News Archive: December 2007

The views represented in these articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editor, the Privacy Act Program, or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

THE SCOOP for December 26, 2007

ASCI: E-gov losing ground with citizens
Government Computer News - December 17, 2007
"The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index, released today by the University of Michigan, shows that citizens' enthusiasm for e-government is tempering a bit. But they are still more satisfied with e-government than with the federal government overall."
Bill to overhaul Freedom of Information Act goes to Bush
Government Executive - December 19, 2007
"The legislation...attempts to reverse a decline in federal agencies' response time to FOIA requests. Provisions include barring agencies from collecting search fees if they fail to respond to a request in 20 days and creating a FOIA office and ombudsman within the National Archives."
Facebook's Privacy Debacle
CIO Insight - December 18, 2007
"Turns out the Facebook generation does have concerns about privacy. But only certain kinds of privacy."
FBI aims for world's largest biometrics database
ZD Net - December 22, 2007
"The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world's largest computer database of biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on Friday."
Federal judge rules White House visitor logs are public records
Jurist - December 17, 2007
"A federal judge ruled Monday that the White House visitor logs are public documents, rejecting a Bush administration bid to have the logs treated as confidential presidential records."

THE SCOOP for December 19, 2007

Businesses Generally Ignoring E-Discovery Rules
CIO Insight - December 18, 2007
"A year and 16 days after the institution of the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on Dec. 1, 2006, about two-thirds of U.S. businesses remain unprepared to meet strict court requirements for the discovery and handling of electronic evidence, according to a data storage researcher."
CIA Interrogation Tapes Issue Plays Out Against Authorization Bill Vote
CQ Politics - December 11, 2007
"A Senate panel questioned the chief of the CIA on Tuesday about destroyed interrogation videotapes, an issue that will color House debate Wednesday over a conference report that would ban harsh interrogation tactics."
How to Remove Social Security Numbers and Personal Information from Public Records
Government Technology - December 12, 2007
"Today, the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Electronic Commerce Coordinating Council (eC3) released a white paper on policies for removing Social Security numbers and other sensitive information from public documents."
NARA finishes testing first ERA software
Federal Computer Week - December 14, 2007
"The National Archives and Records Administration moved ahead this week with its ongoing project to deploy an archive system to handle the ever-growing swath of agency e-mail messages and other electronic records, after budget shortfalls had forced a protracted schedule for the initiative."
Tech Heavies Offer E-Gov Search, Privacy Tips
E-Commerce Times - December 12, 2007
"Tech leaders representing Google, Wikipedia and the Center for Democracy and Technology testified Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, which is mulling reauthorization of the E-Government Act. Signed into law five years ago, it requires government agencies make information more accessible electronically."
The Untold Insider Threat: Office Workers Confess to Everyday Behavior that Places Sensitive Information at Risk
emc.com - December 10, 2007
"The results of the survey underscore that the risk posed to data by well-meaning insiders--employees, contractors, suppliers, partners, visitors and consultants who have physical and/or logical access to organizational assets--must be as closely managed as that posed by malicious insiders who deliberately leak sensitive data for personal financial gain or other criminal purposes."
U.K. admits to losing data on 3 million people
Internet News - December 17, 2007
"British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government suffered new embarrassment over missing data today when it revealed that one of its contractors had lost the details of 3 million learner drivers."

THE SCOOP for December 12, 2007

CIA tape destruction offers cautionary tale for CIOs
Computerworld - December 10, 2007
"The recent revelation that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two terrorist suspects may offer a timely reminder for CIOs at private companies in the U.S. tasked with electronic evidence preservation rules since last December."
Lawmakers told federal Web efforts hinder accessibility
Government Executive - December 11, 2007
"Information technology executives and congressional leaders today questioned the progress of the Bush administration's efforts to make documents easily accessible online and to inform Americans how it is protecting their personal information, as required by law."
Metadata Management: Helping Tame IT's Chaos
CXO Today - December 12, 2007
"A major contributor to breaking down barriers and helping IT 'tame chaos' is metadata management. Metadata management is usually found in two forms, either as a discrete shared Business/IT function or as a function within an IT domain like Data Integration or Business Intelligence. But what is metadata and how can managing it help?"
Phishing Attack Hits National Labs
CIO Insight - December 7, 2007
"Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been bombarded by a coordinated phishing attack aimed at multiple national labs and may have unwittingly handed over to attackers the personal information of anybody who visited the lab over a 14-year span, including Social Security numbers."
Waxman, Davis press Bloch about alleged file deletion
Federal Computer Week - December 6, 2007
"Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Tom Davis (R-Va.), ranking member of the committee, have sent a letter to U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch requesting information about allegations that he improperly erased files on his office PC."
Workers disciplined for e-mail use
Government Computer News - December 6, 2007
"Montana's Department of Corrections yesterday announced it was disciplining 74 Montana State Prison employees for misusing e-mail.... Some of the e-mail messages contained inappropriate jokes, but the more prevalent problem was an overuse of the system for personal messages...."

THE SCOOP for December 5, 2007

Battle over VA's data breach heads to mediation
Government Executive - November 29, 2007
"Lawyers for people who sued the Veterans Affairs Department over last year's data breach will begin mediation with government attorneys in the weeks ahead and will update the federal judge overseeing the case in early 2008."
Data theft touches 150,000 Massachusetts seniors
Computerworld - December 1, 2007
"The state of Massachusetts is warning 150,000 members of its Prescription Advantage insurance program that their personal information may have been snatched by an identity thief."
DBA Admits to Theft of 8.5M Records
Computerworld - December 3, 2007
"A senior database administrator at a subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Services Inc. last week admitted that he stole about 8.5 million customer records over five years. The records were sold to data brokers for $580,000, according to court documents."
Masters records destroyed?
Rocky Mountain News - December 3, 2007
"Records in [a] murder case may have been mistakenly destroyed when the Fort Collins police department changed computer systems.... In 2004, the department switched to a new electronic records management system, and during that process the assumption was made that all documents in a particular case would have been finished in the same year as the crime."
NASCIO: Cross-government collaboration key to e-discovery
Federal Computer Week - November 29, 2007
"State governments looking to embark on e-discovery should first seek collaboration with a range of stakeholders. That's the view of a newly published research brief from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO)."
PDF approved as international standard
InfoWorld - December 5, 2007
"Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 has been approved as an international standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO), according to a company executive."
Roundtable: How Legal Trends of 2007 Will Affect Your Future Technological Decisions And Solutions
Metropolitan Corporate Counsel - December 2007
"While a variety of technologies can be used to apply litigation holds, a multidisciplinary approach is required. Anyone who thinks that IT can implement a hold assumes that the problem is exclusively a technical one. It is not. Legal, HR, and records management professionals all have important roles to play in the process."
Securing info systems could cost $28 billion, budget office says
Federal Computer Week - December 4, 2007
"The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the E-Government Reauthorization Act could cost the government about $29 billion over a four-year period, mainly for securing agencies' information systems."

News Archive: December 2007

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