Remember that story about the New York City employee who got fired for playing computer solitaire at work? Well, it turns out that just maybe the addictive game isn't all about wasting time; it's also, according to Josh Levin writing for Slate, "propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture. It has also helped the human race survive innumerable conference calls and airplane trips. If solitaire is not the most important computer program of all time, it is at least in the top two, along with Minesweeper."

The following item was posted by Nextgov reporter Gautham Nagesh.

Mark Hamilton, the Environmental Protection Agency's senior information management officer, has a lot of ideas about how technology can serve the agency's strategic plan to meet its mission.

First there's nano-technology. Speaking at the Industry Advisory Council’s Executive Session on May 7, Hamilton said the EPA is incorporating the use of technology with its operations teams to better track the status of natural disasters. Hamilton used the example of a recent encounter with an EPA field employee, who was assigned to cover the Port of Long Beach in Los Angeles, Calif. The employee was driving a mobile laboratory van when Hamilton approached him and asked to check out the inside. The employee explained to Hamilton that the EPA was using nano-sensors spread over the water’s surface to detect and isolate oil spills, work that used to be done visually from a helicopter – a practice that is "not too useful at night,” Hamilton said.

You can go to the Moon with NASA late this year. Well, sorta, at least your name can go.

NASA is offering to add anyone’s name to a database, which will then ride on a microchip inside the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. Just go to the designated Web site to sign up and print out a certificate saying you’ll be on board.

The orbiter will create an atlas of Moon features and resources, a first step in creating a U.S. base there to assemble spacecraft to take humans to Mars. LRO will carry six instruments and a technology demonstration project. It’s supposed to send back the most complete dataset ever compiled about our satellite planet, including best landing sites for America’s return now slated for 2020.

The deadline for getting your name on the lunar list is June 27.

You can watch NASA-produced videos about sending your name to the moon here.

The following item was posted by Jill R. Aitoro.

A discussion board recently posted an unclassified PowerPoint presentation from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which provides an in-depth look at the criminal investigation into the selling of counterfeit Cisco networking equipment to federal agencies.

The presentation reports a spike in the total number of seizures of products that violate intellectual property rights from 8,022 in 2005, valued at more than $93 million, to 14,675 in 2006, valued at more than $155 million.

Counterfeit Cisco equipment – including routers, switches, and other hardware components -- finds its way into federal networks because of weaknesses in government procurement and problems with Cisco’s own sales practices, according to the presentation. In the case of the former, agencies purchase from uncertified suppliers using government credit cards or from subcontractors that are two or three levels separated from the manufacturer and allow “blind drop” or “drop ship” methods of fulfillment that limit the possibility of quality assurance checks within the contracting community by delivering the products directly to the agency from the supplier.

For Cisco’s part, reliance on distributors and resellers for the sale of products, combined with a lack of coordination between the company’s brand protection and sales teams perpetuates the problem, according to the presentation. Furthermore, it notes a lack of any vetting of companies selling equipment to government, beyond standard background checks, by either Cisco or the General Services Administration.

The presentation highlights a number of cases where counterfeit Cisco equipment managed to infiltrate federal agencies, including one that involved a top tier partner sourcing equipment from China, that eventually landed in a secure Navy facility.

If you needed reminding that information technology isn't always the answer to efficiency, you may want to check out New York Times technology reviewer David Pogue's recent pieces on the modernization of the air traffic control system. Last week he wrote about the automatic dependent surveillance - broadcast system (ADS-B), a GPS-based system that gives pilots a view of the air traffic around them. The idea is that with that kind of control (and not having to depend on air traffic controllers so much), planes could fly closer together and relieve some of the congestion that has led to record delays this past year.

But wait.

An article in InfoWorld today quotes IPv6 experts calling for organizations to adopt the next generation Internet protocol, which will provide more Internet addresses and with it the promise for new applications. From the article:

The telecommunications industry is going through "a period of grief" over the end of IPv4 (IP version 4), said Tony Hain, IPv6 technical leader for Cisco Systems. "Most people in the world are still in a state of denial" about upgrading to IPv6. "No one will ask for IPv6 until they run out of IPv4 addresses," he said.

Agencies are facing a June deadline – a mandate issued by the Office of Management and Budget – to make their network backbones IPv6 compliant. It looks like most will meet the deadline, but whether agencies will develop applications that take advantage of IPv6 is the question.

Is IPv6 yesterday's news? Or is it? Are organizations integrating the fucntionality promised by IPv6 into the infrastructure of the organization? What is the level of commitment to incorporating the functionality of IPv6 to provide the enhanced security and information protection that is necessary as information sharing, information dissemination become the norm?

Is the there, there to obtain the long term focus to transition an organization from IPv4 to IPV6?
Has your organization started the journey?

Revealing some of the inside frustration that comes with leaks to the press, John Grimes, chief information officer and assistant secretary of networks and information infrastructure at the Defense Department, said a “disloyal” person was to blame for disclosing information about President Bush’s Cyber Initiative, reportedly totaling several billion dollars.

It was unclear whether the disloyal individual Grimes referred to in his morning session at the Information Processing Interagency Conference was the person inside government that leaked the information or the reporter with The Wall Street Journal that decided to run with the story. Regardless, he seemed to take personally the release of details on the White House cybersecurity directive signed by President Bush in January.

“We did not want this public until we got [various issues] resolved,” including those relating to privacy, Grimes said, referencing the numerous hearings that have been scheduled since the story broke. each hearing requires executives at Defense, the departments of Homeland Security and State, and the Office of National Intelligence to prepare to testify.

“This comes down to political [culture] of decisions,” Grimes said. “Whether an attack is an act of war or criminal -- who makes that decision?”

Reports from news outlets seem to have prompted the release of some details – though not many – about the cybersecurity initiative. Most recently, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff released remarks made to a roundtable of bloggers.

"We are beginning our cyberstrategy," he said. "That will not be done this year, but I'm hoping we can get it, a cybercenter, up and running, and have a full set of plans and a funding budget to move forward over the next several years to get to the next level of cybersecurity."

The administration’s top IT official bid an early farewell to government and industry IT workers at the 2008 Information Processing Interagency Conference in Orlando, Fla., Monday before announcing the winners of government project management awards.

Acknowledging the approaching end of the Bush administration, Karen Evans, administrator of the office of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, called her fifth keynote at IPIC “bittersweet.” She then acknowledged the work of agencies to achieve the goals of the e-government initiatives, which identified several governmentwide programs to integrate agency operations and information technology investments.

