Politics and Law

The accidental disclosure of a House ethics investigation has kicked up quite a fuss on Capitol Hill as it turns out that more than 30 congressman and aides are under investigation. But after committee chairman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) disclosed the breach on the House floor late Thursday, her colleague, Rep. Jo Bonner (Ala.), who is the committee's ranking Republican, spoke next, telling fellow members that the breach was an isolated incident.

Not exactly.

In February, a company that monitors P2P networks said that it had found blueprints and avionics about the president's helicopter, Marine One, on a computer in Tehran. An investigation later found that a third-party defense contractor with access to that data was using a computer that also had P2P file-sharing software on its hard drive...

Read more of "File Sharing's Mysteries Again Stump Uncle Sam" on CBSNews.com.

Sensitive files like Secret Service safehouse locations, military rosters, and IRS tax returns can still be found on file-sharing networks, according to a report to a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Wednesday.

In many cases, that's because federal government employees or contractors installed peer-to-peer software on their computers without paying attention to which documents would be shared, Robert Boback, the chief executive of Tiversa, told the panel.

Boback said his company found the Secret Service's evacuation plans for the first lady and motorcade routes. (See an interview with Tiversa about Marine One documents found on a peer-to-peer network this spring.)

That led some politicians to announce that new federal laws were necessary to stop inadvertent file sharing.

"I'm planning to introduce a bill," said Rep. Edolphus Towns, a New York Democrat who heads a House oversight committee. He said his legislation would limit the use of peer-to-peer software on all computer networks operated by the federal government or its contractors.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission should investigate whether P2P software developers are violating the law, and the Obama administration should "undertake a national campaign to educate consumers about the dangers of file sharing software," Towns said. (In April, Towns' committee informed the FTC it had reopened an investigation into inadvertent file sharing.)

Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, suggested a similar approach. He wanted to know "whether there's some legal action that should be taken to protect intellectual property, to protect kids from pornography, to protect classified medical information, national security information."

The two-and-a-half hour hearing singled out LimeWire, which is probably the highest-profile P2P client in use today. LimeWire is distributed by Manhattan-based Lime Wire LLC (which sells a more featureful version called LimeWire Pro) and it uses the BitTorrent and Gnutella networks.

Lime Group chairman Mark Gorton tried to defuse some of the criticism, saying "the current version of LimeWire does not share any documents by default," and many security improvements were added in version 5 of the software--released in December 2008--that were absent from version 4.

Gorton also tried to make a more subtle point: the Gnutella network is an amalgamation of scores of different P2P clients, many of which may have different default settings, and LimeWire shouldn't be held responsible for someone's decision to share files using a program written by a different company.

It didn't work. "It is chilling what the public now has available to it," Towns said. "The idea that you can look at the first lady's information, where she's going, how she's getting there. Tax records, things of that nature...we need to get to the bottom of this."

Not helping was the fact that Gorton testified at an earlier hearing in July 2007 on the same topic.

"Mr. Gorton, I find your testimony today stunning," said Rep. Paul Hodes, a New Hampshire Democrat. "You promised us two years ago you were going to fix LimeWire."

Replied Gorton: "LimeWire does not control the computers of people around the country."

He added later: "It's not unreasonable to expect that people who install file-sharing software want to share files."

Other suggestions were more extreme. Rep. Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat who's more technically-inclined than most politicians (he has a doctorate in physics), said "the nuclear option is to block the Gnutella protocol" on a national basis.

But, Foster acknowledged, that wasn't likely to work. Another option, he said, would be to create a new version of the Gnutella protocol that allowed only limited clients--that curbed what folders or file types could be shared--to connect to it.

It's the age-old question. Where do our tax dollars go? Washington is using the Web to try to provide an answer, at least as it relates to information technology.

The IT Dashboard, a new tool from the USASpending.gov site, promises a behind-the-scenes look at how our tax dollars are spent on government IT. The site was unveiled Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York by federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips.

(Credit: USASpending.gov)

A promising idea. But the site, which is still in beta, appears to have a few kinks that need working out. When I tried to access the dashboard late Tuesday morning, I received frequent HTTP error messages telling me it was unable to contact the server. This happened both at the dashboard's home page and at its subpages.

I called the department in Washington responsible for the site. A representative told me the errors were being caused by high traffic on the site but that people were working on the problem. I'll follow up with more details on the site as soon as it's accessible.

Update at 12 p.m. PDT: The Dashboard appeared to be running smoothly after earlier hiccups due to heavy traffic, so I had the opportunity to check it out.

