“There is a tension between information assurance and increasing capabilities,” she said. “The dilemma is how to ensure security and confidentiality while not reducing the effectiveness of networks to warfighters.”

Data transparency is one of the top three priorities of the military and Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom Jr., director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), noted that information exchange led to the successful targeting of al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.

As for the software DISA is acquiring, Croom said, “Commercially available technology is clearly where DISA is headed. We’re after speed, and commercial software does it for us.”

The primary problem presented by commercial software is that “our adversaries are able to buy the same piece of software as we do,” Brown said. “There are definite vulnerabilities in how we are using commerical software.”

For Brown, this involves a new way to secure networks. “The way we have protected networks traditionally has always been to lock them down,” she explained. “It is a philosophy we borrowed from the world of physical security, where you lock the doors and bolt the windows to keep people from getting in. In a network environment, the same measures also reduce the ability to get out, so it’s not the right philosophy.”

DISA recently awarded a $17 million Network Centric Enterprise Services contract to IBM Global Services to provide suite collaboration capabilities. The contract utilizes an existing commercial collaboration service and represents an almost complete outsourcing of collaboration tools to a commercial vendor.

Governement outsourcing for the development of IT that will house sensative information is of growing concern. The need for efficiecy must be weighed against the potentially greater concern of having insecure information systems.

Source: Click Here.

Despite significantly increased fluency, I am still amazed that a series of 1′s and 0′s create the words I am typing on this screen. The digitization of information is a fascinating topic and Chapter 11 revealed the underlying structure of many everyday occurrences–color, sound, images, video.

In my short lifetime, I have seen three major iterations of music technology: tapes, compact discs, and now, digital music. However, it wasn’t until I read this chapter that I began to understand the foundation of the sounds we hear. From sampling to compression ratios, it was all new to me. I also didn’t realize that it is possible to “fix” recordings, similar to editing pictures.

Despite common knowledge, it was also interesting to learn that although computers represent information as binary numbers, not all information is represented in binary. The truth is, computers represent information as bits. Indeed, bits can be interpreted as binary numbers; although, they can also represent ASCII characters, RGB colors or an unlimited number of other things.

As time progresses, communication technology and multimedia continue to become more accessible, portable, and capable. It is already a struggle for most twentysomethings–and others–to detach themselves from an iPod, cell phone, or PDA. The world is getting smaller and the interconnectedness of society will only increase.

Maintaining a balance between connectedness and disconnectedness personally and professionally will be a challenge for all in the coming years.

Jim Henson can be credited with many accomplishments: he had the most profound influence on children of any entertainer of his time; he adapted the ancient art of puppetry to the most modern of mediums, television, transforming both; and he created a TV show that was one of the most popular on earth. However, one thing he cannot be attribued with is making Kermit the Frog think.

Similarly, computers and IT can be credited with many accomplishments: they revolutionized the the storage of large of amounts of information; they greatly enhanced the speed of communications; and the internet has the potential to be, if its not already, the most influencial technological advancement in history. However, one thing that cannot be attributed to computers is the abilty to think.

Computer do what they are programmed to do, nothing more. Programmers think.

Dictionary.com defines Intelligence as: The capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.

Computers can be programmed to appear as though they are thinking, but a very basic level they simply perform a series of algorithms. My ah-ha moment this week taught me that the genius of IT is found at the end of the tubes. Humans have the ability to analyze inputs and outputs at each end of the system, whlie computers simply perform activites based upon what they have been told. Despite rampant personification of IT, computers cannot think.

As I perused various news outlets for some decent election coverage earlier this week, I came accross an article titled, CNNU: Politics Play out for Students on Internet. As I began to read the article, I came to find that it highlighted the use of blogs in classes at Florida Atlantic University, particularly a site called Stupid Florida Politics.

