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Privacy
Appropriators Move To Halt Funds For Data-Mining Plan
by Chris Strohm
House appropriators want to halt funding for a Homeland Security Department data-mining program until the department verifies that adequate privacy protections are in place.
The fiscal 2008 Homeland Security appropriations bill, scheduled to be on the House floor Tuesday, would stop funding for the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, which is known as ADVISE. Funding would be withheld until the department submits a privacy-impact assessment for the program.
Under development by Homeland Security's science and technology directorate, ADVISE "is designed to help detect threatening activities by allowing an analyst to search large amounts of information for patterns in the data and to provide visual representations of these patterns," appropriators wrote in a report accompanying the bill. "At this time, DHS has not assessed the privacy risks associated with ADVISE."
Appropriators noted that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that "until a privacy-impact assessment is conducted, little assurance exists that privacy risks have been rigorously considered and mitigating controls established."
A Homeland Security spokesman said privacy assessments will be done as the department determines how ADVISE will be used and what kind of data will be fed into it. "You can't do a privacy-impact assessment until you determine what data you're going to have," he said.
The spokesman added that four test programs using ADVISE are under way, and the only one using data on individuals is the "threat vulnerability integration system," which is being done within the department. He said a privacy assessment for that system has been submitted to the department's privacy office, and a public notice was issued for the data being used.
"It's all about transparency," the official said. "We want the public to know what we're doing and that we're taking good care of their information. There is nothing devious being done there."
He added that the other test programs are being conducted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He also said the department's privacy office is working with the science and technology directorate to develop a "privacy and technology implementation guide." He did not know when the guide would be finished.
By the end of last year, the department had spent about $40 million on ADVISE. According to officials at the time, the program was expected to be in a testing phase for at least a year and possibly as long as two years.
Congressional aides noted that similar problems surrounded the Transportation Security Administration's Secure Flight data-mining program for screening airline passengers. The fiscal 2008 appropriations bill would provide $25 million for Secure Flight, which would be $28 million less than the White House requested.
"While TSA recently completed a yearlong initiative to reassess Secure Flight's capabilities and address privacy and other concerns, the agency has not completed a cost estimate for completing development and conducting operational testing of the program," appropriators wrote. "Until TSA develops a detailed expenditure and management plan, it is premature for the committee to fully fund the budget request."
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Broadband
Net Neutrality Fans Aim For A Statement In Maine
by Michael Martinez
Supporters of safeguards to ensure the equal treatment of high-speed Internet content are looking for lawmakers in Maine to make a big statement about the issue before closing their legislative session later this week.
The Maine Legislature is considering a resolution, L.B. 1675, that would direct the state's public advocate to study the extent of the state's authority to enforce so-called network neutrality rules. The resolution also would express support for "full and nondiscriminatory access to the Internet."
A vote is expected in the next two days. The legislative session ends Friday.
Earlier this year, legislation was introduced in Maine to prohibit broadband network operators from charging premium rates for high-speed access. That proposal was replaced with a nonbinding resolution to commission the study on whether it would be feasible for the state to mandate such network neutrality principles.
Opponents of the resolution, including Verizon Communications, have argued that the state does not have the constitutional authority to enforce net neutrality regulations. Its supporters claim that the nonbinding language still would make Maine the first state to take an official stance on network neutrality.
Rachel Myers, a field director for the Maine Civil Liberties Union, said the legislature can send a clear message to its congressional delegation. U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Republican, is a co-sponsor of federal network neutrality legislation, but the issue has not gained much traction during the 110th Congress.
"This is really exciting, if [the resolution] passes," Myers said. "Maine would become the first state in the country to see what it can do about network neutrality."
Jon Bartholomew, the national media and democracy organizer at the public advocacy group Common Cause, also said passage of the resolution would be significant, and he prefers not to look at it as a nonbinding solution. The fact that it would direct the state to examine the issue during the next year would be a major development in the national debate, he said.