A YouTube video on the home page explains how the site works, which was quite helpful since I wasn't sure where to look at first.

Filled with news, statistics, and charts, the dashboard reveals IT spending across all the major federal agencies. Select any agency, and you can see its budget and spending pattern. For example, according to the site, the Department of Defense chews up the most tax dollars, with a 2009 IT budget of $33 billion.

Your federal IT dollars at work

(Credit: USASpending.gov)

An interactive data feed page lets you filter specific types of data by IT project, category, and department to see a spending snapshot. As an example, I retrieved a list of all 37 projects and cost centers for NASA, with descriptions and budgets for each one. An analysis page offers an interactive chart where you can track the rise in IT spending by agency and by year.

Certain facts are especially revealing. I discovered how much money was estimated for a given IT project vs. how much has actually been spent, providing an education in cost overruns.

Certainly, the dashboard is promising more transparency and accountability by publishing the facts and figures behind government IT spending. The site says it receives its data from agency reports on IT spending submitted to the Office of Management and Budget.

The dashboard does lapse into government-speak at times--it refers to IT project spending by agencies as "investments" and the overall amount of money spent as a "portfolio." The data feed page lists Exhibit 53 and Exhibit 300 as data sources, though most people outside the government would have no idea what those mean. (The site's FAQ does explain both terms.)

Also, the information takes a while to gather up and assimilate. I'm not sure how much time the average person would actually spend plowing through a site like this. But given the site's traffic congestion earlier on Tuesday, the dashboard may already be proving more popular than expected.

NEW YORK--The state senate in Albany was in a bit of a shambles Monday. So instead of speaking in-person at the Personal Democracy Forum as planned, NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg used Skype to make his keynote address.

"Through the miracles of modern communication, we're essentially together," Bloomberg commented to the audience at the Frederick P. Rose auditorium here in midtown Manhattan. He then spoke about how New York is using the assets of the digital age to make more information available to the city's residents--something that Bloomberg can pitch well, considering he made a fortune as the founder of the business news and information company that bears his name.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

(Credit: NYC.gov)

Bloomberg's new initiatives include Skype and Twitter accounts for NYC 311, the city's information hotline that Bloomberg launched several years ago; a partnership with Google to get more detailed information about exactly what people are searching for on municipal government sites (and what they can and can't find); and "Big Apps," a new contest for developers to crunch and remix city data into Web or mobile applications for the masses.

The economy, however, may get in the way. Any ambitious new city projects are taken with a grain of salt these days, and with good reason.

I, for one, was scrambling to get to Bloomberg's talk on time because cutbacks and delays on the B-D-F-V subway line had added literally an extra half-hour to my commute from downtown to the conference venue at Columbus Circle. Griping about the city budget is pretty commonplace around here these days, and Bloomberg himself is no exception.

"If any of you from around the world wants to move here," Bloomberg quipped over the Skype connection when conference organizer Andrew Rasiej commented that a thousand people were on hand, "we would love to have you. We need taxpayers."

The official information available on the Web to New York residents includes public school progress data and citywide performance reporting. Beyond that, Bloomberg's administration has chosen to support new and more efficient ways of doing business: it has given the thumbs-up to collaborative workspaces and launched a venture fund for tech and finance start-ups, among other things. These are all part of a way to combat the fact that the Wall Street meltdown has left scores of the city's professionals out of work.

With "Big Apps," Bloomberg is encouraging developers to participate in a contest that "will challenge all of you, and the whole tech world, really, to come up with new applications using city data."

"We'll be releasing a huge volume of data from a number of agencies," Bloomberg said before the Skype connection briefly cut off. Rasiej re-dialed in, and Bloomberg continued that he hopes the fruits of Big Apps contests will "create the connectedness that will benefit the city economically, civically, and socially."

If developers aren't willing to act solely out of a desire to help the city, Bloomberg said that Big Apps will indeed have cash prizes, as well as an even bigger incentive.

"I'll up the ante by taking the grand-prize winners out to dinner," he said.

Good to hear that's still in the budget.

Facebook's targeted advertising program is "materially different from behavioral targeting as it is usually discussed," Chris Kelly, the social network's chief privacy officer, said in remarks prepared for a Thursday morning hearing before two House subcommittees.

"In offering its free service to users, Facebook is dedicated to developing advertising that is relevant and personal without invading users' privacy, and to giving users more control over how their personal information is used in the online advertising environment," read the remarks for two subcommittees of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The hearing, titled "Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers' Expectations," was also slated to include testimonies from Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy; Scott Cleland, president of Precursor; Charles Curran, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative; Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University; Anne Toth, vice president of policy and head of privacy at Yahoo; and Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google.