“It isn’t work OMB has done; the work is done by vendors that help the agencies and the agency [IT administrators],” Evans said.

Recipients of government project management awards, some of which Evans announced Monday and others that will be announced at a Tuesday session, were recognized for programs that demonstrate excellence in project management:

Cost Savings/Cost Avoidance
Winner: NASA’s Shared Services Center
Winner: The Office of Personnel Management’s Human Resources Integration

Retooling the Infrastructure
Winners: The Energy Department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Campus Camera and Emergency Call Station System; and the Interior Department’s 104 Mainframe Efficiency Improvement Project

Service-Oriented Architecture
Winner: DHS’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Enterprise Service Bus

Digital Trust-Infrastructure Security
Winner: GSA’s Managed Service Offering USACCESS Program

Identity Management-Biometrics
Winner: Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Quick Capture Platform

Delivering Mission Services/Practical Innovations
Winner: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ ATF Knowledge On Line

Delivering Mission Services/Practical Innovations
Winner: Small Business Administration’s Business Gateway Initiative

Amid congressional hearings accusing the White House of improperly saving electronic records, another federal organization is promoting services that provide access to all sorts of government (and non-government) resources.

In March, the Library of Congress will launch a monthly online newsletter as part of its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program to provide a digest of recent news, with links to stories on the program’s Web site. The program is driven by a national network of partners -- government agencies, educational institutions, research laboratories, and commercial and nonprofit organizations -- dedicated to the collection and preservation of “born-digital content." That's content that was created digitally and exists in no other form, such as electronic journals and Web sites, films, television programs, sound recordings, maps and other media that are digitally produced.

Those interested can subscribe to the newsletter online.

Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that the balloon catheter manufacturer Medtronic whose catheter burst and injured a patient was immune from liability because its product, along with its warning labels about the product's risks, had received premarket approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Supreme Court said that state laws allowing lawsuits against so-called Class III medical devices were not permissible.

Class III medical devices are, according to the FDA, “the most stringent regulatory category for devices. Class III devices are those for which insufficient information exists to assure safety and effectiveness solely through general or special controls.

“Class III devices are usually those that support or sustain human life, are of substantial importance in preventing impairment of human health, or which present a potential, unreasonable risk of illness or injury.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported today more than 400 seizures of counterfeit Cisco equipment and labels worth more than $76 million filtering into the United States from China.

The effort, which has been ongoing since 2005, is being driven by DHS and FBI. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Customs and Border Protection conducted 28 investigations and managed six indictments and four felony convictions, with more than 74,000 fakes seized, while the FBI’s portion of the initiative, dubbed Operation Cisco Raider, resulted in 36 search warrants with approximately 3,500 counterfeit network components identified, and a total of 10 convictions.

So why is government focusing on Cisco? Because the counterfeiters do. They go where the money is, and in terms of networking gear, which many regard as commodity items that can be easily copied, no manufacturer rakes in more revenue than Cisco. It’s the same reason that hackers focus on Microsoft: Market saturation.

The government is among the most profitable markets for Cisco. That makes federal agencies as susceptible as any to getting duped. Check out what happened to the Navy in 2004 for example, when counterfeit Cisco switches landed in one of its secure facilities. (You can read the whole sordid story at GovernmentVAR.com). One contractor involved was recently found liable, and now the circumstances are being investigated by the Navy’s Acquisition Integrity Office.

The lesson learned? Check those serial numbers.

Anne Laurent, former executive editor at Government Executive magazine, writes in her blog, The Agile Mind, about the recent unclassified report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on report unveiling the Reynard project, conducted by the ODNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to spy on players in virtual worlds to see if they can, as Laurent quotes, "identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments" and then "apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world." Her post highlights just how quickly technology is moving as compared with Congress' ability to understand it. Her point:

DNI archly informs lawmakers that they won't be getting much real information about intelligence community data mining because they asked for the wrong thing. The law [the 2007 Data Mining Reporting Act] defines data mining as "a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases" to "discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomoly indicative of terrorist activities." But that's not the kind of data mining DNI uses most, the report says.

"Analysis performed within the ODNI and its constituent elements for counterterrorism and similar purposes is often performed using various types of link analysis tools [which] start with a known or suspected terrorist or other subject of foreign intelligence interest and use various methods to uncover links between that known subject and potential associates or other persons with whom that subject is or has been in contact," the report says. But "the Data Mining Reporting Act does not include such analyses within its definition of 'data mining' because such analyses are not 'pattern-based." Note to Congress: Catch up. Fix your definitions.

According to a briefing by Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, the recent successful shoot down of the wayward spy satellite was not a test of the missile defense system. While the Missile Defense Agency was helpful in netting all the sensors needed together, according to Cartwright,

the missile itself is a standard missile in the Navy inventory; the ship is a standard ship in the Navy inventory. We added a lot of instrumentation. We made some modifications to the software to be able to go after a satellite.

You know, this is a one-time mod. It is -- if you put this mod in, we can't use the ship or the missile for another function without taking the mods out. So it's not something that we would be entering into the service in some standard way.

Yet, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the shot proves that missile defense works.

I think, actually, the question of whether this capability works has been settled. The question is: Against what kind of a threat (do we employ the technology)? How large a threat? How sophisticated a threat?

So, is this shot "proof" of missile defense, or just a one-off highly constrained, albeit successful, experiment?

Google engineering manager Alan Newberger blogged yesterday about the software giant’s pilot program with Cleveland Clinic, which integrates patients’ electronic health records with their Google accounts. The initiative seems the first step in a long-term goal to provide citizens with universal access to their medical histories, and the ability to quickly exchange information with insurance plans, medical groups, pharmacies and hospitals.

Patients don’t have to participate in the program. Those that opt in will give authorization via Google’s “AuthSub” interface. Still, the initiative is sounding the alarm bells for privacy rights groups – the same groups that have spoken out against a national health network and other government-sponsored electronic health efforts.

Maybe a watchful eye on how Google handles the situation, including the very real privacy and confidentiality concerns, will provide the federal government a clue on how to get their own initiatives moving. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time industry paved the road.

Spending on information technology to support federal health care is expected to increase 40 percent to $4.5 billion in the next five years, according to a report released today by the federal market research firm Input. The 7 percent compounded annual rate increase may be even larger once standards for the electronic health records are adopted and as more medical records are digitized, Input analysts report.

