Regulation

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was created, it was supposed to find a way to respond to serious "cybercrises." "The department will gather and focus all our efforts to face the challenge of cyberterrorism," President Bush said when signing the legislation in November 2002.

More than six years later, and after spending more than $400 million on cybersecurity, DHS still has not accomplished that stated goal. "We need to have a plan tailored for a cybercrisis," DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Thursday.

Chertoff told a conference in Washington, D.C., … Read more

Millions of green card holders will be fingerprinted and photographed every time they enter the United States as part of an expansion of a controversial biometric program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced on Thursday.

The expansion of the US-VISIT program to permanent residents--also known as green card holders--takes effect on January 18, 2009. At the moment, the program's biometric requirements apply to foreign citizens with a non-immigrant visa or those traveling as part of the so-called Visa Waiver program.

Anyone screened as part of the US-VISIT program must provide digital fingerprints and a photograph at the … Read more

The Department of Health and Human Services this week released new privacy guidelines (PDF) for electronic health records, the use of which President-elect Barack Obama has promised to support as part of his plan to jump-start the economy.

The use of electronic medical records could reduce costs and medical errors while potentially improving the quality of care patients receive, advocates say, but the level of new privacy standards needed for e-health records has been a matter of debate.

"Consumers need an easy-to-read, standard notice about how their personal health information is protected, confidence that those who misuse information will … Read more

About a dozen leading privacy and consumer groups met with members of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team Tuesday to discuss the Federal Trade Commission's role in protecting consumer privacy.

While participating organizations addressed a range of problems and potential solutions, the underlying message was clear: the FTC has for too long allowed industries to self-regulate their online privacy practices--to the detriment of consumers.

"The FTC keeps moving the goal post on what privacy advocates need to prove" before it provides substantive regulation, said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's … Read more

Facebook grew to more than 100 million users by providing a way for friends and family to keep in touch with one another. But few, if any, probably expected that their Facebook accounts offer lawyers a handy new way to tell them that they've been sued.

It's already happened in Australia, where a court recently allowed a lawyer for a mortgage lender to use Facebook as a method of serving legal documents. The purpose of the suit: to let a couple know that they're about to lose their home through foreclosure after defaulting on a loan.

United … Read more

Just days before a federal regulatory body will vote on whether to require publicly traded companies to use a specific business data language to report their financial data, IBM is launching a major initiative to create new standards for the language, thereby making it even more useful.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to vote on Wednesday on whether companies will have to submit their financial filings in Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Filings submitted in XBRL use XML data tags to describe business and financial information, making the documents much more searchable than the current official SEC filings, … Read more

The problem with defining Net neutrality so the government can regulate it is a little like the problem of defining obscenity so the government can ban it: You know it when you see it.

That shorthand didn't work very well for the U.S. Supreme Court, and it's not working that well for Google, as a report in Monday's editions of the Wall Street Journal made clear. The article said that Google "has approached major cable and phone companies" with a plan to "place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers,&… Read more

Updated at 9:50 a.m. PDT with new information.

While the federal government scrambles to find ways to stimulate economic activity, one of the U.S. Postal Service's most popular online services was malfunctioning and temporarily out of service during the Post Office's second-busiest week of business for the year.

The U.S. Postal Service Web site experienced a system-wide failure Monday morning, bringing to a halt one programs such as one Web tool that powers 20 online services including the site's free package pick up service, its zip code locator, and its rate estimator. Those … Read more

When President-elect Barack Obama appoints a chief technology officer to the White House, he should make the new appointee a part of his senior economic policy team and the chief "evangelist" for innovation-spurring policies, the software and hardware industries say.

The Business Software Alliance, which represents companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and others, sent a letter to Obama last week with suggestions for what role the CTO should play in the administration. The BSA has taken other steps in the past week, such as meeting with the Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Wednesday and releasing its 2009 … Read more