Chris Kelly

(Credit: Kelly2010.com)

Kelly, a White House staffer under President Clinton, has announced an exploratory bid to run for attorney general in California.

Social-media sites like Facebook, where members fill out extensive personal profiles that can detail everything from their music tastes to travel plans to political leanings, are at the forefront of new developments in behavioral ad targeting. The Facebook Ads program lets advertisers fine-tune their campaigns to reach specific demographics and audiences. Kelly insisted that this does not constitute an invasion of user privacy, an Internet-wide concern that the Federal Trade Commission has been exploring at the request of privacy advocates.

"The FTC's behavioral advertising principles recognize the important distinctions made by Facebook in its ad targeting between the use of aggregate, non-personally identifiable information that is not shared or sold to third parties," Kelly's remarks read, "versus other sites' and companies surreptitious harvesting, sharing and sale of personally identifiable information to third party companies."

Privacy concerns are nothing new to Facebook. The social network went through a user backlash over the introduction of its News Feed in 2006, and a bigger one over the controversial Beacon advertising program. More recently, a revision to Facebook's terms of use prompted consumer advocacy blog The Consumerist to highlight language that it said meant that Facebook claimed ownership of user profile data and photos.

"In February of this year, we looked to revise our Terms of Use, simplifying them to cut out as much legalese as possible and explain them in plain language," Kelly's remarks explained. "When we released a first version of our new terms, a blog misinterpreted our simplification of our copyright license, claiming that it meant we were seeking to own user content. The user reaction was predictably swift and severe, and we needed to choose among weathering the storm, revising the language, and introducing an entirely new process that would directly involve users in the governance of the site."

Facebook ultimately underwent a "notice and comment period modeled in part on the federal government's rulemaking procedure...(with) a user vote at the end of the process."

The points he tried to drive home the most: that Facebook members have extensive control over their personal information and that Facebook does not allow advertisers access to "personally identifiable" data in the Facebook Ads program.

Kelly also included a general mea culpa of sorts: "Perhaps because our site has developed so quickly, Facebook may have sometimes been inartful in communicating with our users and the general public about our advertising products," he stated. "We learned many lessons about the importance of user education and extensive control from the imperfect introduction of our Beacon product in 2007. As a result, Facebook continues to be dedicated to empowering consumers to control their information in both the noncommercial and the commercial context because we believe that should be the future of advertising."

A few other interesting tidbits from Kelly's remarks: out of Facebook's 200-million-plus active users, about 65 million are in the U.S.; more than 10,000 sites are using the Facebook Connect universal log-in product; and Facebook plans to continue the discussion-and-feedback-period strategy on any future changes to its "critical site documents."

A State Department press briefing gives some insight into why the U.S. government requested that Twitter postpone a scheduled downtime during a crucial period in the post-election upheaval in Iran.

"I think, as I was following this, these developments over the weekend...I began to recognize the importance of new social media as a vital tool for citizens' empowerment and as a way for people to get their messages out," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday, according to a transcript of the department's daily press briefing (which was not held specifically to address the Twitter question). "And it was very clear to me that these kinds of social media played a very important role in democracy, spreading the word about what was going on."

CNN reported Tuesday that the State Department had been behind the decision by Twitter and its hosting provider to reschedule the downtime for an hour when it would be the middle of the night in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

Kelly was then asked to comment on "discussions that (the State Department is) having with networking sites about maintaining the technology, about how the State Department as an institution is monitoring these type of sites to gain information about what's going on."

His response: "We're monitoring many different media, including some of these sites. And we've had, of course, talks with Twitter as well...I don't want to go into the detail of the nature of those talks right now."

Another reporter then pointed out that "by not providing any information on the nature of the talks, it indicates that you have some role in kind of providing messages to Twitter, messages to Iranians."

Kelly denied this. He said he was not sure who exactly within the State Department had been in touch with Twitter and added that "we use a number of social media outlets, and we're in constant contact with them. And as I said before, we were, of course, monitoring the situation through a number of different media, including social media networks like Facebook and Twitter...this is about the Iranian people. This is about giving their voices a chance to be heard. One of the ways that their voices are heard are through new media."

With the Iranian government clamping down on foreign journalists, Kelly has a point: access to Twitter and ilk are crucial sources of information.

Social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have already emerged as sources of raw news in disasters and political crises before--from the Hudson River emergency plane landing to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. But this is the first time they've been highlighted as vital information channels in Iran--both for protesters trying to spread information and for government authorities trying to gather it.