“It’s such a great tool,” Florida Atlantic professor Bonnie Gross said. “I hope that students get more familiar with media on the Web, then they can use what they learn to become better informed about politics.” However, when I visited the class blogroll and jumped around to a few sites, I found that few students were actually writing about politcs. Visit the blogroll here: FAU Class Blogroll

It is refreshing to know that people are beginning to take notice of the ever growing voice of the blogosphere. I emailed our blogroll to Prof. Bonnie Gross and asked her to comment on our work. I’ll let you know how she responds.

In the following months, the task force was charged with identifying priority actions to achieve strategic improvements in the following four areas of service:
• Service to individuals: deploy easy to find one-stop shops for citizens, including single points of easy entry to access high quality government services
• Service to businesses: reduce burden on businesses by using Internet protocols and consolidating the myriad of redundant reporting requirements
• Intergovernmental affairs: make it easier for States to meet reporting requirements, while enabling better performance measurement and results, especially for grants
• Internal efficiency and effectiveness: improve the performance and reduce costs of Federal government administration by using e-business best practices in areas such as supply chain management, financial management and knowledge management.

In order to do so, the e-government task force conducted 80 interviews with senior federal and state officials, including political appointees and career civil officials. More than 175 e-mail responses were also received, and more than 269 information technology “projects” were uncovered. Eventually, the task force identified 24 e-government initiatives to focus on. The Quicksilver initiatives, as they became known, formed the centerpiece of Bush Administration/OMB e-government strategy. In fiscal year 2002, Bush called for $100 million in e-government funds over three years to support his initiative; yet, as of fiscal year 2005, Congress had only appropriated $16 million towards e-government.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 had an impact on all federal funding streams –
IT included – and took precedent over many budgetary requests. Nevertheless, the attacks cannot be held solely responsible for the lack of e-government funding allocated by Congress. As such, OMB officials now take the stance that “the lack of e-government funding will actually help force departments (and agencies) to embrace enterprise applications” and collaboration (Garson, 2006).

Numerous factors led to significantly decreased funding for e-government. For example, in 2002 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report analyzing the business cases used to support the Quicksilver Initiatives. The report showed that “fewer than half addressed collaboration and customer focus, despite the importance of these topics to OMB’s e-government strategy and the President’s stated goal: to ‘champion citizen centered electronic government that will result in a major improvement in the federal government’s value to the citizen’” (GAO, 2002). The report clearly showed that the even the Bush administration’s own “business cases did not follow usual best practices for business plans and most lacked any market study of consumer need and demand” (Garson, 2006). In fact, in 2004 only 2 of the 25 Quicksilver lead federal e-government projects judged by the OMB met its goals (Mosquera, 2004).

With that being said, e-government and its counterpart e-commerce are at the very center of business, public and private, moving forward. Despite the conceptual mismatch between private e-commerce initiatives and public e-government initiatives, both are fundamental to the quality and accessibility of information, goods, and services.

So, why have so many of the Quicksilver Initiatives been unsuccessful? The short answer is because e-commerce business models have only limited applicability to the public sector. The longer answer (or at least part of it) and competing views of the Quicksilver e-government initiative follow.

Robert Atkinson, Vice President of Progressive Policy Institute, suggests that, “the administration’s support for e-government is all symbolic. It is not a priority. Bush in his campaign said they support a government wide CIO and a $100 million fund. But the most they ever asked for e-government is $40 million and got just $5 million, and they were fighting [Sen. Joseph] Lieberman’s E-Government Act because they didn’t want a real CIO. They watered it down and watered it down until the Lieberman folks went with it” (Miller, 2003). Garson adds that “the climate of political support for e-government never materialized…in fact, in many ways support has deteriorated” (Garson, 2006). Perhaps, the main reason the Quicksilver Initiatives haven’t been a stunning success is simply because more pressing issues emerged. The War on Terror, Social Security reform, and oil prices may have been enough of a distraction in and of themselves to move e-government to the back burner. Regardless, the practice of e-government never caught up with rhetoric of e-government.

