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The third annual survey on e-government, The New e-Government Equation: Ease, Engagement, Privacy and Protection, conducted on behalf of the non-partisan Council for Excellence in Government, indicates that Americans are pleased with improvements in e-gov services, but are also deeply concerned about data privacy issues associated with the collection and dissemination of personal data by …
Information Week reported that “Lt. Col. Doug Dyer, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), said at an IBM-sponsored conference on data privacy…that Americans must trade some privacy for security.” The Total Information Awareness System is a project of Darpa, under the direction of John Poindexter.
Information Security: Progress Made, but Challenges Remain to Protect Federal Systems and the Nation’s Critical Infrastructure, by Robert F. Dacey, director, information security issues, before the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census, House Committee on Government Operations. GAO-03-564T, April 8. Highlights (pdf).
A follow-up to my posting yesterday on FERC’s announcement concerning the temporary removal of Enron e-mails from the agency’s database: Judge Melinda Harmon, United States District Court, Southern District of Texas, has “rejected Enron’s request for a blanket protective order preventing parties from disclosing discovery documents to the public.” This information is via the Reporters …
Bad news for the UK’s approximately 800 e-government sites comes from a report leaked to the press. Apparently, almost 80% of the sites are not published in a format accessible to users with disabilites and require redesign to achieve mandatory compliance.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced on April 7 that all Enron e-mails posted on the Commission’s website would be removed temporarily (until April 24). The e-mails are part of a FERC database comprising over 85,000 Enron related documents and over 150,000 document images. This action was in response to Enron’s petition to the …
On April 7, OMB Watch launched a portal to monitor how data quality guidelines impact the timeliness and range of information which state and federal government agencies make availalble to the public. The Tracking Data Quality site includes links to the following areas: Analysis and Background Challenges Agency Guidelines Legislation Correspondence
Internet News reported on April 3 that the FTC “has finalized its Gramm-Leach-Bliley Safeguards Rule, which requires financial institutions under the FTC’s jurisdiction to develop and implement appropriate physical, technical, and procedural safeguards to protect customer information. The rule becomes effective on May 23.” In related news, this press release, The FTC Targets Security to …
This US News and World Report’s article, Digging through data for omens, addresses information gathering challenges inherent in the TSA’s new airline screening program, CAPPS II. The article states the program is… “a delicate dual challenge: accurately spotting suspicious patterns across multiple databases while minimizing false alarms and safeguarding individual privacy.” Within the context of …
CNN reported the availability to the public of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Access to Archival Databases System (AAD) in this April 5 article. The database was actually released on February 12, and represents a substantial e-gov program to provide a single user interface for researchers to facilitate searching, retrieving and dowloading approximately …
On March 31, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced S. 745, “A bill to require the consent of an individual prior to the sale and marketing of such individual’s personally identifiable information, and for other purposes.” Her press release states that the legislation seeks to establish a national standard for the protection of personal information, including …
Via the Big Ear, this link to the Project on International Courts and Tribunal: “The new Courts and Tribunals section will include information about all currently functioning international judicial bodies, including contact information, cases (pending and decided), and information about the judges, together with news and selected bibliographies (coming soon) about each body.”