But the path to electronic health records won't be -- and hasn't been -- easy. As William Hammond, professor emeritus of community and family medicine at Duke University, was quoted in IEEE Spectrum magazine:

We’ve been talking about medical standards harmonization and cooperation for 20 years. Yet no one has defined all the standards needed to support a national health information network, and no one has identified what’s missing.

However, the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have been one of the leaders in electronic health care. On Feb. 27, Bob Brewin, Government Executive's editor at large, will conduct a webinar with Lt. Col. Edward Clayson to look at how the Army has brought electronic health care to the front lines in Iraq. The Battlefield Health IT webinar will start at 2 pm.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is out a chief technology officer. Just before Super Tuesday, Kevin Malover reportedly joined private equity firm GTCR Golder Rauner in Chicago as chief information officer, according to Investment Dealers Digest.

Prior to joining the campaign trail, Malover helped with travel site Orbitz.com and an online real estate company he cofounded. He can be credited for helping to craft Obama’s strategic use of text messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook.com, and developing an interactive web site that allows Obama followers to find events and volunteer opportunities, register to vote, and call citizens in contested states to drum up support. The Web site's ability to reach out to voters via mass emails has been mentioned as one of the reasons for Obama's success this campaign season. At the time this blog was written, the call function was not available due to “overwhelmed” servers. Perhaps the campaign is already feeling the effects of Malover’s departure?

No word about a replacement CTO has come from Obama's camp.

There's a lot of talk about the transformative nature of information technology. One of my favorite commentators on this is a professor of cultural anthropology named Michael Wesch. In this short video, he talks about the way digital information is changing the way we interact with the world.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is teaming up with West Virginia University in national security efforts using biometric technology. According to a press announcement released yesterday, WVU will serve as the academic arm of the FBI's Biometric Center of Excellence, providing biometrics research support to the FBI and its law enforcement and national security partners.

The center will coordinate biometric and identity management activities within the FBI and partner with other U.S. government agencies to develop and train users on biometric technologies and systems. The goal is to leverage biometric technology in the fight against terrorism and intelligence efforts.

Thomas Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, credited WVU as having "comprehensive, integrative research and education programs in biometrics," and being known around the world for identification technology research. Perhaps. But there's much to say about the value of proximity -- Clarksburg is home to the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, and Fairmont hosts the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

One has to also wonder how much of a role Sen. Byrd, D-WV, played in the decision, too. The FBI has Byrd to thank for driving the construction of a new Biometrics Fusion Center building at the Harrison County campus, with the addition of $7 million to the fiscal year 2006 Defense Appropriations bill signed into law. He also secured more than $141 million to launch and expand Defense's own biometrics initiatives, which of course contribute to FBI's efforts.

Of course, what came first? The chicken or the egg. Did Byrd's support of FBI efforts come because of its presence in West Virginia, or did the FBI's presence in West Virginia grow with support from Byrd. No doubt state government doesn't much care. This is not to discredit WVU contributions in the area of biometrics. It's National Science Foundation Center for Identification Technology Research teams up with other universities to drive research, which had earned praise in and outside federal government.

The following item was posted on the Blog "The Agile Mind," written by Anne Laurent, who gave permission to have the item posted in its entirety in Tech Insider.

The military services have been early and avid government adopters of gaming technology and especially software platforms. The Army has had tremendous success with its recruiting game, America's Army, and follow-on training modules built on the same game engine. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Sandia Laboratories have created wildly successful trainers for languages -- chiefly Iraqi Arabic -- culture and non-kinetic (civil-military) operations.

I've written about DARPA's projects and their Godfather, Ralph Chatham, for Government Executive magazine. I caught up recently with Chatham, who just left DARPA at year's end. Among the many strands in our rich and fascinating discussion, we talked about a very exciting DARPA project that could revolutionize the way the military -- and the rest of government -- uses games, as well as wreaking wide-ranging effects on the way games are created in the commercial world.

In March, Chatham expects to see a first version of DARPA RealWorld become available for use in the field. What's the big deal? Well, the huge speed bump to military use of games for training is that service members haven't been able to easily alter them to accurately represent the terrain, buildings--outside and inside--and vehicles they confront in the field. Real World is designed to be truly user authored by not-so-technically-adept soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines on the ground. That means Real World can become a real mission rehearsal tool.

Daniel Kaufman, the RealWorld program manager, says his goal is to be able to build simulations without programmers. This "dictates a new approach to getting software requirements," he told the audience at DARPA Tech 2007, the systems and technology symposium held in August in Anaheim, Calif. "The 20 meetings to write the 100-page RFP to generate the 1,000-page specification to find a product that will not be delivered for four years has consistently failed," he continued. So he set out to build tools and capabilities so warfighters can create applications when they need them. Take a 19-year-old soldier in the field, Kaufman said:

He’s out on patrol in a rocky canyon in Afghanistan and some OPFOR pops up and shoots at him because that’s what an opposing force does. Our warfighter engages, the OPFOR vanishes, and our Soldier returns to base to be debriefed by his commanding officer. Our soldier gets out his laptop – and, voila! On the screen appears a scene that is an exact 3-D recreation of precisely where he was in that canyon. Not generic terrain – this is exactly his patrol and exactly his location.

Within seconds, our soldier is dragging-and-dropping:

“This is where I was; this is where my buddy was; this is where George was; this is where the HMMWV was, this is where the sniper was, and this is where we got shot, sir.”

Notice that I said he does it. There’s no software guy; there’s no writing down specs. He does it, and within seconds it’s right on his laptop screen and it’s exactly correct.

If you think about it, in that one small instance, four very important things have taken place: RealWorld has become an after-action review tool, a mission planning and briefing tool, a mission rehearsal tool and a training tool.

Imagine recording this whole sequence, and then sending it back by e-mail to Ft. Polk and Ft. Lewis, and Twentynine Palms, or anywhere else. And instead of trying to tell a kid back at a U.S. training base, "Look here’s 100 pages of doctrine that explains how you are supposed to handle an IED, and here’s a PowerPoint slide, and here’s a satellite map, and here’s a contour map," we put him right there!

Now training takes on a whole new meaning. Our stateside soldier is not working with, "Here’s a square: imagine that’s you, and imagine the bad guy is this circle over here." We’re saying, “In 90 days, you’re going to be there. Work with this simulation and figure out what you would do. Because if we have not gotten that sniper – who really does exist -- in three months, odds are he will still be out there and it will be your job to go get him.”