Security is another key attribute of e-government’s success and failure. “The more we know about citizens and e-government, the more we see a trade-off between convenience and ease of use and security and privacy,” said Pat McGinnis, president and CEO of the Council of Excellence in Government, a Washington, DC based nonprofit. Fortunately for e-government, the ongoing battle between convenience and privacy is often won by convenience. “It’s not going to be used by everybody for everything, but we are crossing over into another era, from listening and observing government to doing business with government over the Internet. If the good news is how well people are using this, the even better news is how they feel about it,” said Peter Hart, CEO of Peter D. Hart Research Associates Inc. of Washington. Nevertheless, concerns surrounding data security and privacy are prevalent. When asked what the government’s top priority should be for its Web sites, 33 percent of citizen respondents said security, according to a Hart-Teeter research poll. Interestingly, when the same question was asked of government officials, they ranked security third behind ease of use and ease of understanding. As more and more government agencies move transactions online, “security has to come along,” said Mark Forman, associate director for IT and e-government at the OMB. East coast and west coast approaches must work together so as to provide citizens with an e-government experience that is both user-friendly and secure.

The most popular argument defending the apparent failure of the Quicksilver initiatives is lack of funding. Fortunately, five budget cycles into e-government, the Senate finally seems to be grasping the finer points of the administration’s effort to make agencies act more like businesses. According to Jason Miller of Computer Government News, “For five years, funding requests for the 24 Quicksilver projects and the e-government Fund mostly ran into a wall on Capitol Hill. But this year (2006), OMB officials say, congressional staff members for the first time didn’t focus on whether e-government is valuable as a concept, but wanted to know about benefits the initiatives bring to taxpayers.” “This year, we got to a level of granularity that we never reached before,” Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for e-government and IT said. “We talked about how we get value, and what the oversight process is.” Dan Chenok, a former OMB official and now a vice president at SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., said OMB’s progress may be a function of two factors: the administration’s focus on explaining why e-government is important, and the time it takes to educate the Hill.” I trust that the five years of due diligence performed by OMB has better prepared them to educate Congress on the benefits of e-government and improve the future of the Quicksilver Initiatives.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word Quicksilver as unpredictable. The Quicksilver e-government Initiatives certainly fit that definition. Introducing systemic change in government, especially change of a technological nature, is always a slow process. Nonetheless, as e-government continues to evolve, the application of business models in the public sphere—if applied in ways most beneficial to the citizenry—will improve the availability, cost and quality of public goods and services.

References:

Daniels, Jr. Mitchell. (2001) Citizen-Centered E-Government: Developing the Action Plan. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m01-28.html. 23 Oct. 2006.

Emergy, Gail Repsher. (2006) E-gov is easier, but citizens worry about security. Government Computer News. Post-Newsweek Media, Inc.

GAO. (2002) Electronic Government: Selection and implementation of the office of Management and Budget’s 24 initiatives. Report to the committee on governmental affairs, U.S. Senate. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Garson, G. David. (2006) Public Information Technology and E-Governance. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc.

Miller, Jason. (2006) Negotiations renew hope for e-gov; OMB makes headway in convincing appropriations staff of programs’ benefits. Government Computer News. Post-Newsweek Media, Inc.

Miller, Jason. (2003) Think tank slams Bush’s e-gov efforts; Think tank slams Bush’s e-gov efforts. Government Computer News. Post-Newsweek Media, Inc.

Mosquera, Mary. (2004) Grants.gov marks first anniversary. Government Computer News. Post-Newsweek Media, Inc.

OMB Outlines New Federal E-Government Strategy. (2001). U.S. Office of Management and Budget. http://www.cio.gov/fpkisc/library/pressrelease_omb_oct25.pdf 24 Oct. 2006.

Quicksilver. (2004) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company. 23 Oct. 2006.

Thornmeyer, Rob. (2006) The test of e-gov: efficiency and effectiveness; OMB requires project data to help quiet Hill critics. Government Computer News. Post-Newsweek Media, Inc.

Website References:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/egov/.html

On the eve of a very important American election, one that we hope will not be stolen by hanging chads or removable memory cards, the electronic voting machine debate deserves a bit more attention.

