Politics and Law

President Obama signed an order on Wednesday proclaiming that the entire federal government should be more open, transparent, and Internet-friendly. It said that agencies must "put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public."

That memorandum, along with a few other executive orders and statements from White House officials, were sent to reporters throughout the day. But in an ironic twist, the transparency and a slew of other first-day-in-office documents were still absent from the official Whitehouse.gov site as of Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET.

caption: Whitehouse.gov, frozen in time since Tuesday?

The Web site still says: "The President has not yet issued any Executive Orders."

By comparison, the outgoing Bush administration was disciplined about updating Whitehouse.gov. As soon as Bush left the White House on Tuesday to go to the inauguration, a photo of himself and his wife appeared online.

Yet the text of Obama's inaugural address didn't appear for more than a day, even though news organizations posted it immediately. Still missing from Whitehouse.gov are an executive order relating to ethics, a memorandum about a staff pay freeze, and an Obama statement about meeting with the Iraqi ambassador.

Now, we've heard reports of confusion during the Obama press office's first full day on the job, with phones not working and computer passwords not assigned. And it's fair to say that the Bush administration's takeover of Whitehouse.gov was not exactly an unqualified success; it boasted broken links and, briefly, the phrase "Insert Something Meaningful Here."

But for a president who campaigned on on government openness and (unlike Bush) had almost three months to prepare, this state of affairs can't be entirely satisfying.

Update 5:40 pm PT: The White House Web site has been updated to include some, but not all, of the documents.

Update 5:50 pm PT: Whitehouse.gov includes some JavaScript tracking code that sends WebTrends--a private company that provides Web analytics--information about each visitor's computer and settings. This disclosure is not made public in Whitehouse.gov's privacy policy, and may violate a Clinton-era memorandum saying government Web sites should have "clear and conspicuous notice of any such tracking activities." The Bush administration got in trouble for a less intrusive use of WebTrends, which merely set a cookie instead of sending visitor information to a third party, according to an Associated Press article from 2005. A WebTrends spokesman declined to comment, referring us to the White House. We'll contact the White House and get back to you.

In one of his first official acts as president, Barack Obama ordered more government openness, marking an abrupt end to his predecessor's policy of extraordinary secrecy.

Obama's still-be-named chief information officer -- some speculation has centered on Washington, D.C., CTO Vivek Kundra -- is required to come up with ways within 120 days to make the administration more Internet-friendly. (The memorandum says agencies must "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.")

The second memorandum overrules the Bush administration's controversial policy, issued a few weeks after September 11, 2001, instructing agencies to limit their responses to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests as much as possible. OpenTheGovernment.org said last fall that Bush had "exercised unprecedented levels not only of restriction of access to information" but also of "suppression of discussion of those policies and their underpinnings and sources."

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's October 2001 memorandum promises that the Justice Department would "defend" decisions not to release materials, and an accompanying note talks about denying requests "to provide necessary protection in the wake of terrorism."

That's what Obama essentially revoked. Here's an excerpt from the FOIA memo:

The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears... All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.

And an excerpt from the memo "Transparency and Open Government":

Information maintained by the federal government is a national asset. My administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.

Fans of President Barack Obama, or perhaps just those who dislike former President George W. Bush, seem to think there's something notable about the way the new White House Web site is configured to deal with search engines.

That configuration file is called robots.txt. It's designed to let Webmasters ask search engine robots not to include certain areas of a Web site in their index. Well-behaved robots will comply.

The Obama revamp of Whitehouse.gov included a shorter robots.txt file, which Thenextweb.com called "a sign of greater transparency and change." A BoingBoing poster claimed that now "people can find information that was restricted before." And so on.

There's just one problem with these comments. They're wrong. As of Tuesday morning, the Bush administration's robots.txt file did only two things: first, it pointed search engines to the high-graphics versions of the page, as opposed to the text-only versions, and second, it tried to keep type-in-your-search-query pages from being indexed.

Those are legitimate reasons to list those pages in robots.txt, which is why CNET's own file is relatively long and complicated too. (Sites that have been around for eight years or longer tend to get that way). We ask search engines not to index an "/Ads" directory, e-mail-this-story pages, and dozens of others. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate have--gasp!--substantial robots.txt files too.