Net neutrality critics have been quick to note that Maine backed off its original proposal. Precursor President Scott Cleland wrote on his firm's blog this week that the resolution was introduced to let lawmakers save face when they realized that binding legislation would not fly.
But he said he expects net neutrality proponents to continue wasting "valuable state legislative time and resources" by raising the issue in other states. New York also is considering a plan to mandate net neutrality safeguards. The issue has been attached to legislation that would allow streamlined access to the state's video service market.
"They don't seem to 'get' or care that the Internet is federal jurisdiction and federal policymakers at every official level have rejected calls for net neutrality legislation," Cleland said.
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Intellectual Property
Groups Question Ruling On Digital Video Recorders
by Andrew Noyes
High-tech and consumer watchdog groups joined trade associations and businesses on Monday to urge a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court's ruling against Cablevision's experiment with network digital video recorders.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Electronics Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation, U.S. Telecom Association and others told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that a March ruling by a New York judge could chill technological innovation.
Hollywood studios sued the cable provider, arguing that the device violates copyright law. Rather than storing programs on an internal hard drive, Cablevision's technology would let users record and store them on remote servers. The studios said Cablevision does not have permission to rebroadcast programs.
The court "imposed liability on Cablevision without any consideration of whether Cablevision's service has non-infringing uses or whether imposing liability would advance or undermine the purposes of copyright law," the friend-of-the-court brief from the high-tech stakeholders said.
They said the decision by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin focused on "irrelevant factors," such as the placement of equipment in Cablevision's offices and the company's offering of access to the equipment as a service rather than a product for purchase. Those elements are unrelated to determining direct infringement, according to the filing.
"Innovation and economic growth would suffer without any countervailing promotion of invention or creativity," they said in the brief. "Development of new technologies such as remote data storage and remote computing applications would be chilled."
"We're living in this networked world and services, and devices of all kinds are going to be connecting to the Internet and they're not going to pay a lot of attention to geography,"
CDT Staff Counsel David Sohn said. "Having legal approaches that fixate on locations of the machines used to deliver the service doesn't make a lot of sense."
EFF Senior Attorney Fred von Lohmann said in a press release that the benefits of remote computing have been realized by Apple Inc., the online retailer Amazon.com and Google, all of which offer such services. "It can't be the case that these companies are automatically liable for every copyright infringement committed by every user, whether they know about it or not."
Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn emphasized the "illogical distinction between being able to record shows through a set-top box or through a cable network." The American Library Association also weighed in. The group's legislative counsel, Miriam Nisbet, said her members routinely provide and use remote services that are threatened by the district court's decision.
The studios' reply to Cablevision's appeal are due in late June and supporting briefs will be due several weeks later, CDT's Sohn said.
Matthew Schruers, senior counsel for the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said a ruling could come by the end of the year and regardless of the outcome, "you'll hear talk of taking this to the Supreme Court."
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Cyber Security
Standards Body Drafts Guide To Secure Agency Systems
by Heather Greenfield
The National Institute for Standards and Technology has released a draft of its new guide to better protect federal agencies from data breaches.
The 387-page guide is designed to help agency technical teams evaluate whether the security controls they have actually work as intended to protect information systems from being compromised.
It is designed as a companion to an earlier publication on minimum security controls for federal information systems. That guide, according to lead author Ron Ross, defines the different security controls required by the federal government -- including encryption, identification and authentication of users, access control to systems, personnel security and physical security.
The latest publication lists the different security measures and explains how to test them. For example, for continuity of operation requirements, the report outlines how to determine if an agency really has developed a plan, if people understand it and if it has been distributed to the right people within the organization.
The 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act instructs NIST to prepare minimum computer-security requirements for all systems other than those connected to national security, which have separate rules.
"The assessment requirements presented in this latest draft are intended to make compliance with FISMA easier, more efficient, and ultimately to produce better computer and information security for the federal government," said Ross, who is the FISMA implementation project leader at NIST.