In an article that appeared yesterday — October 18, 2006 — in Wired, two of the top computer scientists in the field, UC Berkeley’s David Wagner and Princeton’s Ed Felten, were asked to come up with a wish list of features they would include in a voting machine, if they were asked to create one.

Note: They preceded their technological recommendations with this statement; “Voting machines, no matter how secure, are no remedy for poor election procedures and ill-conceived election laws. So our system would include thorough auditing and verification capabilities and require faithful adherence to good election practices, as wells as topnotch usability and security features.”

With that being said, here is their list:

HARDWARE RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Combine the best features of touch-screen and optical-scan machines in a single device.
2. Eliminate removable memory cards.

SOFTWARE RECOMMENDATIONS
3. Simplify voting machine software to use minimal lines of code.
4. Make self-policing software.
5. Create transparent code.

PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES
6. Employ mandatory audits.
7. Random spot checks.
8. Post-election hand audits
9. Post-election voter verification

I found this article interesting for a number of reasons. The first being that most of Wagner and Felten’s recommendations mirrored the suggestions posed by our seemingly un-FIT class a few weeks ago during the Diebold discussion. For claiming not to be geeks, we managed to stumble upon many, if not all of the experts’ recommendations. I know this is a digital governance nugget, but this is surely a sign of increased fluency.

Secondly, I find it interesting that even the most technologically fluent persons in the field recognize the necessity of finding east coast solutions to this problem. The pathetic dot has little control over whether or not their vote is being counted. Safer election technology in cahoots with more stringent election policies and procedures is what will bring us closer to election accuracy. Felten thinks that “someday we may get to the point where we can provide…verifiability but it will take time. For now, all we can do is take steps to reduce the window of vulnerability (with elections) — not to zero, but to far below where it is now.”

This issue will be at the forefront of election rhetoric for years to come and it seems obvious that policy and technology must work hand in hand to create a viable solution.

To view the complete article, please click: Building a Better Voting Machine

1st Michigan
2nd Virginia
3rd Ohio
4th Utah
5th Arizona
6th Arkansas
7th South Dakota
8th Kentucky
9th Wisconsin
10th Tennessee

The Center for Digial Government (CDG) is a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government. They are a private organization based in Folsom, Calif. that provides public and private sector leaders with advisory services, online resources and special reports to aid in their decision making regarding the effective incorporation of new technologies in the 21st century.

One such publication that falls under the auspices of CDG is the Digital States Survey; the nations original and only continuous survey of state governments use of technology to serve citizens. The Digital States Survey is a comprehensive study that examines best practices, policies and progress made by state governments in their use of digital technologies to better serve their citizens and streamline operations. In June, the Center invited all state governors and their chief information officers to participate in the revised 2006 Digital States Survey.

With more than 70 measurements in four broad areas–service delivery, architecture and infrastructure, collaboration, and leadership – this year’s survey is the first report on the transition of states to digital government since the 2004 elections.

The survey is just one of a series of national studies conducted by the Center that examines best practices and IT innovations within government. City and county governments, along with school boards and community colleges, are also surveyed throughout the year. The Digital States Survey is conducted biennially in even-numbered years, providing a longer horizon in assessing state progress.

For more info on the Digital States Survey, please visit: Center for Digital Government

Security: Precautions taken to guard against crime, attack, sabotage, espionage, etc. (www.dictionary.com)

The cartoon above does a good job of illustrating a recent trend in the discussion of privacy and security in America–privacy is being limited for the sake of security. Many American’s have expressed concern that the US Patriot Act has gone too far in weakening protections on people’s privacy set forth in the Privacy Act of 1974. The caveat is that it is difficult to determine how much security is too much security, and how much privacy is too much privacy. Moreover, the often times intangible nature of the debate only makes matter worse.

If another terrorist attack is averted due to lessened privacy regulations, most American’s would probably be in favor. However, so many factors contribute to the exchange of information in this country and abroad that it is difficult determine the appropriate level of information sharing. And the internet only heightens the debate.

