Politics 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 Federal Trade Commission is allowing the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services arm of the Homeland Security Department access to its secure consumer complaint database so USCIS officials can investigate scammers posing as immigration legal advisers, federal officials announced on Thursday.

Typically only law enforcement officials can search through the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network, which warehouses tips that customers submit to the Better Business Bureau, National Consumers League and other watchdog organizations.

USCIS, FTC and Justice Department officials announced the new data exchange on Thursday as part of a public awareness campaign to crack down on unauthorized legal assistance providers. Many imposters charge unwitting immigrants for resources the government offers for free, like application forms, or falsely claim they can expedite the approval process, according to USCIS officials. Some promise to help clients obtain immigration papers for which the applicant is ineligible.

Obama administration officials have been stressing the White House's commitment to immigration enforcement, as they try to ease the way for comprehensive immigration reform.

USCIS posted several campaign ads on YouTube to educate people on how to avoid immigration scams, but the promos do not encourage reporting deceptive outfits. The ads direct Internet users to the uscis.gov/avoidscams website for more information. A "Report Immigration Scams" tab on the site takes visitors to an interactive Web page where they can notify authorities about suspicious professionals.

Egypt has gone dark. According to Renesys, a Manchester, N.H.-based company that monitors Internet routing data, the Egyptian government appears to have taken the unprecedented step of ordering service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet.

"Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world," Renesys said in a blog post. "The Egyptian government's actions . . . have essentially wiped their country from the global map."

At 12:34 a.m. Friday in Egypt, Renesys said they observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. The company said this is different from what happened previously in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or in Iran, where the Internet connections were rendered painfully slow.

The blackout also appeared to extend to mobile phones. British Telecom provider Vodafone confirmed on their website that all mobile operators in Egypt were instructend to suspend services in selected areas of the country. "Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it," the company said.

And the fact that those in Egypt might not see reaction from the US government, which condemned the moves, was not lost on State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowely: "We are concerned that communication services, including the Internet, social media and even this #tweet, are being blocked in #Egypt," he wrote on the micro-blogging site late Thursday.

Boeing, General Dynamics and the Navy fought over billion-dollar claims involving a failed 1991 stealth fighter aircraft contract on Jan. 18. The contractors claimed that the government withheld information from them, and by invoking the state secrets privilege, prevented them from delivering a satisfactory product. The question is, does throwing around the word "state secrets" unnecessarily politicize a dispute that can be resolved by contract law?

The facts of the case: In 1991, the Defense Department pulled the plug on the inauspicious project to build a stealth fighter, the A-12 Avenger, when it ended up too heavy for aircraft carriers to handle. The plane never took off from blueprint into production. The 20-year-long dispute is a bitter blame game following a disastrous $4.8 billion deal that in truth, just amounted to expensive aircraft blueprints.

The government demanded a refund of $1.35 billion after it cancelled the contract and declared General Dynamics and Boeing in default. The contractors sued, countering that they were owed an additional $1.25 billion for work done that had not yet been billed.

Boeing and General Dynamics said it wasn't their fault that they hadn't delivered what the Navy wanted; the real problem was the abuse of the state secrets privilege. The government withheld sensitive information that would have allowed them to deliver satisfactory results, the contractors claimed. The government countered that this was done to protect national security.

The information that came was "too little and too late to effectively allow the contract to proceed as planned," said attorney Carter Phillips. "The weight specifics that we were being asked to provide or to supply were literally impossible to comply with based on what the government already knew," he said.

His argument sounded almost convincing until he dropped this:

The problem is we don't know precisely what information we didn't have and were never entitled to. So it's very difficult to say how strong is our defense under these circumstances.

That admission reveals that this case is going to be a difficult one to argue. The politically-charged rhetoric around "state secrets" masks what is at the heart of the debate: "All we're asking for is the actual amount of money that we expended," said Phillips, "maybe to some extent you could say we're sort of being a little greedy." But a contract is a contract, he added.

Framing the case as a constitutional precedent centered around "state secrets" unnecessarily politicizes more fundamental problems, namely mutual distrust and insufficient planning.

The insistence of General Dynamics and Boeing that the government provide more specifications could hint at a lack of enterprise, Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to suggest. "Sophisticated contractors are perfectly capable of negotiating their own contract," he said. If the government fed too much information to contractors, "we are not just throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of government contracting; we're throwing the whole monkey."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia seemed in favor of tossing the case out of the court, arguing that the dispute could be better resolved by contract law rather than constitutional law. If it is indeed settled behind closed doors, we'll never know who put the monkey wrench in the gears of this contract. But really, in a case involving two the top five government contractors, billions of dollars, and the U.S. Navy, are we surprised?

The White House blog and Twitter feed this week promoted a Thursday MTV town hall meeting featuring President Obama and students by asking teens to tweet questions about jobs, energy and other issues weighing on their minds. But the moderators on MTV's website, which was live-streaming the televised event and posting comments, didn't seem to get the whole "youth" theme.