Ross said the report is the last in a series since 2003 and is designed o make security procedures more cost-effective and easier to implement. NIST is asking for comments through the end of next month. The guidelines could help federal agencies, which received a grade of C-minus for FISMA compliance for 2006.
Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., has introduced legislation that would amend FISMA rules to broaden the definition of sensitive personal data and direct the White House Office of Management and Budget to establish policies that agencies should follow after data breaches.
In addition to names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and places, mother's maiden names, and biometric records, the bill would include education, criminal, medical and employment history. The measure, S. 1558, also would give agency chief information officers more power to enforce compliance with security rules.
"In the wake of data breaches at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Commerce, Agriculture, the [Transportation Security Administration] and IRS, we must ensure that federal agencies are taking the necessary preventative security measures to protect our citizens' personal information," Coleman said. "In addition to establishing a new protocol, this legislation will also create a system for notifying victims in the event of a security breach."
The Senate bill is designed as a companion to a House bill, H.R. 2124. Unlike broader data-protection measures drafted or being drafted by other committees, the bills would apply to just personal data stored by the federal government.
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Health
Private Sector Leads Way In Adopting E-Health Tools
by Aliya Sternstein
With federal funding a distant promise, many healthcare organizations are turning to the private sector for help in building electronic systems for managing medical records.
"All the major medical specialty societies are creating programs to help their members adopt electronic health records in their practices, and as far as I can tell, they are not waiting for government subsidies for those efforts," said David C. Kibbe, former director of and now a senior adviser to the Center for Health Information Technology at the American Academy of Family Physicians.
There is already activity in the private sector with respect to personal health records, building health exchange networks and standards for compatibility, Kibbe added.
"If the private sector is really starting to move, then why are federal programs required?" he said. "At that point, the federal government starts to interfere."
Relatively little money was spent on health IT when Republicans controlled Congress, and now with the Democrats' "pay as you go" rules for restraining federal spending, expectations for more health IT funding are even lower, Kibbe said.
David Merritt, a project director at The Center for Health Transformation, said his organization agrees completely with the vision of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, for a new "paperless" health IT system but believes her strategy for achieving that goal relies too heavily on the federal government. "The consumer and the marketplace should be driving the change," he said.
But Christine Bechtel, vice president of public policy and government relations at the nonprofit eHealth Initiative, said there are roles for all three -- consumers, the private sector and the federal government -- in supporting the expansion of health IT.
The government can cover the startup costs of health information exchanges to demonstrate their value to consumers, providers and other stakeholders. Also, changing the reimbursement policies of federal health programs can create incentives for providers to adopt the technology.
"In an ideal world, consumers should be one of the primary drivers of change," Bechtel said. But in today's market, they do not have the information they need -- such basic information as a list of providers that use electronic health records to treat their patients.
"Consumers need better access to information on cost and quality so that they can make more informed decisions," Bechtel noted.
That said, she added that consumer information must include clinical data from providers, so there are important functions for consumers, clinicians, payers and the federal government "in driving EHR adoption."
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On The Download
Web-To-Field Transition Challenges The Campaigns
by Shira Toeplitz
One of the most difficult challenges of an Internet team is to translate online support into an on-the-ground team -- just ask anyone who worked for Democrat Howard Dean in Iowa in 2004. The campaign's Internet fundraising success and online support didn't transfer well to the cold, windy streets of Des Moines for the January 2004 caucus.
"One of the sorts of great mistakes of the last 100 year in politics may have been the bright orange hats and Dean and his army of a 1,000 marching into Iowa," said Mike Turk, the former e-director for the 2004 campaign of President Bush. "They stood out frankly. They were outsiders."
Early-state voters likely are used to personal attention from candidates -- not e-mail messages from supporters. Turk, who now advises the presidential exploratory committee of Republican Fred Thompson, said Iowa voters didn't want to hear from, for instance, a California college student about why they should vote for Dean.