OK, so that's a revolution in military simulation, but what about overturning commercial game creation? Kaufman's prime contractor, Total Immersion, is making a bet by developing RealWorld for very little money. The company is getting its R&D paid for and gets to hang onto the real-time mission-rehearsal building tools it is creating. Since it now costs $20 million to $40 million to build a computer game, companies only invest in those that appear to have "blockbuster" written all over them. But what if a company developed a set of tools it could both use and license relatively inexpensively to others to use to create games quickly? Kind of blows open the whole game economy, eh?

More on all this to come, but for now, it's worth noting that before DARPA, Kaufman worked for DreamWorks Interactive, a joint venture between Microsoft and DreamWorks SKG, where he was involved in creating games including Goosebumps, The Neverhood, Jurassic Park and the precursor of what was to become Medal of Honor. Before that, he was an attorney with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison (Palo Alto, Calif.), where he had the largest game company representation in the United States, handling the EA/ABC joint venture, Spectrum Holobyte's management buy-out and merger with Microprose, which led to an IPO, the formation of Crystal Dynamics, and the formation and subsequent sale of Humongous Entertainment for $76 million. Oh, and the CIA's venture catalyst, In-Q-Tel, once commissioned him to look into how gaming could help the CIA train, too.

Smart development, smart acquisition, smart partnering with the private sector and smart risk taking. Watch out big, entrenched military simulation companies!

After much speculation, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., confirmed yesterday that he will not run for office in 2008. As Republicans and Democrats scramble to defend or snag (respectively) the Davis' congressional seat, the technology community – both in and outside government – bids farewell to a staunch advocate.

The list of IT issues that benefited from Davis' support is long. In his early days in Congress, he founded the Information Technology Working Group to promote a better understanding of issues important to the computer and technology industries. He sponsored the Y2K Act, which encouraged Y2K compliance in industry, and later helped pushed several bills through Congress that advanced efforts to more strategically implement IT: the E-Gov Act of 2002, the Federal Information Security Act, and the Critical Infrastructure Information Act, to name a few. He speaks frequently in support of changes to trade agreement laws that would make it far easier for agencies to purchase technology goods and services.

Phil Bond, the president and CEO of the Information Technology Association of America, described Davis as the “ultimate champion for technology in Congress,” helping to “tear down the wall between the federal government and commercial technologies.

“When other members needed to get smart on IT, they often called Tom,” Bond said in a prepared statement.

Now what? In a statement released this afternoon, Davis said that he has not yet decided what opportunities to pursue, "but it’s clear to me that returning to the private sector and reacquainting myself with that view of the world is the best move." He was careful to call his departure “a sabbatical from public life,” keeping the door open for a return to government, but no doubt the number of offers coming his way in the meantime promises to be staggering -- if it isn't already -- as IT firms and organizations scramble for the chance to profit from his knowledge of government IT as well as his influence.

You may have heard that federal agencies are monitoring an American spy satellite that is predicted to enter the Earth's atmosphere, with the possibility of some debris reaching the ground. Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, head of the U.S. Northern Command, says "the size of the satellite suggests that some number of pieces will not burn up as the orbiting vehicle re-enters the Earth's atmosphere and will hit the ground," the AP reports.

But Wire Magazine's Danger Room blog says not to worry. The chance of debris hitting someone is "pretty darn minuscule." They've posted a video of a Russian rocket body re-entering the atmosphere over Denver to make the point.

The following item was posted by Anne Laurent.

More news about NASA and virtual worlds.

This weekend's Virtual Worlds and Immersive Environments conference was held at the space agency's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. Two days with some big names in virtual worlds should place NASA even more squarely on the virtual government map than it has been. NASA already has issued a call for help creating its own synthetic world and multiplayer immersive game.

Here are the organizing principles for the confab:

1. We all get to go: The ability to engage anyone in being a part of or contributing to an experience (such as a space mission), no matter their training or location. A new paradigm for education, outreach, and the conduct of science in society that is truly participatory.

2. Remote Exploration: The ability to create high-fidelity environments rendered from external data or models such that exploration, design and analysis that is truly inter-operable with the physical world can take place within them.

3. Become the data: A vision of a potential future where boundaries between the physical and the virtual have ceased to be meaningful. What would this future look like? Is this plausible? Is it desirable? Why and why not.

NASA is hosting some big virtual world names. Among the lecturers will be Corey Bridges, who founded Multiverse, a company of former Netscape folks who want to put the tools of synthetic world creation into the hands of the masses, so to speak.

Underlying NASA's growing interest and presence in the virtual world appears to be a belief that it's more than just a place to attract kids to science. NASA seems to be envisioning a future in which space missions occur not just in physical outerspace, but simultaneously in the ethernet.

Here's a telling quote from the conference welcome: “This workshop will focus specifically on the convergence of underlying technologies necessary to achieve high-fidelity virtual environment experiences, and possible architectures of that convergence. There will be a particular emphasis on how these technologies can support scientific and engineering visualization and analysis.”

Kind of gives new meaning to the idea of “space,” eh?

The following item was written by Anne Laurent.

NASA wants to do more than just seek new worlds, it wants to create one.

The day after Valentine’s Day, the space agency hopes to receive a pile of five-page proposals detailing how it should go about creating a synthetic online world and a multiplayer game within it. The goal is to lure more youngsters into science, technology, engineering and math professions that NASA needs to achieve its lofty plan to return to the Moon and to build a spacecraft to carry humans to Mars.

In its Jan. 16 request for information, NASA seeks the input of organizations that already operate immersive synthetic environments that would be interested in partnering to develop a new online world and educational role-playing game.

“A high quality synthetic gaming environment is a vital element of NASA’s educational cyberstructure,” according to the RFI. “This new synthetic world would be a collaborative work and meeting space as well as a game space of a kind familiar to increasing numbers of American students. Games and challenges in the [massively multiplayer online educational game] would engage students in a way that is both familiar and comfortable for them.”

It won’t be NASA’s first foray into the synthetic universe. The agency already has a presence in the best known of the dozens of virtual worlds, Second Life. NASA’s “island” in Second Life houses a virtual CoLab, a digital version of a program begun at the agency’s Ames Research Center in San Francisco to allow collaboration between NASA and individuals in support of space missions.





Other federal agencies also have outposts in Second Life. Perhaps the best known is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Meterora, where visitors can ride a submarine, view tsunami demonstrations, ride a weather balloon and a hurricane hunter plane and interact with a real-time 3-D weather map of the United States.