Physical privacy is one thing but internet privacy is another issue altogether. It is easy to put a lock on a door, but it is much more difficult to put a lock on the information you offer the internet. Cookies, identity theft, spyware, and adware are just some of the mechanisms lurking to steal your information. Furthermore, when the overarching lack of IT fluency in America is combined with a naive sense of trust in the technology, it puts many people at risk.

I recently attened a Fundraising and Development lecture at which they detailed a series of databases used to track donor information. The specificity of the information available was scary. (e.g. Number of Children. Names of Children. Marital status. Address. Relocation Dates. Job Titles. Salary Information.)

My ah-ha moment this week encouraged me to be more careful with personal information and afforded me the opportunity to discard the romanticized vision of the internet i’ve carried for some time.

I’m sure by now you have heard about the Foley/Page scandal. I was appalled to hear that he was soliciting sex from underage boys. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the more disturbing thing is that nothing was done about it. It seems clearly evident that multiple members of the GOP, including Hastert, were warned of Foley’s behavior and did not act.

Clearly, we have been granted the benefit of retrospect and it is easy for us to see that this was a serious violation of laws, codes, mores, etc., but it’s inexcusable nonetheless. Foley used technology to corrupt congress.

It will be interesting to see how many e-mails and AIM messages surface and what type of action is taken against this repugnant account of gross negligence.

Check out Brian Ross’ webpage. The comments he is receiving are interesting to peruse.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/warnings_about_.html

From Wikipedia:
In other words, a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

In practice, the PageRank concept has proven to be vulnerable to manipulation, and extensive research has been devoted to identifying falsely inflated PageRank and ways to ignore links from documents with falsely inflated PageRank.

_____________________________________________________________

Last weeks discussion of Google and its interworkings peaked my curiosity of the PageRank system and its capabilities. I discovered, as noted above, that it is essentially a “democratic” search engine. Each time we link to a page, we cast a ballot for the virtual candidate of our choosing.

More links = More votes. Less links = Less votes.

However, it seems that stealing virtual votes (i.e. increasing your PageRank) is far more difficult than stealing votes in Ohio or Florida. Google has gone to great lengths to ensure that PageRank, the basis for all of its webtools, is locked down. PageRank wont lose the election due to a Philips head screwdriver, so to speak.

Understanding the interworkings of PageRank is important if you, or your organization, wish to increase the standing of your online presence. This week’s milestone reflects a better understanding of ranked webpages and the populist nature of Google.

The attached article discusses PageRank in more detail. It is worth a read.

PageRank Article

PS: What do you think about the validity of the aforementioned site?

The article, titled “Clinton-Wallace Body Language: Here’s the Tale of the Tape” by Tara Dooley, raises an interesting point about dialogue and the impact of the visual over the audible.

Karen Bradley, director of graduate studies in dance at the University of Maryland and a certified movement analyst who is often called on to assess politicians’ body language, suggests that watching the controversial interview without sound is another way to tell us how the former President really felt.

In particular, we can tell how people feel when they do something different with the body language from what is familiar to us, she said. Usually, Clinton is all about warm friendlies with a hand on the back and a big smile.
This was unfamiliar, Bradley said. At least unfamiliar to the general public. And, Bradley said, Clinton used forceful movements:
• The finger wag: This is not a nagging scold but the gesture of a man signaling that he is more important than Wallace.
• The hand wave in front of his body: With this motion Clinton sets a clear boundary between himself and Wallace.
• The forward body position and hand movement toward Wallace’s sheet of paper: Clearly, that hand wave boundary is only for Wallace. Clinton crosses forcefully into Wallace’s space.
• The pullback into his chair: With this movement, Clinton is not signaling retreat but being dismissive.