It's true that in 2007, the Bush White House did block some files they should not have, which they fixed once I brought it to their attention. They also fixed a more serious problem with the Director of National Intelligence's Web site, and an earlier problem in 2003. (A better solution would be for search engines to ignore overly broad robots.txt files on .gov and .mil sites, including Thomas.loc.gov.)

If anything, Obama's robots.txt file is too short. It doesn't currently block search pages, meaning they'll show up on search engines--something that most site operators don't want and which runs afoul of Google's Webmaster guidelines. Those guidelines say: "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

And here's something sure to upset Obama-praising geeks: the new White House site doesn't pass the litmus test of good HTML design. Alas, according to the W3C, not all pages successfully validate. Those are your tax dollars at work.

P.S.: The White House seems to be using Akamai's Edge Platform for scalable Web hosting:

sh-2.05b$ host whitehouse.gov
whitehouse.gov has address 96.6.250.135
whitehouse.gov mail is handled by 105 mailhub-wh3.whitehouse.gov.
whitehouse.gov mail is handled by 100 mailhub-wh2.whitehouse.gov.
sh-2.05b$ host www.whitehouse.gov
www.whitehouse.gov is an alias for www.whitehouse.gov.edgekey.net.

www.whitehouse.gov.edgekey.net is an alias for e2561.b.akamaiedge.net.
e2561.b.akamaiedge.net has address 96.16.218.135
sh-2.05b$ 

WASHINGTON--Barack Obama was sworn in as president Tuesday in what many spectators viewed as the nation's most interactive inauguration ceremony so far.

Andrea Williams takes a picture of herself in Washington on Tuesday to send to her family.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

As millions of people in Washington and around the globe watched a weekend of festivities, culminating with Tuesday's ceremony, they gave their instant feedback online and through text messages and other means to family, friends, and anyone else listening. At the same time, event organizers were able to give spectators live updates about the state of affairs in the nation's chilly, crowded capital.

Most people who watched the inauguration did it through traditional television broadcasts, a medium that hasn't changed significantly in half a century. But it was also possible to tune in online; our sister site CBSNews.com, for instance, streamed the inauguration live over the Internet. And people learned about the inaugural action from pictures uploaded by friends, comments on Twitter and other social media, and direct text messages from event organizers.

"I think we're more connected with the experience, the overall process from the primaries to today," because of technology, said Ghajiibah Campbell, who came from Baltimore with her family to watch the inauguration. "It made you not only more connected, but willing to be connected--it wasn't an inconvenience."

Campbell used her cell phone to send pictures and text messages to her sister in Florida, her brother-in-law in New Jersey, and her brother in Virginia.

"It allows us to share the experience with everybody live, as opposed to getting home and saying, 'Guys, you should've been there, you should've seen it,'" she said.

Countless others also used their handheld devices to share the historical moment with loved ones.

Dawn Chandler from New York said she was sending text messages to her relatives throughout the ceremonies describing "how cold it was, how long we were waiting--it was worth the wait--and the speech."

The desire to share the experience led to more organized communications as well. Inauguration-watchers from Oregon to Massachusetts sent anonymous comments to Januarythe20th.com, describing the scene around them as the swearing-in took place. Participants of the "mass observation" sent comments to Januarythe20th either via e-mail or Twitter.

"CNN airs," says one post from a deli in Washington. "A small sitting room is packed with diners eating out of Styrofoam containers. Three limo drivers beside a salad bar talk rapidly in an eastern language."

The inaugural balls this year have a new emphasis on interactivity as well.

The Huffington Post pre-inaugural ball Monday night featured text messages from guests displayed on a giant computer.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

New media received top billing at the pre-inaugural ball held Monday night by the news aggregation and commentary site Huffington Post. Even as stars like Ben Affleck, Dustin Hoffman, and Michael J. Fox milled around the lowly lit, sleekly designed Newseum in downtown Washington, they were overshadowed by a giant computer displaying text messages sent in from lesser-known guests at the party.

The Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site will host a live blog of the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball Tuesday night, which is open to Washington residents. The committee is encouraging people to host their own inaugural balls across the country and text in photos or video of their events, some of which will be aired on ABC's broadcast coverage of the Washington inaugural balls.

The committee made use of more practical interactive features as well, offering text alerts for event scheduling updates, public transportation news, weather reports, and more.

Regular citizens will also be able to contribute to the Official Barack Obama Inaugural Book by uploading their pictures to Photobucket.

