a Washington-based public interest law firm. His statement is the latest indication of State's push to leverage mobile technology to influence the political message in unsettled regions.

Using smartphones, activists can access Twitter and transmit photographs to the Internet. "Anyone with a smartphone can become a citizen reporter," he said.

State is also looking to use mobile channels to spread messages to stabilize regions. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, will fund programs that can "develop SMS messaging and other cell phone initiatives" for "countering extremist voices," it indicated in a grant document in November 2011.

It was reported last year that the State Department and Pentagon had spent at least $50 million on building an independent cellphone network inside Afghanistan. The network, created with towers on military bases, was set up to keep the Internet up even if official services were disabled.

State also has quietly supported the development of a phone app in which protesters can trigger a "panic button" that will delete all their contacts and transmit alerts to activists.

In just over the last three years, State would have spent about $70 million to promote free access to the Internet.

"The Internet is politically agnostic. It allows people to realize their desires whatever they may be," said Scott, "To me, that's the bedrock of Internet freedom -- and why it poses both vulnerabilities and opportunities for every government in the world, including ours."

The Office of Management and Budget has given agency chief information officers new guidance on installing software to continuously monitor the security of their networks by the end of fiscal 2012, Federal News Radio reported Wednesday.

As part of the administration's annual IT budget passback guidance, which was obtained by FNR, agencies are also instructed to use the CyberScope reporting tool to submit standard data on the health of their IT systems by Sept. 30. Homeland Security is supposed to issue guidance for exporting data to CyberScope later this year.

Continuous monitoring, which requires security evaluations on an ongoing basis in real time or near real time, presents a major challenge for agencies, the report noted. Many agencies now conduct such monitoring only a few times a year.

The State Department has sent out a memo to all employees in its Consular Affairs-Passport division telling them they can't read leaked confidential documents posted by WikiLeaks on their 'personal time.'

The memo was obtained by Gawker, which published it late Wednesday.

Other agencies have left open the question of whether employees were permitted to browse WikiLeaks on non-work computers. Preventing employees from viewing the classified material while not in a federal workplace could be illegal, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law with expertise in whistleblower protection and national security, told Nextgov Tuesday.

The State Department memo states: "Although legitimate reasons may exist for certain individuals in their official capacities to review 'Wikileaks documents,' with few exceptions, PPT employees have not been assigned work or projects related to 'Wikileaks documents,' . . . Accordingly, PPT employees shall not access any classified documents . . . during business hours or on their personal time."

White House officials on Thursday morning released a 25-point implementation plan to execute one of the biggest information technology contracting overhauls since the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act.

The problem the plan aims to tackle: Productivity gains in the private sector have outpaced government performance even though federal agencies spent about $600 billion during the past decade on technology to boost efficiency. The Obama administration's policy roadmap aims to dismantle the old way of installing new technology - which has been to design overly-ambitious systems that fall years behind in development - and create new procedures for quickly and cheaply upgrading machinery.

Here are some of the standouts on the to-do list:

• Reshape or terminate at least one-third of underperforming projects in the government's $80 billion IT portfolio within the next 18 months.
• Shift to a "cloud first" policy, where agencies consider moving to Web-based software and hardware before spending money on new systems. Each agency will identify three must-move services within three months, shift one of those services to the cloud within 12 months and then transition the remaining two within 18 months.
• Within 12 months, establish a tech fellows program modeled after the Presidential Management Fellows program to recruit graduate students with in-demand talents into IT program management.
• By mid-June, launch a website where industry and agency contracting officials can collaborate prior to the issuance of requests for proposals.

As online holiday shopping swings into full gear, the FBI is reminding consumers how to avoid scams.

In a news release, the bureau told consumers to be wary of e-mails or text messages that indicate a problem with financial accounts. Often the websites those messages link to appear legitimate, but they are not, and any information entered could be compromised.

FBI also warned shoppers to be careful on auction websites. Criminals will post advertisements for products they do not have and sometimes products purchased could be stolen, the bureau said.

Among other tips were:

• Do not respond to unsolicited e-mail


• Only open attachments from known senders


• Avoid filling out forms contained in e-mail messages


• Contact the actual business to verify that an e-mail is genuine

If you do receive a suspicious e-mail, you can file a complaint here with the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

But the best advice, which is ages old, comes from the FBI itself: "If a deal looks too good to be true, it likely is."