In contrast, Wallace struggled to neutralize the situation, Bradley said. His movements include:
• Leaning back in his chair: Though Clinton makes a similar move, Wallace does not settle back with his full body into the chair, Bradley said. Instead, his weight is suspended as if he is uncomfortable.
• Hands moving back and forth: This is a sign of equivocating as if to say, “Wait, no, I meant this.”

I don’t think that the technology, in this case television, actually heightened the quality of the dialogue between Wallace and Clinton. Although, it would be hard to say that we didn’t benefit from having seen the conversation.

The visual representation surely gave us another angle from which to analyze their conversation and gather information we may not have gleaned had we only heard the interview.

Link: source

The Accelerator, in cahoots with LotterShelly — our design firm — is working on the design of a new website for our organization. One of the talking points at yesterday’s meeting was in regard to what keywords we want to include in the text to draw as many people to the site as possible.

For those of you who have never helped design a website before, I must say that it is quite an arduous process. We are currently playing around with the wireframe — a large hierarchical diagram of how the pages of the site intertwine — and writing the content for the site.

It is interesting to consider what types of questions and phrases people will type into a search engine to try and find our site. It is equally intriguing to try and design the content of the site so as to garner the types of viewers we seek to attract.

“The query processor of a search engine gets keywords from a user and looks them up in the index to find the URL’s of pages associated with those keywords” (Snyder, 140). It is crucial that we include as many common words as possible in the text so as to easily attract our constituency base.

Snyder also revealed the concept of the “invisible web” to me in this chapter. According to UC Berkeley’s Teaching Library, the “visible web” is what you see in the results pages from general web search engines. It’s also what you see in almost all subject directories. The “invisible web” is what you cannot retrieve (“see”) in the search results and other links contained in these types of tools.

Apparently, nearly half of all web pages are not yet found in general search engines.
However, most of the invisible or deep web is made up of the contents of thousands of specialized searchable databases made available via the internet.

Google Scholar is an interesting exampled highlighted by Berkeley’s website. It is basically a collection of citations with links to publishers or other sources where one can try to access the publication in full text. However, Google Scholar is only able to locate a tiny fraction of all the scholarly publications that exist online.

Google Scholar is only able to provide citations to journal contents for which its crawlers can find stable links. In some experiments conducted at UC Berkeley, they estimate that Google Scholar accesses about 10% of all we subscribe to for their students, faculty, staff, and users present on campus.

Fortunatly, it is possible to find searchable databases containing invisible web pages in the course of routine searching in most general web directories. Berkeley suggest using Google and other search engines to locate searchable databases by searching a subject term and the word “database”. If the database uses the word database in its own pages, you are likely to find it in Google. The word “database” is also useful in searching a topic in the Google Directory or the Yahoo! directory, because they sometimes use the term to describe searchable databases in their listings.

This information allows students, researchers, and scholars–Google and otherwise–increased access to information and resources. It is important to remember though that most of the information found in databases is proprietary and subject to copyright restrictions. Good luck searching! All you have to do is know where to look.

Think about it: in real time we are able to virtually peer at events transpiring on the opposite side of the world and comment about what implications, if any, the event had on any realm of interest.

The most facsinating things about monitoring the coup in thailand take place were that (1) I can now say that I monitored a coup in thailand, and (2) watching the blogosphere banter about it in real time. Here is a link from technocrat.net, click,  that shows an amazing course of events.

It is now possible for people to access the internet, find a blogging website of their choosing, discuss a topic of interest, search a wealth of information to assist in that discussion, and literally watch events unfold before their eyes.

That is amazing.

PS: In honor of the title of this blog, Thai Coup, I have decided to write a Haiku about technology.

Coup is happening!

Visit technocrat.net

Tell them what you think

As part of a little music project I was involved in as an undergraduate, I helped create a website for our band. I didn’t create the entire site nor do I claim to be an expert, but I was in charge of updating it regularly. HTML is a fairly intuitive language and a little experiementation is all it really takes to figure it out. WYSIWYG editors are also a tremendous help for those of us without a coding background.

Anyway, our site is still out there on the web. You should check it out.

http://www.soulpatchmusic.net/