Caption: The most prominent feature of President Obama's new Whitehouse.gov site: a promise that change has come to America, and an oversize photo of Obama. On left, the outgoing Bush administration's site as of Tuesday morning.

As President-elect Barack Obama began his inaugural address at noon on Tuesday, his aides were busy switching over Whitehouse.gov.

Until 11:59 am EST, the Web site featured a photograph of former president George W. Bush leaving the White House for the last time. The relaunched site's most prominent feature is an oversize photo of the new president next to the slogan: "Change has come to America."

Because the presidential Web site launched under Bill Clinton's tenure, this is only the second time that Whitehouse.gov has changed hands. The Clinton-Bush handover was not without problems: The site on January 20, 2001, briefly sported the line "Insert Something Meaningful Here," and suffered from some broken links and 404 errors.

Obama's new site, too, has its bugs. The site administrators posted an entry saying Obama "was sworn in" before that happened; another post titled "Read the Inaugural Address" was blank an hour after Obama finished giving it; some photo captions were incorrect; and the search option didn't work reliably.

If you're interested in reading the inaugural address, our CBSNews.com sister site has posted the full text.

The White House also now has what it calls a blog, something that Bush didn't have, except for occasional features like his "Trip Notes" during an overseas visit. Macon Phillips, the White House's director of new media and one of the blog contributors, said in a post that "Whitehouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement" in making this the most "open and transparent" administration in history. Phillips also asks for comments from the public through a Web form.

At least in its initial incarnation, the White House blog seems to be more a collection of press releases (a proclamation of a day of reconciliation) and Obama statements (remarks at a speech on Monday, and Tuesday's inaugural address). There is no opportunity to comment, the person posting the item is not automatically identified, and it doesn't include "trackbacks," meaning ways to identify who else is talking about the entry.

On technology policy, the new administration promises to support Net neutrality, encourage the development of Internet-filtering technologies for parents "while preserving the First Amendment," and "strengthen privacy protections for the Digital Age." In an echo of Obama's campaign Web site, it says intellectual-property owners should be "fairly treated," while copyright and patent laws should be updated.

The White House lists names of appointees for Cabinet positions, including well-known ones like Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and lesser-known ones like Robert Nabors for deputy budget director. But it missed the opportunity to post photos and even brief biographies of each of the nominees.

It does feature a reasonably flattering official biography of the outgoing President Bush, saying he worked "to create an ownership society and build a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans. He signed into law tax relief that helped workers keep more of their hard-earned money" and took steps "to protect our homeland and create a world free from terror."

Elsewhere, though, another Web page lambastes Bush's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina and promises that such a "catastrophic failure" will never happen again.

WASHINGTON--Cell phone traffic near Capitol Hill was three to five times its normal levels late Tuesday morning, just as Barack Obama was set to be sworn in as president.

Even with high traffic, most calls continued to go through, wireless carriers said--a good thing for the many spectators on the National Mall who were depending on cell phone service to get through the day, despite carriers' warnings of dropped calls.

Gridlocked crowds of people swarmed the perimeter of the Mall early Tuesday morning in an attempt to watch Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. Some inauguration-goers near the west end of the Capitol even began to trample over a perimeter fence, Capitol Police said. As the crowds stood shoulder-to-shoulder, just about every other person grasped a cell phone, trying to contact others nearby.

Carol Moore, center, tries to reach her husband and children via cell phone before walking farther to the National Mall on Tuesday.

(Credit: Stephanie Condon/ CNET News)

Eileen Lewis, here from Atlanta, received scattered service on her prepaid Motorola TracFone during Sunday's "We Are One" concert at the Lincoln Memorial but still found herself trying to keep track of her son with it on Tuesday morning.

Crowds were barely able to move on D St. NW, near the Capitol Building, and Lewis' son had gotten ahead of her. She wasn't concerned, as she tried to inch closer to him, that she may not be able to reach him.

"We're just trying to get to the Mall," she said.

There were scattered reports of others, like Lewis, who lost service on the Mall during Sunday's concert.

Sprint's traffic more than doubled that day, according to John Taylor, a Sprint spokesman, with more than a million extra calls.

By 11:30 a.m. local time Tuesday, Sprint was handling three times its normal traffic for voice calls and roughly five times its normal traffic levels for data usage. On top of that, many of the calls going through tied up the network for significant periods.