The Crawford Auditorium on NOAA’s island hosted the virtual version of the first gathering of the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds, “Exploring Virtual Worlds,” in November and held live at the National Defense University in Washington. (175 people attended in the real world, 182 in NOAA’s auditorium.) The Centers for Disease Control, which has had a Second Life presence since August, also was on hand.

The pressure to go green – adopting policies, processes and technologies that reduce energy consumption -- is building, as Government Executive reported last year. Study after study has shown how much U.S. companies and the federal government can save by using more efficient computer equipment – and it’s not insignificant.

Now, two more studies released this week pile on to the findings. The federal government could save about $960 million over five years if it adopts green technologies such as virtualization, consolidating servers and dynamic smart cooling, according to an article published by InformationWeek. Another study found that the federal government could save about $330 million over five years "by using more energy efficient PCs, specifically those that meet the Environmental Protection Agency's more stringent Energy Star standards that went into effect last July," according to the article.

Or, in other terms:

The annual savings by the feds using more energy efficient PCs would be equivalent to conserving 1.3 billion barrels of oil. Over four years, the report estimates the cost savings would be equivalent [to providing] 28,537 Americans with Social Security benefits for a year, or more than 989 million meals "to the hungry."

The studies were underwritten by the technology companies Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va., and Mike Turner, R-Ohio, have asked the Democratic leadership on the House government oversight committee to schedule a hearing to investigate the Census Bureau's management of a project to develop handheld computers it plans to use for the 2010 census.

In a Jan. 7 letter, Davis and Turner cite a Government Executive article published Jan. 2 that was based on a Mitre Corp. document characterizing the handheld computer contract as in "serious trouble" because of poor management. The representatives have asked Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., chairman of the Information Policy, the Census and National Archives Subcommittee, to schedule a hearing on the subject.

In particular, Davis and Turner want to know why Census Bureau Director C. Louis Kincannon did not mention during a subcommittee hearing held Dec. 11 the meeting that Census managers had with Mitre to discuss the contract's problems. The meeting with Mitre, in which Mitre delivered an unusually harsh analysis of how Census was managing the handheld contract, as outlined in Mitre’s talking points document, was held Nov. 29, 12 days before the hearing.

The Census Bureau's senior leadership has maintained – rather stridently at times – that the handhelds will work as planned for the 2010 census and that the only problems they have experienced are those consistent with any IT project of this magnitude. They have insisted they do not need to develop a backup plan in case the handhelds do not work. Forming a backup plan to use paper would be too costly, they argue. But the Government Accountability Office (and now Mitre), as well as project management experts, have all strongly questioned the Census Bureau's management of the contract, especially the inability to manage the inherent risks, as outlined in a Government Executive article last summer.

If the handhelds did not work as planned and the Census Bureau had to revert to using paper forms to collect census data, the cost of the 2010 census would increase by the billions of dollars. Already the cost of the census is tracking to be more than double the $6.5 billion cost of the 2000 census. Nevertheless, Congress would spend whatever it had to to conduct the census, because, as one Hill staffer reminds us, the census is a Constitutional requirement.

Update: In his blog, The Risk Factor, risk management expert Robert Charette, who is quoted in the Government Executive article on the Mitre analysis, discusses just what the Census Bureau means when they understand the handheld contract has "challenges."

If you're heading back home tomorrow on New Year's Day, you may want to take note of a new Transportation Department rule that forbids air travelers from packing loose lithium batteries (those typically used in laptops, cell phones, digital cameras and other electronic equipment) in checked luggage.

Transportation Department officials have been concerned for years that the lithium batteries can ignite a fire. The batteries can generate intense heat if a short circuit occurs, which can be caused by metal touching both battery terminals or if internal seals fail. (More on why lithium batteries ignite.) Dell Computer recalled 1.4 million laptop computer batteries in 2006 because of a fire hazard due to the batteries. Days later, Apple Computer Inc. recalled 1.8 million batteries. Recalls of lithium batteries go back years.

According to the WSJ, the rule, which goes into effect Jan.1, requires that:

travelers can bring a laptop computer, digital camera, cellphone and other equipment on board or in checked luggage if their lithium batteries are installed in the items.

And fliers can bring spare batteries in carry-on luggage if they're stored in plastic bags or if they're in the original retail packaging. But travelers can bring only as many as two such spare batteries, and each must be packed separately.

Here are some examples of airline fires linked to lithium batteries, as reported by USA Today:

On July 26, 600 people were evacuated from a San Diego office building when a FedEx package exploded. The package contained a backup power supply for a computer, a type of battery. No one was seriously injured.

Prompted by a 1999 fire in a crate of lithium batteries at Los Angeles International Airport, the FAA two years ago banned shipments of such batteries on passenger planes because they can spontaneously combust. The batteries can still be shipped on cargo flights.

A lithium camera battery burst into flames and ignited a seat on a chartered Boeing 727 on Oct. 29, 2004, FAA records show. A flight attendant extinguished the fire, and the jet returned to Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

Several aircraft accidents have been linked to hazardous cargo. Pilots of a UPS DC-8 barely landed in Philadelphia on Feb. 7 with a raging cargo fire. The National Transportation Safety Board says there is no evidence that an aircraft malfunction caused the fire, but they have not identified its cause.

Investigators found lithium-based batteries near the fire.

It's official: The Senate confirmed four new leaders at the Homeland Security Department last night, one of which could play a key role in cybersecurity efforts.

Robert Jamison was appointed under secretary for the National Protection & Programs Directorate. The office is charged with minimizing the department's risk through an integrated approach of physical and virtual threats. Previously, Jamison served as deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, leading a transit security program and Lower Manhattan transportation recovery operation, which was established after 9/11.

Other confirmations included Julie Myers as assistant secretary of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Jeffrey Runge as chief medical officer and assistant secretary for the Office of Health Affairs, and Ross Ashley as assistant administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff released a statement on the confirmations this morning.

Usually, when a company toots its own horn it's because the positives aren't noteworthy enough to speak for themselves. Not so in the case of Chantilly, Va.-based solution provider GTSI. The company has promoted its recent accomplishments hard, but with what seems like good reasons.

Most federal agencies know GTSI. The company made its name (and profits) for the majority of its 25 years in business by selling IT products. But changes in how the federal government buys IT, poor corporate management decisions and a botched ERP system implementation led GTSI to a $16 million loss in 2005, no line of credit and a 55 percent employee attrition rate.