The spotlight is on President Obama's accomplishments at the end of his first 100 days in office.

(Credit: White House photo by Chuck Kennedy)

This was originally posted on CBSNews.com.

A White House "virtual town hall" that Barack Obama hosted last month was intended to be an exercise in open-microphone democracy that would allow the president to interact with average Americans.

Aides billed it as permitting members of the public to "pose a question or vote for a particular question" using the Google Moderator utility. A new area of the WhiteHouse.gov Web site was titled Open For Questions, and nearly 1.8 million votes were cast.

That was the plan. After voting began, though, a committed group of mischievous activists (and their friends) deluged WhiteHouse.gov with their votes--and questions advocating the legalization of marijuana soon topped the site's "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget" categories. Obama eventually told the live audience that he doesn't think pot legalization is "a good strategy to grow our economy."

The White House's experience with reefer madness reflects the challenges that Obama faces when living up to his campaign pledge to create a "new level of transparency" through "cutting-edge technologies."

At 100 days into the Obama administration, Washington observers said that the president has made some significant steps toward using technology and the Internet to honor that campaign promise. In other ways, they said, Obama has not yet lived up to it.

"In general, we've been very optimistic," said Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Compared to his predecessors, Obama is an unusually wired chief executive. Bill Clinton sent only two e-mail messages as president and has yet to pick up the habit. George W. Bush ceased using e-mail in January 2001 and said toward the end of his presidency that he's looking forward to e-mailing "my buddies" after leaving the nation's capital.

But Obama, whose campaign made aggressive use of the Internet, is an inveterate e-mailer, saying "I'm still clinging to my BlackBerry" before taking office. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters after the inauguration that, thanks to a "compromise," his boss could keep a security-enhanced BlackBerry for e-mail.

Schwartz and others suggested that it's unfair to judge Obama's record on technology and openness after 100 days, especially when the president himself set a 120-day deadline for an internal review.

One of Obama's first acts as president was to sign a directive ordering his chief information officer to devise ways to make the administration more Internet-friendly within that time period. (The memorandum says agencies must "harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public.")

In early March, Obama named Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C.'s chief technology officer, to the position of federal CIO. Kundra said that he wants "to ensure the public has access to information, and to rethink the way the public interacts with the government in an information economy."

One of his office's projects is the not-launched-yet Data.gov Web site, which is intended to be a warehouse of government data for public consumption. (For the District of Columbia, Kundra's office created the D.C. Digital Public Square Web site, which provides data feeds and even ways to follow government activities through Twitter and Facebook.)

The White House also faces the challenge of upgrading a clunky and out-of-date computer system to allow them to do things like send SMS text messages and mass e-mail updates.

"They're putting out a report," said Schwartz, referring to the 120-day review. "We've had some conversations with the open government people and they seem to be looking at a lot of the issues we think are important."

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that advocates for open government, has created a Web site allowing voting on what's most important to see in the 120-day review. The winner so far: formal data standards, which would allow programmers to extract government databases to be incorporated in their own applications--in much the same way as Google's announcement this week does. (Sunlight also was the sponsor of a so-called Transparency Camp in Washington recently.)

Another area that's attracted more attention under Obama's administration than it did under that of George W. Bush is blogging. The White House has a blog (with comments disabled and no actual posts by the president so far). White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has a blog; so does the State Department and Homeland Security (with comments permitted).

What he hasn't done
Overall, though, the Obama administration has been "more talk than action, that's for sure," said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

It's true, Harper said, "that it takes longer to do a lot of the things the president has promised. However, there are things he promised and things he could have done starting on day one that he didn't do."

One of those is adhering to what seems like a simple, unambiguous promise: Obama pledged that he would "not sign any nonemergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House Web site for five days."

That hasn't happened. Obama signed a slew of nonemergency bills without posting them for comment. A chart shows that Obama posted only one of 14 bills for the required five days.

In addition, before taking office, Obama promised new openness in the presidential transition, saying "you can track these meetings" his transition staff had with groups seeking to influence policy. A "Your Seat At The Table" memo said: "This scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials."

That didn't happen. Although Obama did disclose documents submitted to the transition staff, his Web site never provided a list of meetings with the names of groups and identities of participants.

Instead, only a list of documents submitted was made public--meaning that if a meeting took place between the transition team and outside groups and no documents were exchanged, it remained secret. And even though meetings with White House staff are generally more important than meetings with transition staff, no similar disclosure policy has been adopted.

This and the WhiteHouse.gov five-day period could be easily fixed, Harper argues. "It's totally within the purview of the president to say what should happen," he said. "And it's not something he said should happen.