"People are not making quick calls," said Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge-Walsh. "They'll call people and share the experience with them for many minutes."

Verizon Wireless also reported three to five times the normal traffic level around 11:30 a.m., with most calls going through on the first attempt.

AT&T was experiencing heavy volumes of traffic as early as 9 a.m., but the networks were running smoothly in the morning, said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel.

Carol Moore, however, found her daughter's iPhone unreachable by 8:30 a.m. Moore and her husband, who were visiting from England, had to separate from their children because they had tickets for different areas of the Mall.

Moore also had to separate from her husband because a bad knee kept her from trekking to the back of the line to pass through the security gate. She was able to use her Sprint service to let her husband know where exactly she was waiting for him. If she cannot reach her daughter during the ceremony, Moore said she suspected she would not reach her until the day is done.

"We are borrowing a house three blocks away, so that is the contingency plan," she said.

Patty Brink's family, also attending the inauguration, planned to separate during the swearing-in and reunite during the inaugural parade in the afternoon. She and her son parted ways with her husband, equipped with T-Mobile service on Brink's BlackBerry and Verizon service on her cell phone.

"We're going to the swearing-in, and he's going to go save us parade seats, and he'll let us know if we can actually get into the parade area," she said. "I don't know what we're going to do if we can't text or BlackBerry."

"If we can't get in," Brink said turning to her husband, "we'll see you at home."

By Declan McCullagh and Stephanie Condon

Before the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, President Bush focused more on technology. In this photograph from less than two weeks before September 11, 2001, he was announcing a relaunch of Whitehouse.gov.

(Credit: Declan McCullagh)

news analysis Months after being sworn in as president, George W. Bush sat down with reporters and his wife, Laura, for a technology-themed event: a relaunch of the Whitehouse.gov Web site, which previously had been rather dilapidated.

Bush and his aides proudly demonstrated the new features, including photo essays, better access for the disabled, and a kids' area with details about the First Pets. The president said the Web site would let Washington become "more accessible" and let Americans "participate in the process."

Less than two weeks later, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, the White House shifted to a wartime footing, and Bush never looked back. Instead of a presidency that might have become known for its technology policies--Bush was, remember, a businessman in Texas--he leaves Washington this week amid controversies involving the Iraq war, torture, wiretapping, an economic crisis and bailouts, and a doubled federal debt.

The 43rd president leaves behind a technology legacy characterized less by intent than by casual neglect. Bush and (especially) Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were adamant in their defense of warrantless wiretapping, and made it a priority of their administration. "The president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity," Gonzales said in 2005 after details became public.

Yet wiretapping and its cousins such as monitoring financial transactions were the exception, not the rule. On more routine, humdrum topics, the White House seemed happy to defer to Congress or to its appointees in various federal agencies, rather than use the authority of the president to focus attention in certain tech topics--something President Bill Clinton regularly did to applause from Silicon Valley firms, whose executives would rarely turn town an invitation to the White House.

That apparent neglect occasionally led to embarrassing results, such as the Bush administration acknowledging last month that it opposed a spectrum plan backed by Kevin Martin, Bush's own appointee who heads the Federal Communications Commission. Bush's Federal Trade Commission warned that Net neutrality regulations would be dangerous, as did the Justice Department; but the FCC went ahead anyway and now is trying to defend its actions in court.

For his part, Bush has stressed that September 11, 2001, was what changed his priorities and his views.

"This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house--September the 11, 2001," Bush said in his farewell address to the nation last week. "As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did."

(It may be a little too facile to attribute a near-complete policy shift to that date. There is some evidence that the National Security Agency's wiretapping program began immediately after Bush took office in 2001; a lawsuit filed by Qwest Communications' former chief executive says that he was approached by the NSA at that time, and another lawsuit makes similar allegations involving AT&T.)

The administration's broad claims of expansive executive power and an Iraq occupation that's lasted longer than World War II--coupled with massive deficits and a ballooning federal bureaucracy--eventually estranged some Silicon Valley Republicans who once were Bush loyalists. Venture capitalist Tim Draper chaired three Bush fundraisers circa 2000; last year he gave the legal maximum to President-elect Barack Obama.

"It's good to have a fresh face," Draper said in a recent interview. "At least from the press, we've seen about six years of fear. I'd like to see six years of opportunity and what that could do for our country, and I think that might happen with Obama."