Staged as a forum to get out the vote -- the webcast looked more like an uncensored free-for-all, or a Tea Party rally. Here is a sampling of the comments that appeared on the MTV site:

• "#askmarijuana Dear President Obama, What are your thoughts and views on legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes in all states ?"
• "Why is the middle class suffering more than any other group right now? I worked 2 years very hard to get you elected. Now I"M being audited!"
• "#askjobs Will the President help push for passage of the Equal Employment for All Act (H.R. 3149)? Credit checks are discriminatory especially so for older Americans. This is a real job creation program. Are you aware of it and that it's been stuck in Committee for the past year?"
• "How are you going to push for Universal Health care? And how do you think that it is not a violations of our rights as Americans? Personally I feel like it is unconstitutional, how can you argue that it is not?"

Looking to help deter shoplifting right from your very own house? Now some people can.

The website Internet Eyes has launched in the United Kingdom and pays the public to monitor live commercial CCTV footage online. Users who regularly report suspicious activity, such as shoplifting, will be paid up to 1,000 pounds, or about $1,600 (U.S.).

The footage will be streamed live by the private company to user's home computers from CCTV cameras installed in shops and other businesses, the BBC reported.

Subscribers will have access to four screens at the same time. If they see anything suspicious, they can press an alert button, which sends a text and picture message to a shop assistant or manager, who then makes the decision about what action to take, a company official told the BBC.

The news agency reported more than 13,000 people have indicated an interest in the project, but they expect more people will join. The British government requires users pay a small fee to prevent misuse of the system. Anyone in the European Union can register with the site.

But, as you might expect, civil liberties groups are upset with the program. "This is the privatization of the surveillance society -- a private company asking private individuals to spy on each other using private cameras connected to the Internet. Internet Eyes must be challenged," Charles Farrier, of No CCTV, told the Guardian newspaper.

Technology designed to circumvent Internet censorship by Iranian officials has been found to be riddled with security loopholes, raising questions on how the State Department could have approved it for distribution in Iran.

Haystack's website boasted that the tool employed "a sophisticated mathematical formula to hide users' real Internet traffic inside a continuous stream of innocuous-looking requests," guaranteeing Iranians protected access to Facebook and other blocked sites.

This week, security engineers discovered serious flaws in Haystack's software. Jacob Appelbaum, who is a programmer for the encryption software Tor, and who helped to reverse-engineer Haystack's code, tweeted, "I think in the end Haystack was misrepresented and its implementation was dangerous to real humans in the field."

Haystack's creator, Austin Heap, has claimed "a few dozen" people in Iran are using an initial test version of the software, but an Iranian activist mentioned that 5,000 people were on the Haystack network, reported The Financial Times.

When Foreign Policy tech blogger Evgeny Morovov ramped up his criticism of Haystack, the plug was pulled on the project. Heap announced Monday that users should refrain from using the program until a third party review was completed.

Much of the ensuing anger circulating in blogs and tweets has been directed towards the State Department. "What is most interesting is the enabling environment -- why tough questions weren't being asked," Morozov told The Washington Post. "People in Washington are jumping on the Haystack bandwagon because it portrays them as hip and in touch with the times but doesn't show all the risks involved."

According to a U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control watchdog blog, because of trade sanction laws, items for distribution in Iran need to be vetted for approval first.

In regards to Haystack, it is unclear to me: 1) how these applications can clearly set out who the end users are; and 2) if the political dissidents who are receiving this software are really willing to share their identities and locations (i.e., addresses) with a U.S. government agency. If the end user information can not be provided I'm uncertain as to whether not OFAC will be willing to issue the specific licenses needed for the lawful exportation of this technology.

Independent bloggers have filed Freedom of Information Act requests to find out if State exercised all the oversight it could, or if it simply made a hasty decision in giving Haystack the green light.

Some information technology contractors welcomed an announcement by President Obama on Wednesday that he proposes investing in infrastructure, such as advanced air traffic tech, as a way of stimulating the economy -- but expresses nervousness about how he intends to compensate for the cost.

In Ohio, Obama said, "We want to put more Americans back to work rebuilding America -- our roads, our railways, our runways." The fleshed-out plan involves focusing more money on NextGen, a sweeping effort to update air traffic control by replacing radar-based guidance with satellite-based navigation by 2018.

Industry groups and Republicans reportedly care more about extending Bush administration tax-cuts for the wealthy that are set to expire at the end of 2010.

The president did not mince words in saying he is against a continuation of the Bush-era income-tax rates.

"With all the other budgetary pressures we have -- with all the Republicans' talk about wanting to shrink the deficit -- they would have us borrow $700 billion over the next 10 years to give a tax cut of about $100,000 each to folks who are already millionaires," Obama said.