ObamaCTO.org provides a forum for defining, ranking and discussing the key tech priorities for the nation.

While the technology pundits are debating the role of an Obama administration CTO, a few programmers in Seattle yesterday decided to do something more useful. Using an application from UserVoice, they launched ObamaCTO.org, a site, unaffiliated with the Obama machine, that allow citizens to list and vote on what should be the top tech priorities for the new administration.

"User voting is an easy way for people to prioritize ideas," said Matt Lerner of Frontseat.org, which created the site. While the voting on this site is more like on Digg than a scientific sampling, and can be gamed, it is part of the Internet-fueled movement to give more of voice to the populace. The Obama campaign provided ample evidence of the benefits of using the Web for massive outreach. Now the question is how much weight the wisdom of the crowd will carry in influencing the direction of government policy.

Lerner and his co-workers are focused on making use of public data for civic good. "We have been interested in all the government data that is available," he said. "There is a treasure trove, such as data on campaign finance and voting records, but it is not standardized or structured, and doesn't have any APIs. Many innovations would be created if the data were available to programmers."

He gave a few examples of applications built around government data. Voting records are publicly available but must be accessed from each county in the U.S. and then normalized. "You could have maps of a block and see who hasn't registered to vote as a way to get out the vote," Lerner explained. Voter data is available from private firms such as Catalyst Consulting, Lerner said, but is expensive.

With census data on whether people drive, walk, or take public transportation to work, activists could encourage people to be more environmentally responsible. Frontseat.org developed Walk Score, which ranks the "walkability" of 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities.

Walk Score rates thousands of neighborhoods and ranks them on how walkable they are.

See also: Micah Sifry--Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is out of the running for the chief technology officer (CTO) position that the Obama administration is planning to create. In an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Schmidt said, "I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no." Schmidt will remain a close adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, but his first call to duty is Google.

Based on the job description below, it could be difficult to find a worthy candidate from the private sector willing to take on a task of such enormous scope in an environment known to chew up and spit out White House policy czars.

Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

The Obama administration's CTO job could be one of those bureaucratic positions that ends up consumed by turf wars rather than making real progress against initiatives. CNET News' Stephanie Condon noted the overlaps, which could turn into conflicts, between a White House CTO and CTOs working in various agencies:

The jurisdiction of a CTO could overlap with other agencies or executive positions in areas such as innovation policy, cybersecurity, or intellectual property enforcement. To avoid those overlaps, the Obama team will have to decide, for instance, whether the CTO would focus on goals like making agencies more efficient or take on a broader agenda such as dictating policy.

Just creating and implementing a coherent technology plan and policy for the numerous agencies under the Department of Homeland Security is an incredibly daunting task for a CTO. The DHS Directorate of Science and Technology, for example, has a budget of $830 million. It has 250 projects in process and 50 percent of them are expected to fail, according to Jay Cohen, Under Secretary for Science and Technology for the DHS.

The Department of Homeland Security organizational chart. The DHS is trying to achieve information flow across 87,000 different federal, state, and local governmental jurisdictions.

(Credit: Department of Homeland Security)

The Obama administration has a long list of tech initiatives (see below). The focus should be on having the best technical minds and management working on each initiative--the White House CTO as chief tech policy evangelist, inter-agency liaison and human capital recruiter.

Advance Stem Cell Research

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, HP CTO Shane Robison, who has been touted as a White House CTO candidate, believes that a White House CTO would need to focus on a few key tech initiatives and not just serve as an administrator or liaison between CTOs across the government.

This approach to the White House CTO job makes the most sense in terms of being able to accomplish specific objectives. In addition, Obama is fielding his own technology council of private and public sector titans, as his predecessor did with his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), to advise and help out on key issues.

(Credit: CBS News)

As the rookie U.S. senator who was catapulted into the White House on the back of the Internet, Obama knows that technology is a key enabler for his President 2.0 administration. He keeps a BlackBerry or iPhone on a holster on his hip, although his campaign Flickr photo library appears to devoid of pictures of Obama using his smartphone. (It must not yet be considered appropriate to show the president-elect text messaging.)

The technology to accomplish his long list of goals exists, but the funding, expertise, focus and political will is lacking in many areas. Transforming the U.S. government technology infrastructure from a plodding battleship (outside of the NSA and a few other high-tech agencies) into a speedy, adaptable ship built for the Internet age isn't going to be solved in the Obama era. But great progress can be made if the White House CTO can recruit into agencies the kind of people who helped Obama transform the way electoral campaigns are run and stimulate young people to study science curriculums.