What could, perhaps, have been a Reaganesque technology agenda founded on free market principles with an emphasis on free trade and immigration reform shifted focus to security and surveillance, especially with the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in November 2002.

"The Bush administration was largely AWOL on technology policy," said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a technology trade association that supports antitrust regulation and counts Oracle, RedHat, and Sun Microsystems as members. "It was always an afterthought."

The Bush White House got off to a strong start by revamping Whitehouse.gov and launching the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2001.

Yet even with the new White House Council, the lack of technology expertise within the administration was apparent from the beginning, said Black, who is listed as giving money to Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but no Republicans.

"There were only a handful of people who by and large were the administration's technology people," he said. "In some cases, while they were fine people, they lacked the clout to make a big difference."

In many ways, a laissez-faire approach
On the other hand, the Bush administration's relatively laissez-faire approach when it came to Internet regulation turned out to be good for business. Bush opposed Internet taxes, though he spent little political capital on the topic. He expended more when supporting immigration reform, even when it put him at odds with conservative members of his own political party.

"Generally, the technology industry has flourished under the Bush administration," said Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organization that stages the annual Consumer Electronics Show. "It's a legacy of those who came before as well that the U.S. has managed to attract virtually every major company based around the Internet. All of these companies have been in the United States because of U.S. policy and creativity."

One early flashpoint came after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's attempt to break up Microsoft could not stand. Jackson had, in violation of judicial ethics rules, invited favored reporters into his chambers for private chats about the perfidy of Microsoft executives--typically likening them to gangland killers and stubborn mules who should be walloped with a 2-by-4.

The appeals court's ruling overruled Jackson, tossed out his breakup order, and concluded that Microsoft had not illegally "tied" the browser or tried to monopolize the browser market to the detriment of Netscape Navigator. That left the new Bush administration with less antitrust ammunition, and it settled the case a few months later.

Liberal critics of the administration, however, blamed the settlement on a political philosophy hostile to expansive antitrust claims. They found even more to complain in a series of FCC-approved telecommunications mergers that took place during the Bush administration, including the merger between AT&T and BellSouth, Verizon and MCI, and SBC Communications and AT&T. (For its part, the White House characterizes itself as having "pro-growth telecommunications policies.")

The free market principles of the Bush administration were extended globally, and "the focus on free trade has been the most principled and lasting legacy" of the Bush administration, Shapiro said.

Bush can claim as victories the Central American Free Trade Agreement and a trade deal with Peru. He managed to ink deals with Colombia and South Korea, but Congress did not ratify them. Although there was more emphasis on bilateral agreements than multilateral trade deals, Bush's push for free trade was significant for an industry that is thoroughly international, Shapiro said, and especially laudable given the growing anti-trade sentiment in the country, particularly in Democratic and union circles.

Stronger protections for intellectual property were put in place with the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act. Copyright law tends to be relatively bipartisan: there's no reason to believe that a Democratic administration would have been any different. President Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which was overwhelmingly approved by a bipartisan congressional majority) into law, and Obama has chosen the recording industry's favorite lawyer for a senior administration position.

"There's a gradual increasing respect in the developing world for IP, and I suspect that's a trend that will continue," Shapiro said.

Immigration policy in the Bush years, however, is largely seen as a disappointment from the tech perspective.

"National security concerns and a loss of focus on visas was disappointing for us," Shapiro said. "In terms of attracting the best people around the world, we know we're losing people to countries with less rigorous security processes."

While it was negotiating international agreements, the Bush administration could have done more to create an Internet climate optimal for Internet companies by supporting policies and legislation such as the Global Online Freedom Act, Black said.

"Increasingly, we've seen country after country use the power of the government to block sites and to make companies liable for doing those things," Black said. "The Internet was created by the U.S., and for the U.S. not to have been a forceful advocate of U.S. principals of openness was squandering an opportunity."

The administration's silence on the issue may have been influenced by its defense of warrantless wiretapping, which may have caused it to be reticent on this topic.

"We didn't do any work on (privacy policy) in the last eight years, and the work we did do nobody wants to keep, like the warrantless surveillance program," said James Lewis, a director and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies. "9-11 knocked the privacy balance askew. There were things we needed to do (to ensure national security), but we never tackled them in a way that doesn't weaken privacy."

While the Bush team was collecting information on its own, it did little to stop the private sector from its own questionable data collection, said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, a liberal group that advocates more federal regulation.