Fast forward two years to the present. The company's services revenue has grown from $18 million to $150 million -- that's a 733 percent growth rate. Earlier this month GSA awarded GTSI a Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services (MOBIS) Schedule, which some might argue as confirmation that company efforts to transition from product peddler to services provider are working. In its third quarter of 2007, its gross margin reached nearly 15 percent and operating expenses declined more than 5 percent. Sales for that same period declined 25 percent, but management points to the corporate decision to not discount orders of less than $10,000 and net certain software and service offerings as the reason. Net income for the quarter was $5.5 million compared to a let loss of $3.4 million a year ago -- a positive change of 263 percent.

CEO Jim Leto said in a meeting with Government Executive Tuesday that GTSI has achieved all of the objectives he set when he took over the helm in February 2006. Whether or not that will continue remains to be seen. When asked what we might expect for the year-end financials, Leto only said that he hoped a spending bill would get passed sooner rather than later. Maybe that signifies an impending loss, as agencies have slowed IT spending awaiting for the long-delayed passage of a fiscal 2008 appropriations bill. A loss would fall in line with analyst predictions.

But here's the bigger question: If GTSI manages to pull itself consistently back in the black after years of hemorraging cash, will Leto stick around? Not likely. Last month, he relinquished 'president' from his title, promoting Scott Friedlander from executive vice president to president and chief operating officer. Chances are that was step one in a planned succession. Leto is undoubtedly a turnaround CEO, having done exactly that for a number of other companies that he later sold off. At the very least, GTSI's success might spur Leto's retirement (his third, he will tell you). If that does indeed happen in the near future -- and Leto would neither confirm nor deny when asked -- it could be the best sign for the company yet. As stated by Bill Weber, GTSI's senior vice president of programs and services: "The goal of the management team is to let him retire."

Shannon Kellogg, director of government and industry affairs at RSA Security, recently recounted a decision by a federal agency to encrypt everything (systems, emails, devices) to avoid the dreaded security breach that so many other agencies have reported. Apparently, after the decision was made, a contractor working with the agency (Kellogg declined to name the agency or the contractor) accessed sensitive information while on the network, saved it on a USB memory stick -- and then walked out the door. Kellogg didn’t say if the agency reported any data loss – but who's to know? Exposure is exposure, and the risks still apply.

This story certainly isn't unusual, but it bears repeating because this plays out in every agency routinely. Among the most important lessons that can be learned may be to avoid knee-jerk reactions to security threats -- such as believing an encrypt-everything policy will insulate you from security breaches. Such policies are, by definition, reactionary – not strategic. Encryption – like any security strategy – works in specific circumstances, but should not be the end-all-be-all security policy.

And this lesson comes from a security vendor.

A group called Techno Patriots in Southern Arizona has set up its own version of the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative Network, called SBInet, replete with wireless cameras. The group says its do-it-yourself version has a better response time than the problem plagued Boeing-built DHS system, according to an article in the Sierra-Vista, Ariz., Herald.

Techno Patriots, which describes itself on its Web site as “basically a high tech Neighborhood Watch group on the border,” said it has installed a commercial grade wireless Internet infrastructure in Cochise County, Ariz., the most highly trafficked smuggling area in the United States.

The group said it has installed video cameras on this infrastructure, which are then monitored by its members, who keep an eye out for illegal immigrants. Techno Patriots said it can easily shift the cameras from one location to another and intends to eventually operate the system 365 days a year.

John Healy, the group’s director, told the Herald that the cameras used by Techno Patriots can be controlled remotely with a joystick, with only a two- to five-second delay from joystick touch to camera movement, compared to a 30- to 40-second delay for the SBInet cameras.

Techno Patriots may have some pretty nifty camera technology, but its Web site needs some work. I tried to use the “Contact Us” page to send an email to the group, only to receive a dreaded HTTP 404 “page not found” message.

The City of Westminster – the London Borough which encompasses the West End Theater District and government buildings such as Parliament – launched last week what it described as the first service in the United Kingdom to help people find their nearest public loo using mobile phone location technology.

SatLav is a play on words for the term used in the UK for consumer GPS receivers – SatNav – and the word lavatory – for toilet. But SatLav works by determining the location of the nearest public toilet for a desperate user by triangulation with nearby mobile phone towers.

If nature calls while in London, just send a simple text message – “toilet” to 80097 – and the SatLav technology provider will do a database search to determine the location of the nearest public toilet – much to the relief of the caller.

Gail King, a 26-year-old student, came up with the idea for SatLav while writing her Master’s thesis, “'Public Toilets: A Woman’s Place” and figured “a text service would be really useful for people on the move.” And, ostensibly, who just can’t hold it.

The Westminster cabinet member for street environment said that the SatLav service puts the Borough way ahead of any other local authority in the UK in public lavatory service. Bradley said Westminster already had “an unrivalled, award-winning provision of public toilets” but the “groundbreaking” SatLav initiative “shows we are always looking for new, innovative ways to improve our service.”

This is a government that really cares at the most basic level.

The word ‘retirement’ doesn’t count for much in government. As soon as an official graciously departs his or her post, industry pounces. Such is the case of former U.S. Army CIO, Steven Boutelle, who retired less than four months ago. He has joined Cisco Systems as vice president of the networking vendor’s Global Government Solutions Group.

Boutelle will lead Cisco’s participation in the Internet Routing in Space program, which is a collaboration between industry and government to demonstrate the viability of conducting military communications through an Internet router in space. In theory, satellite systems could integrate with ground infrastructure for anytime, anywhere IP-based data, video voice and mobile communications.

It’s been more than 10 years since President Bill Clinton described the 21st Century classroom as a place in which “computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards." Since then, schools -- and parents -- have spent millions of dollars on computers for students and their children under the assumption that the computers are directly related to improved learning and higher test scores. The problem is that no national study has proven those claims.

Now, more than a decade after the fact, the federal government wants to find out what the link is and has awarded a grant to education researchers at Indiana University to study how teachers and students use computers to learn. This seems a bit late.

For sure, the study could shed light on just what value computers give students in the classroom. But this fact has been debated for years. As Todd Oppenheimer pointed out in his article (subscription required) that appeared in the July 1997 issue of The Atlantic, computers’ value to education is questionable. An excerpt from the article:

… Alan Lesgold, a professor of psychology and the associate director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, calls the computer an "amplifier," because it encourages both enlightened study practices and thoughtless ones. There's a real risk, though, that the thoughtless practices will dominate, slowly dumbing down huge numbers of tomorrow's adults. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime observer of children's use of computers, told me, "The possibilities of using this thing poorly so outweigh the chance of using it well, it makes people like us, who are fundamentally optimistic about computers, very reticent."