The Air Force has issued a warning on its internal website to troops not to reveal their location through social media tools, such as Facebook.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the service is concerned about new features on sites such as Facebook and Foursquare that could show the enemy exactly where U.S. forces are located in war zones.

"Careless use of these services by airmen could have devastating operations security and privacy implications," read the warning, sent to senior commanders, according to AP. Commanders were asked to spread the word to troops.

The Army, which has the majority of the nearly 145,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, intends to issue a similar warning next week.

Massachusetts has alerted a website operator that he could face jail time for failing to take down data released to him through a freedom of information request.

According to a Thursday report in The Boston Globe, Massachusetts' Department of Transitional Assistance sent Michael Morisy, cofounder of MuckRock.com, a website devoted to open records, a letter earlier this week warning him failure to remove the data could result in fines or imprisonment.

The acting general counsel of DTA told Morisy the agency released the information -- which concerns how much money in food stamps has been spent at Massachusetts businesses over the past five years -- erroneously. She said she was not threatening him, but alerting him of possible ramifications, as told to her by the Agriculture Department, Boston.com reported.

Morisy has consulted with an attorney and it is unclear what action the state might or might not take. The data remains on the website.

The government's stimulus spending watchdog is set to launch a website on Monday that will track $10 billion in non-stimulus funding for education jobs, Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced on Wednesday. The board, which Congress established in 2009 to oversee $787 billion of economic recovery funding, will host FederalTransparency.gov while it continues to maintain the interactive stimulus-tracking site Recovery.gov.

The goal of the new site is more ambitious. Devaney has said it potentially could be used to monitor the impact of all federal funding. At this point, the board only is authorized to evaluate progress reports from recipients of stimulus funding and money disbursed under the Education Jobs Fund, which Congress created this summer.

"To avoid confusion, the board decided to establish a separate website to track spending under the new education program, which is not part of the Recovery Act. According to Devaney, the new site also will be used for any spending the board is asked to monitor in the future," board officials said in a press release.

The new site, at first, only will provide basic information, such as the total amount received by each recipient, the number of jobs funded and the status of projects, board officials said on Wednesday: "Over time, FederalTransparency.gov will have some of the same features as Recovery.gov,'' Devaney said. "We are putting up the site now as a placeholder so that the public can see where the money is going and where the jobs are being funded in states and territories.''

Under the education jobs program, the Education Department will distribute funds to states and U.S. territories, which will award the money to localities for hiring and rehiring school personnel. Schools are prohibited from using the funds for anything other than paying for salaries and benefits of education-related positions, such as teachers, librarians, secretaries, speech therapists and cafeteria workers.

Russia is saying do svidaniya, or goodbye, to Microsoft as its operating system. The government has said it is spending 150 million rubles, about US$4.5 million, to develop a "national" operating system, based on the open source Linux OS, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

The goal from the switch, ordered by Russia's Ministry of Communications, is to rid state computers of Microsoft's Windows OS with the goals of saving money, improving security and reducing dependence on foreign software giants, the Monitor reported.

The switch, first ordered three years ago, largely went unnoticed by the public and media, and is supposed to be finished by the end of this year.

Yet Viktor Tsygankov, an analyst with the Russian branch of the International Data Corp., an IT consulting firm, told the newspaper that current existing Linux systems would have been just fine and "this is just unnecessary, in my personal opinion."

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who could well become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee if the Republicans take control of the House after next week's elections, says the key to transparency in government can be summed up in one word: technology.

In an op-ed in the Washington Examiner, Issa makes the case for agencies to be required to use "consistent, compatible electronic data formats for financial, regulatory, and legislative information."

If agencies used such common formats, Issa argues, it would be a simple matter to reconcile agencies financial reports and for citizens to track federal spending. Specifically, he makes the case for the Extensible Business Reporting Language data-tagging format.

Of course, in keeping with Issa's overall view of the federal bureaucracy, the purpose of the effort wouldn't be to show where government might be getting a decent bang for its buck, but to determine "exactly how much waste, fraud, and abuse goes on every day."