The Federal Trade Commission essentially ignored "the greatest threat to privacy we've ever experienced," he said.

The ramifications of commercial data collection is evident in the financial meltdown of the past year, Chester said, given that many people fell prey to online targeting of questionable financial services.

On the other hand, the Justice Department did mount an aggressive challenge to Google's planned advertising deal with Yahoo, even going so far as to hire a well-known litigator for the job. Google walked away from the deal in November, citing antitrust concerns.

Cybersecurity
Homeland Security was supposed to mastermind the government's cybersecurity efforts, combining what had previously been the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Defense Department's National Communications System, the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, an Energy Department analysis center and the Federal Computer Incident Response Center. But six years later, the agency proved to be anything but efficient at that task, prompting calls to move the responsibility to the White House or the National Security Agency.

Homeland Security managed to pour $400 million into cybersecurity without coming up with a coherent "cybercrisis" plan. And in 2004, the Homeland Security Department was given a discretionary reserve fund of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield, part of the president's war on terror.

"You had this idea you could apply the tech-heavy solutions we used on the DOD side to fix what were seen on problems on the homeland security side," said Lewis, who chaired CSIS's Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. "The tendency in the U.S. is to spend a lot to reduce risk. We've been doing that since the 1950s, so this might have been the reaction (to September 11, 2001) no matter who was in office."

The tech industry can be grateful for one important Bush administration decision. It never resumed the legal assault on encryption software, including PGP and Web browsers, which the Clinton administration had escalated in the 1990s. Even after the September 11, 2001, attacks, when some Republican senators and think tanks were calling for domestic restrictions on encryption without backdoors for government surveillance, the White House never followed suit.

The White House points out that President Bush signed into law the largest federal R&D budget in history and funded programs like the $1.9 billion Networking and Information Technology Research and Development initiative.

Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D budget and policy program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted that the Bush administration's support for R&D was strong in the first term but cut back substantially in the second term because of overall budget deficits. Large investments in war and a stated desire to cut domestic federal spending drained fund that could have gone to support the American Competitiveness Initiative, which was created to strengthen math, science, and foreign language education in the U.S.

"When you talk about a Bush legacy for science funding you have to talk about legacy for the federal budget," Koizumi said, "and by most accounts that's not great because of debt."

Bush's vision for NASA to carry out human exploration of the moon and Mars has also created a quandary for the agency, which lacks the funding for all of its goals.

"The unwritten legacy is NASA will have to squeeze, juggle, and cut its portfolio to keep doing nonhuman exploration, climate research, and work on the space shuttle," Koizumi said.

With reports all but confirmed that President-elect Barack Obama will be nominating Julius Genachowski to lead the Federal Communications Commission, speculation continues to grow over whom the incoming president may choose to be his chief technology officer.

An Obama transition team member would not confirm Genachowski's nomination but did not deny it. The transition team member could not say, however, whether the president-elect is any closer to naming a CTO.

Padmasree Warrior

(Credit: Cisco Systems)

A report from BusinessWeek maintains that the choice has come down to two people who already hold the title of CTO: Padmasree Warrior, of networking giant Cisco Systems, and Vivek Kundra, who works for the city of Washington, D.C.

Kundra's office declined to comment on the speculation, but the CTO has been praised for making Washington's bureacratic system more efficient and encouraging the development of the city's tech sector.

"He's charismatic and smart," Steve Moore, the president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., Economic Partnership, told CNET in an interview earlier this month. "He's a constant adviser for us on technology and what our priorities should be."

Representatives of Cisco could not comment on whether Warrior is under consideration for the role, though a Cisco spokesperson did say the company is a fan of Obama's plan to appoint a CTO.

"Cisco is committed to working closely with the Obama administration on their plans to deploy digital infrastructure to grow our economy and create jobs," the spokesperson said.

Warrior joined Cisco in 2007 after serving as CTO and then executive vice president at Motorola, where she oversaw an R&D budget of more than $3 billion and a team of 26,000 engineers. She was a part of Motorola, an Illinois-based company, for 23 years, and shares some ties with at least one Chicago-based Obama team member. Both Warrior and senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett sit on the board of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.

Anther possible contender for the national CTO position is Edward Felten, a computer science and public affairs professor at Princeton University and the founding director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Felten declined to comment on whether he is under consideration for the job.

It is still unclear exactly what role the CTO would play in the federal government.