Recently, the White House also has taken great care to warn businesses that the administration is not afraid to freeze or dismantle IT projects that are burning through taxpayer dollars without any indication of success. The Veterans Affairs Department killed 12 underperforming systems and, this summer, the White House put 30 major financial management systems on hold and put 26 mission-critical IT systems on a watchlist.

Trade group TechAmerica has told the Office of Management and Budget it wants to work with federal officials on fixing failing projects and reengineering the IT purchasing process -- but has opposed a wholesale halt on systems development. The association extended qualified support for Obama's new plan to spend more money on NextGen.

Industry members "applaud investments in 21st century infrastructure such as the modernization of America's air traffic control system," TechAmerica President and CEO Phil Bond said on Wednesday. "Still, many leaders in the private sector will remain uncertain until they understand the revenue raisers the president alluded to so briefly today. We would be disappointed to see any offsets that would constrain the very growth the president wants to promote."

The chairman of the board that oversees Recovery.gov released on Monday a statement promoting the transparency of the stimulus-tracking website, just as Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee alleged the site is a public relations effort aimed at inflating the accomplishments of the administration.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking member of the committee, repeatedly has knocked the accuracy of Recovery.gov, most recently by calling on federal auditors to investigate "propaganda" on the site, which is supposed to measure the number of jobs funded through stimulus dollars.

Also on Monday, committee Republicans released a report that they say examines numerous instances of misinformation spread by White House officials. The report stated:

Recovery.gov now displays jobs funded by the stimulus rather than the misleading 'jobs created or saved' figure. Still, there is no indication that the current figures are any more reliable than the ones touted by Vice President Biden and subsequently proven to be misleading and deceptive.

The number of jobs funded through the stimulus package during the quarter ending June 30 was 749,142, according to the latest tally on Recovery.gov.

Meanwhile, Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board, posted a column on Recovery.gov that contradicted Issa's portrayal:

In creating the Recovery Act last year, lawmakers directed the board to build a 'user-friendly' website that would provide the utmost transparency in government spending. That objective has been achieved. Users can go on our website, Recovery.gov, pull out the raw data submitted by recipients, do their own analysis, and tell us when they find something that doesn't look right.

. . . Although this new level of transparency may not be obvious to casual observers, it is inspiring real transformation in the federal government. Looking at the broad picture, I do not believe the government can, or will, take a step backward. I expect future government spending to follow the Recovery Board's model of transparency. You, the decision makers, want transparency -- and you'll get it!

The 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act, which established the chief information officer position at agencies, among other things, was signed into law this month 14 years ago. By most accounts, it hasn't lived up to expectations. In fact, many say it's a downright failure.

The latest to weigh in on the disappointment is Alan Balutis, distinguished fellow and director of North American public sector consulting for the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group and a former federal CIO. In an article that appeared on Wednesday on MeriTalk, a social media site for the federal technology community, Balutis says it is high time we accept the fact the Clinger-Cohen Act has been a flop. "Isn't it time to pull the plug and admit we failed?" he wrote. "CIOs in the federal government are ill-defined positions that haven't worked well in the almost 15 years since they were created."

His three reasons for failure closely align with what I learned when writing an article in 2006 on the 10-year anniversary of the enactment Clinger-Cohen Act for CIO Magazine. (Let me just say the article was not warmly embraced by the administration at the time.) Balutis was one of the dozens of people I interviewed for the article, so it might not be a surprise his opinions are similar to those in the article.

Collectively here are the five reasons why CCA has failed:

1. Not Da Man. CIOs don't report to the head of the agency, even though CCA requires it. "Today, many remain buried under a chief financial officer or assistant secretary," Balutis wrote.

2. No Techie Managers. Many political appointees without CIO experience fill the posts and they leave too quickly to make a difference. "To effectively develop and oversee the implementation of major programs, CIOs need to stick around," I wrote in 2006. "The average tenure of a federal CIO today is two years, according to [the Government Accountability Office]." (Balutis says the average tenure is 18 to 22 months.)

3. All the Responsibility But None of the Authority. Federal CIOs don't have budget authority, the two exceptions being the Veterans Affairs Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. The CCA "doesn't match the actual authorities most CIOs in government have," Balutis wrote.

4. Government's Reportitis. CIOs are buried in paperwork. The CCA was supposed to streamline procurement and technology decisions, but agencies spend most of their time writing reports for the Office of Management and Budget and Congress. By some accounts, half of an IT staff's time is filling out paper work.

5. Ignoring -- or Not Funding -- the Basics. The CCA emphasized improving project management skills, requiring CIOs to assess the skills they had, determine which ones they needed, and then hire or train employees to fill the gaps. But inspectors general, project management experts and federal managers said government IT managers "routinely do not follow even some of the more basic project management practices," leading to project failure after project failure, I wrote. This was one of the biggest concerns Mark Forman, a partner with KPMG, voiced when he was OMB's first administrator of the Office of E-Government and IT from 2001 to 2003 in the Bush administration.