Oppenheimer compares the computers-in-the-classroom phenomenon to film-strip technology students used 40 years ago: “‘Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s,’ Clifford Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (1995), told The New York Times last year, recalling his own school days in the 1960s. ‘We loved them because we didn't have to think for an hour, teachers loved them because they didn't have to teach, and parents loved them because it showed their schools were high-tech. But no learning happened.’”

There's no reason to believe that these arguments are outdated -- especially given the fact the federal government just issued a grant to find out if they are. Besides, the rush to introduce computers in the classroom before researching whether they would, indeed, increase performance is part of a long string of similar information technology investments that organizations of all kinds have made, an act of chasing the hottest technology under the assumption that technology, in and of itself, will allow us to work faster and be smarter. “It’s technology, after all," goes the argument. "It must provide value."

For years, IT managers in federal agencies and in the Office of Management and Budget have tried to head off such thinking before it gets too far down the IT investment road. OMB's requirement for agencies to write business cases are just one example of this. A technology may seem like it would create efficiencies and add value, but the results from an IT investment are typically hard to measure – if an organization ever measures them at all. Or, which is more likely, the added value many times falls far short of the expectations managers had when the technology idea was first dreamed up.

The computers-in-the-classroom policy seems to have followed this same line of reasoning, although, at first, some research showed computers raised achievement. Years ago supporters pointed to the study “Connecting K-12 Schools to the Information Superhighway,” conducted by McKinsey & Co. for a Clinton task force formed to study technology and education, as the reasons why the federal government should support a policy that made computers a big part of curriculums. It concluded:

Many schools have experienced significant improvements in student performance after introducing computer-assisted instruction. For example, the Carrollton City School District in Georgia established a computer lab, among other changes, to reduce the failure rate in 9th grade algebra from 38% to 3%. In New Jersey, the Christopher Columbus Middle School saw student performance rise from well below to above state averages on standardized tests in reading, language arts, and math after the school implemented reforms that included extensive use of networked computers. The academic literature confirms technology's role in these improvements: a review of 254 controlled studies concluded that appropriate use of computers in the classroom reduces the time needed to master certain types of knowledge by as much as 30%. Put another way, in three school years, students benefiting from computer-assisted instruction can learn almost a full year's worth of material more than students who do not have access to the technology.

But Oppenheimer, in his article, refutes many of these findings.

Back to today. Now Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy will try “to figure out how teachers use technology in lessons and how students learn from that technology,” according to the Indianapolis Star article. “There have been some larger efforts, but it's mostly been a study here, a study there,” Jonathan Plucker, director of the center, told the Star. “It's a critical question that has never been answered. That's just so exciting.”

It might have been a good thing to ask that "critical question" more than a decade ago before schools and parents spent billions of dollars on computers without knowing for sure if they do indeed raise student achievement or how the computers could be used to do so.

The study is due to be completed in April 2009.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt wrote in his blog that he wants to see Medicare and Medicaid and large federal health care providers make e-prescribing “a mandatory part of medical practice soon.”

Leavitt wrote in his blog that a low rate of adoption by physicians has slowed e-prescribing nationwide. “Most doctors haven’t invested in the necessary technology to do e-prescribing,” he wrote. “The reasons are complex and range from a perceived lack of financial incentives to a reluctance to give up the familiar prescription pad. It is not expensive. This change needs to happen, and from my standpoint, sooner rather than later.”

Leavitt did not define what he meant by soon, and I’ve not heard back from HHS asking about it. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services released Nov. 16 final standards for the Medicare e-prescribing program, which covers million of patients. Ray Sass, an HHS spokesman, said he expected these rules to be adopted in less than a year.

Lee Shapiro, president of Allscripts, an electronic health record and e-prescribing software vendor, said cost should be no impediment to adoption of e-prescribing. Allscripts, along with its partners in the National ePrescribing Software Initiative, have offered to provide free software to any clinician in the country who wants to give up their prescription pads and enter the electronic age.

Shapiro said e-prescribing will help cut billions of dollars a year from the national heath care bill and go a long way to reducing the 7,000 deaths a year caused by adverse drug reactions.

“[A breach in] cybersecurity will be the next Pearl Harbor.” While not original (Win Schwartau, president of security consulting firm Interpact Inc., claims to have coined the phrase "electronic Pearl Harbor" more than 10 years ago), that’s what former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., said during a media dinner in D.C. last night. "We’re making as many problems as we are solving,” as vulnerabilities proliferate and hackers reverse-engineer patches released by vendors like Microsoft to enable access to the network. That leaves government vulnerable and to some degree unaware of the impending danger, until an attack serves as a wakeup call, he said, not unlike the infamous bombing during World War II. What should the government be doing? Nunn didn’t claim to know. He was just as elusive on another subject: a potential run for the White House in 2008, saying only that if it did happen, he’d run as an Independent candidate.

On Nov. 7, the Sunlight Foundation released software that could prove a valuable tool for Republicans critical of congressional earmarks. The Sunlight Foundation, an organization that, according to its Web site, “supports, develops and deploys new Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people,” uses the Google Earth application to plot the locations for almost 1,500 earmarks in the House Defense Appropriations bill.

By downloading Google Earth and a House Defense file, users can locate earmarks on a U.S. map, according to where the funds would be allocated. Click on the pushpin that marks an earmark location and you can find detailed information from Sunlight Foundation’s searchable database, EarmarkWatch.org.

Will the software application play any role in the fate of the House Defense Appropriations bill, which contains an estimated $5 billion in earmarks? Probably not. Congress passed it last week, and President Bush has stated no plans for a veto. Still, Senate Republican leaders that have made earmarks a soapbox issue no doubt cheer the application – along with other Internet efforts to garner support for their cause.

Our pals over at the innovation department in the Defense Intelligence Agency asked us to let the world know they are looking for some good ideas and technologies to power the next generation of the Defense Intelligence Information System.

Vendors can submit their ideas to DIA on Web and when products or technologies meet requirements, vendors are invited to present them in a one-hour pitch at a DIA facility in beautiful New Carrollton, Md.

DIA said it’s looking for IT innovation in a number of areas to help intelligence collectors and analysts in such areas as document and content management, knowledge and records management as well as new software, gadgets or gizmos that can improve systems and security management.