"There are different ways to define a CTO's role, but along with the appointment, there may be some clarification of what exactly the role will be," Felten said.

After Barack Obama is sworn in next week, he'll be able to enjoy one of the lesser-known benefits of the presidency: phone calls that always go through.

That means no more "all circuits are busy" messages. And no waiting for calls to be completed as millions of people crowd into Washington during the inauguration and jam overburdened cell phone towers, despite what have been practically heroic efforts on the part of carriers to add capacity.

It may sound a bit like a storyline from the West Wing, but there actually is a branch of the government called the National Communications System tasked with ensuring that telecommunications related to "national security" remain intact and ready to use. President Kennedy created NCS in 1963, and its mandate has expanded to include high-priority Internet and mobile phone calls too.

"We found that this program was very helpful during September 11," said Robert Kenny, director of media relations for the Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. "We think it's necessary across the board at all levels of government."

Kenny said in an interview this week that NCS' priority-call system, which has been moved from the Defense Department to Homeland Security, is "for emergencies and other times there's a need to get calls out."

That's in addition to private Defense Department networks, some of which are satellite-based. Homeland Security did not respond to queries about NCS on Thursday.

One of the NCS's offerings is called Government Emergency Telecommunications Service, or GETS, which gives federally approved users special calling cards with instructions to call a certain number in the 710 area code for a guaranteed priority connection. At the prompt, the user enters a 12-digit ID number and the destination phone number. (The 710 area code is reserved for the federal government's exclusive use. It is, of course, a free call from a pay phone.)

"A huge advantage for public safety"
NCS says that the GETS system is designed to support tasks including "presidential communication," continuity of government, and access to the emergency broadcast system. Once the ID number is verified, the telephone network marks the call as a high-priority one, meaning it's specially routed and exempt from being blocked because of congestion or network overload.

A 1984 executive order signed by President Reagan lists NCS's duties as: "National security and emergency preparedness communications for the federal government under all circumstances, including crisis or emergency, attack, recovery and reconstitution."

In 2001, the government added an additional high-priority system for mobile phone users. It's called Wireless Priority Service, and gives authorized users including what NCS calls "senior members of the presidential administration" a higher-priority connection to the cell tower. WPS is accessed by dialing *272 before the destination phone number--but, alas, will only work if your mobile provider has authorized your phone. And the federal government needs to approve.

"In times of an emergency that's a huge advantage for public safety," said John Taylor, a Sprint spokesman.

Taylor said that WPS will come in handy next week during the inauguration. "For the inauguration, we are planning for 2 million people," he said. "We've said up front, if there are more than 2 million people, our customers will have problems. But we're confident public safety will not have problems because of this service."

FCC documents (PDF) from 2000 provide a glimpse at the deliberations during the wireless system's creation. The agency concluded that a uniform *272 number was useful because otherwise "communications service users would have to change systems under conditions when compatibility is most important, i.e., during the exercise of the president's war powers."

(As a side note, those war powers are breathtakingly expansive: Federal law allows the commander-in-chief to seize all TV and radio stations and cell phone towers, and control all telephone companies, Internet broadband providers and peering points. This can happen if the president believes there's a "threat of war" and such action is "necessary.")

Authorization to use WPS is ranked by five different levels. The highest priority is reserved for, according to NCS, "National Command Authority support for military command and control critical to national survival" and "support for the conduct of diplomatic negotiations critical to arresting or limiting hostilities." Law enforcement and public utility companies receive a lower-priority WPS status.

If Obama does end up ditching his BlackBerry for General Dynamics' Sectera Edge, a combination phone-PDA that's been certified by the National Security Agency, he won't be the first government employee to use it for priority calls.

"Priority services as well as other security elements were considerations in the design of the device," according to a spokesperson for General Dynamics.

The NCS has also taken some steps to find similarly-bulletproof ways to prioritize Internet communications. It's a far harder problem, of course, because the protocols underlying the Internet lack a reliable way to mark communications as White-House-high-priority, and the network is packet-switched and far less centralized.

A 2004 report lists responses from the Internet industry to the NCS's request for suggestions about prioritizing governmental data communications including video chats and voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. It admits that "NCS cannot cause a paradigm shift within the Internet to meet these goals," one of which is "national leadership must receive end-to-end priority treatment over other users."

It concluded, sensibly, that more research was required.

CNET's Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.