So what's the key to moving online activism to bodies on the ground in the early presidential primary states of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina? Campaigns already are beginning to experiment with a few formulas and strategies for 2008. Here's a preliminary ranking of the online operations for the early states across the campaigns:
First tier: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.; and former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.:
-- Obama New Media Director Joe Rospars might be the first to tell you that he has learned from Dean's Iowa 2004 fiasco, so the Obama campaign will do things differently. The new media team and two volunteers put together an application on the Facebook social-networking site last week that almost 15,000 users have put on their profiles.
The more practical aspect of the application shows users which friends they have in the early states and directs users to send them a message about Obama. It's a simple idea that might even alert the less politically savvy Facebook users to the complicated presidential primary process.
Obama's campaign also launched special Web pages for New Hampshire and Iowa outreach with some standard features, including field office information and recent news from the states.
-- The Edwards campaign depends a great deal on winning the Iowa caucuses.
Similar to Obama's "MyBarack" platform, Edwards has kept his online organizing for Iowa and New Hampshire on his own Web site instead of completely relying on a third party like MeetUp.com to organize his volunteers. While that gives the campaign control over their volunteers' information, it makes it difficult to reach potential new supporters who won't likely make a special trip to his Web site.
Edwards, furthermore, has been working on building his volunteer team, One Corps, since months before the campaign. Though there are chapters of volunteers across the country, One Corps has 33 chapters in Iowa and 22 in New Hampshire.
Second tier: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas:
-- There's not much unique on Clinton's state pages for Iowa and New Hampshire, but the blogs are regularly updated by field staff and include good use of video.
-- McCain's "click-on-your-state" map is minimal, but it's still perhaps the most user-friendly graphic for localizing information. While each state has its own local McCain news stories, only a handful of states -- including Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- have contact information.
-- Paul's Web site does not have the flash or features that the aforementioned candidates display, but Paul's supporters have easily used third-party Web sites like Eventful.com to mobilize people for rallies. He has a high number of requests for campaigns events compared to his Republican rivals, unfortunately only one of which is in an early state right now.
The rest of the candidates had very minimal or no early state operation on their Web sites.
Editor's Note: On The Download is Hotline's dispatch on politics, multimedia and the Internet.
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Today's Feature:
Issue of the Week
After eight months of engineering work, technology integration and big promises, the federal government's new approach for securing the borders is about to undergo its ultimate test.
Every Monday, read the Issue of the Week by the Technology Daily staff.
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E-briefs
Telecom: The National Emergency Number Association said Monday that it is concerned about the potential consequences of an International Trade Commission decision last week regarding the patent dispute between Broadcom and Qualcomm. NENA said the ITC's decision to bar the import of new models of cellular telephones containing chips made abroad by San Diego-based Qualcomm will "have a negative impact on the delivery of 911 service for American consumers and first-responder communications." Safety associations including NENA testified before the ITC during a March hearing. "The remedy announced by the ITC presents a significant obstacle for emergency-response agencies to provide their responders with access to public-safety broadband services," NENA said. "The ITC's ban on importation results in the public being denied new handsets that will improve the ability of 911 public-safety answering points to locate with greater precision victims of crime, accidents, fires or other disasters."
Intellectual Property: The mobile telephone maker Nokia filed a patent-infringement countersuit against Qualcomm on Monday in a Texas federal court, claiming that the competitor illegally used a handful of Nokia's patents that pertain to its MediaFLO and BREW wireless technologies. In previous litigation, Qualcomm has sought injunctions against Nokia, and in this case Nokia is seeking both damages and injunctive relief. "This is another example where Qualcomm has effectively copied Nokia's innovations. We believe that, for MediaFLO to evolve and for BREW to remain viable, Qualcomm needs access to these and many other patented Nokia inventions," Nokia Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanpera said. Qualcomm filed its complaint against Nokia in the same court in April for allegedly violating patents for telephones that run on the global system for mobile communication standard, and patents for digital downloads.
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