Biometric vendors have always had the “Big Brother” image problem to do deal with when trying to sell their wares to organizations that are considering using fingerprints, hand geometry or iris scans to identify individuals. The public worries that their biometric identification could be stolen or used by the government in a way they wouldn't approve of. It looks like they still do, especially when children are involved, as Oregon’s Stayton Middle School officials found out.

McQ Inc. said Boeing has selected it to provide a family of unattended sensors for the Homeland Security Department’s electronic border fence project, called the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet). McQ has a basic ordering agreement to provide unattended acoustic, magnetic and infrared sensors, according to contract information posted on Boeing’s online SBInet Toolbox contract page.

This summer, the Army Research Lab selected McQ’s unattended ground sensors as one of 10 “greatest inventions” of 2006.

In a related development, the House Homeland Security Committee plans to hold a hearing on the troubled SBInet project Oct. 24. DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff threatened last month to withhold payments on SBInet until Boeing fixes problems on a 28-mile pilot project in Arizona. “I'm not going to buy something with U.S. government money unless I'm satisfied it works in the real world,” Chertoff said last month at a congressional hearing.

Northrop Grumman recently won a National Security Agency information management and data services contract, which will allow the agency to ingest data at a speed faster than any other entity that the company knows on the planet.

Kevin Henderson, chief systems engineer for the information management and data services project, declined to provide any speed benchmarks for me but said the system would outperform those used for high-energy physics computations, which does provide a good baseline to work from.

In 2005 a team from the Energy Department's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center transferred physics data at the rate of 150 gigabits per second, or the equivalent of downloading 130 DVD movies in one minute. The NSA system supposedly can work faster than that.

Such blistering data transfer rates of electronics signals intelligence will require storage measured in the petabyte (a quadrillion bytes) range, Henderson said. Northrop Grumman will provide that through disk- and tape-based storage systems, with an eye to nanotechnology-based systems when and if that becomes available.

Loren Ryder, Northrop Grumman’s program manager for the NSA job, said agency analysts will not have to sift through petabytes of data to do their job. The company, he said, has developed an information management system to send the right data, to the right analyst, at the right time.

I understand that Lockheed Martin and EDO also bid on the NSAQ contract.

Some consumer groups in the United Kingdom are concerned that Wi-Fi signals may be harmful to young children and have convinced the a U.K. public health advisor to take on a $600,000 study to determine if the signals can harm health, according to an article posted by telegraph.co.uk. The groups are concerned that Wi-Fi signals, which "are very low power, typically 0.1 watt in both the computer and the router," according to the article, could affect children in classrooms where the Wi-Fi signals are emitted to experience "fatigue, memory and concentration problems, irritability and bad behaviour." And that would be different from . . . ?

News that a government agency or corporation exposed private information such as Social Security numbers is rather common these days. The public routinely asks, "Why can't organizations take more care in securing my personal information?"

One reason may be that agencies use personal information such as the Social Security number as part of their everyday work in processing information, making it difficult to not expose personal information. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs recently installed software that scans each outgoing email for Social Security numbers. Under the VA's security policy, servers will block from being sent emails that contain Social Security numbers. In one month, 7,000 emails that the software determined could possibly contain a Social Security number were blocked, according to Robert Howard, assistant secretary of information and technology at the VA, who testified today before the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs.

That may seem like a lot. But looking at it another way, it's surprising that only 7,000 emails were blocked (which, of course, most likely includes some false positives.) According to the VA's Web site, the VA has 244,032 employees. If each employee sends on average, say, 100 emails a month (that's about five emails a day), that would mean less than 0.03 percent of all VA emails contained a Social Security number. And that doesn't include emails that VA contractors sent. However, Howard did not tell the committee if all VA emails are scanned, which if not, would increase the percentage of emails containing a Social Security number.

Nevertheless, for those who have their personal information exposed because it was emailed out of an organization's firewall, no solace can be had knowing it was highly unlikely.

The Air Force Space Command’s Space and Missile Systems Center has hit another speed bump in the development of the next-generation Global Positioning System satellites. But to find out, you need to start the day reading, and then deciphering, obscure contract notices on the GSA’s Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

Last week the Space and Missile Systems Center announced it intended to award sole source contracts to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which are competing for the multi-billion GPS III contract, for something called “GPS Phase A Sub System Risk Reduction.”

Buried in that contract notice is the speed bump: a line that says that the GPS III Key Decision Point-B has been delayed from August until December. If you want to know what that means, it’s easy to find out if you happen to have, hanging around the office, a copy of chapter 39, Title 10 of the U.S Code, section 2366a.

That code says, in quite plain English, that any major Defense Department project cannot proceed unless higher-ups in the Pentagon determine that the program is affordable, that its technology has been demonstrated in a relevant environment and the program demonstrates a “high likelihood” of accomplishing its intended mission.

In the case of GPS III, this includes a constellation of higher powered satellites that have jam-resistant capabilities for military users and new civilian signals to support civilian users, such as the FAA, which plans to base its new air traffic control system on GPS.

The Space and Missile Systems Center sugar-coated this delay by saying that the Risk Reduction contracts awarded to Boeing and Lockheed will provide them with additional time for system design work, including mature space system design and navigation payload subsystem design.

But time is running out if the Air Force wants to design and build GPS III satellites to replace those satellites on-orbit within six years. The Government Accountability Office reported this April that among if the first GPS III satellite is not launched by 2013 “constellation sustainment will be at risk.”

The Risk Reduction contract notice from the Space and Missile Systems Center indicates that it may be difficult to meet a 2013 launch date. It asked Boeing and Lockheed to provide it with life cycle cost estimates “consistent with a high confidence, low-risk capability insertion program plan for a FY 2014 launch availability” and additional cost estimates for an accelerated launch availability before FY 2014.

Anyone want to bet the first GPS III bird will be launched in 2013?

You typically don’t associate the Space and Naval Warfare System Command with armored vehicles, but it turns out the command’s Space and Naval Systems Center in Charleston, S.C., plays a key role (page 46) in the final assembly of vehicles designed to protect troops in Iraq against Improvised Explosive Devices.

SPAWAR installs all the command control gear for the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles at the Charleston facility, according to Steve Davis, a command spokesman. Davis declined for security reasons to provide me with any details on C2 equipment used in the current generation of MRAP vehicles.

But, the statement of work included in the solicitation (from th