Security
Major Changes Planned For U.S. Points Of Entry
     The infrastructure at border crossings and other points of entry will look completely different in the next few years, driven in part by new technologies, a senior Homeland Security Department official said. "We're halfway through restructuring our border policy," said Stewart Verdery, assistant secretary for policy and planning at Homeland Security's directorate on border and transportation security. "In a couple of years, [crossing the border] is going to be a hell of a lot different than it is today." Verdery made the comments after a speech to the Heritage Foundation. But changes may not happen as quickly as Congress and some others want. Verdery said only three or four nations appear to be on track to complying with a law requiring that they implement biometric-readable passports to enter the United States by late October 2004. He said Homeland Security is working with Congress on the possibility of changing that deadline.

Labor
Coalition To Congress: Let U.S.-Trained Experts Work Here
     News that the cap on visas for highly skilled workers already has been reached for the current fiscal year prompted technology industry representatives to ask Congress to lift the cap or reform the system so U.S. companies can remain competitive. Immigration officials announced that the quota for H-1B visas has been filled. Tech officials said the fact that all 65,000 were issued less than six months into fiscal 2004 shows that while the economy is rebounding, the United States needs to devise a system to ensure that highly skilled foreign scientists, many of whom were educated in the United States, can find employment here rather than with global competitors. During the technology boom in the late 1990s, the cap on visas was raised to 195,000, but the economic recession and fears of terrorism combined to trigger a sharp reduction. No additional visas will be issued until Oct. 1, 2004. American Business for Legal Immigration, a coalition of technology and other companies that rely on H-1B visas, is proposing that scientists and engineers educated in the United States be exempted from visa caps.

Intellectual Property
FBI Plans Anti-Piracy Seal For Entertainment Products
     The FBI announced that it will produce an anti-piracy seal to be placed on or encrypted within frequently pirated entertainment products. "The FBI will continue to work with our local, state and federal law enforcement partners, as well as private-sector alliances, to target and dismantle ... criminal organizations" dealing in stolen intellectual property, said Jana Monroe, assistant director for the FBI's cyber division. Entertainment companies can choose whether to display the seal on their products and in what manner, said Chris Dowd, a special agent for intellectual property rights in the FBI's cyber-crime division. The options could vary from placing physical seals on compact discs of music or their covers, or creating "pop up" warnings on computer screens when installing software.

Security
Homeland Security Forms Groups To Bolster IT Security
     Hoping to leverage the security expertise of the federal government's information technology professionals, the Homeland Security Department has created three groups of government technology officials to share information in an effort to strengthen computer security and coordinate responses to future computer attacks. The first group is the Government Forum of Incident Response Teams, or G-FIRST. It will include federal agencies' chief security information officers and computer experts from the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, Pentagon and civilian federal agencies. The second group, the Chief Information Security Officers Forum, will be a venue for informal information sharing. And the Cyber Interagency Management Group will serve as a forum for defense and law enforcement officials to coordinate a response to a major cyber attack. "These three groups were established to fill a need for information sharing in government," Larry Hale, deputy director of the department's cyber-security division, said in an interview.

E-Commerce
Technologies Can Help Secure Drug Supply, Agency Says
     Technologies that track the origins of medicines and authenticate their legitimacy will provide a greater level of security for drug products, according to a report released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Tracking technologies should be fully available by 2007, according to the FDA. The systems would be used to create drug "pedigrees," or assurances that legitimate companies manufacture them. "This approach is ... much more reliable ... than paper record-keeping requirements, which are more likely to be incomplete or falsified," the report concluded. While there is no "silver bullet" to guarantee drug security, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags will make copying medications "extremely difficult or unprofitable," the FDA said. The agency said it is working with RFID developers to ensure that they comply with regulations.

Digital Television
Movie Group Seeks Mandatory Cable Encryption
     The FCC should require cable companies to use content-scrambling technologies when they transmit digital television programs owned by a broadcast network, six of the seven major studios in the Motion Picture Association of America said. Such a move would change longstanding FCC policy that network television programming -- whether broadcast over the airwaves or transmitted via cable lines -- be available unencrypted. The electronics industry and public-interest groups oppose encrypted broadcasts. The movie association -- absent one of its member studios, Time Warner, which is the second-largest cable company -- made the proposal in a filing following the agency's "broadcast flag" decision in November. Under that order, technology companies building digital TV receivers must detect the digital flag attached to broadcasts and encrypt those programs. That measure is designed to thwart Internet piracy.

E-Commerce
Agencies Grapple With Implementing Anti-Spam Law
     As government agencies familiarize themselves with a new anti-spam law, they are turning to their international counterparts for cooperation and advice, officials said. The Justice Department "spends a lot of time with international bodies" on the spam issue, Anthony Teelucksingh, an attorney for the Justice Department's division on computer crime and intellectual property, said at a workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "Different perspectives" have created "some disagreement," he added. One difference involves the U.S.-backed "opt out" approach to unsolicited commercial e-mail, which lets companies send e-mail until specifically asked to stop, and the "opt in" approach advocated by Europe, which prohibits commercial e-mails unless people first authorize them. Justice will focus its efforts on "cooperative prosecution and training," Teelucksingh said.