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News Archive: May 2008
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 May 28, 2008
The "Big Scrape": This Time, You're on Your Own
Federal News Radio - May 22, 2008
"The 'big scrape' of government web sites won't be happening this year. And watchers of government records collection are not happy."Can We Trust Big Internet Companies With Our Health Data?
PC Magazine - May 20, 2008
"For a long time experts have argued that one of the ways to make the US health care system more efficient is to make records management more efficient...The potential for privacy violations is obvious, but it's absolutely possible for such systems to be run with proper access controls, even by a private company."Google questioned over privacy practices
Reuters - May 22, 2008
"The top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on Wednesday to detail the search engine's privacy practices since it acquired rival DoubleClick."The Other Side of the Coin -- Effective Implementation of an Archiving Solution
Computer Technology Review - May 19, 2008
"You've just spent a large sum of money on hardware for archiving your company's electronic records. The solution is state of the art -- all of your company's data are covered, from e-mail and voicemail to the network servers. You're ready to flip the switch -- or are you? The most technologically advanced, cutting-edge archiving system will do you no good unless you have the organizational infrastructure in place to take full advantage of the new system's capabilities."They Knew, and Didn't do it Anyway
Federal News Radio - May 22, 2008
"As Congress debates HR 5811, a bill that would tighten up record keeping policy at the agencies and put a new layer of controls in place, members of the House are getting input from all sides of the issue."Majority of e-gov spending on shared services, report shows
Federal Times - May 22, 2008
"Agencies are projected to spend $460 million on the administration's electronic-government initiatives this year, the highest amount since they began in 2003."Hospitals, patients clash on privacy rights
San Francisco Chronical - May 27, 2008
"When patients check into hospitals or doctor offices, they presume their information will be kept in strictest confidence, but often, amid the pile of papers, they overlook fine print describing how their personal information can be farmed out for fundraising."
THE SCOOP for May 21, 2008
A bumper year for ID fraud
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) - May 15, 2008
"Symantec monitors internet threats in 180 countries using more than 40,000 sensors and 2 million emails to collect spam. Last year, it detected 711,912 new threats, a staggering 468% increase on 2006, with 68% of the top 50 malicious codes designed to nab confidential information."Editorial: Giving up privacy for security -- or not
The Roanoke Times - May 18, 2008
"Americans have far less privacy than they did prior to 9/11. But court prosecutions don't indicate much security resulted from the sacrifice."Five IRS employees charged with snooping at tax records
Computerworld - May 16, 2008
"Five federal workers at an Internal Revenue Service office in California have been charged with computer fraud for illegally accessing the confidential records of taxpayers."Lack of email training is costing employers dear
TrainingZONE (UK) - May 15, 2008
"Three quarters of all employees are spending at least half of their day dealing with email, yet virtually no UK companies train their employees in how to use it effectively, according to a report out this week...The figures have highlighted the growing time people are spending on their email, the lack of security and the poor use of email as a communications tool."President orders agencies to simplify data labeling
Federal Computer Week - May 19, 2008
"President Bush ordered federal agencies last week to standardize the labels they use to categorize sensitive but unclassified information. The order requires agencies to adopt three standard labels and drop the more than 100 different markings now in use."Should NARA be the e-archiving cop?
Federal Computer Week - May 19, 2008
"The National Archives and Records Administration has let agencies and the White House slide on compliance with federal records laws, and it has not been forceful about asking Congress for necessary funding, some critics contend."More coverage:
Bill would give National Archives greater reach in electronic records management
Government Executive - May 16, 2008Some Heads are Gonna Roll (or Should)
Federal News Radio - May 15, 2008What's it all about? The Money, Partly.
Federal News Radio - May 14, 2008WhitePages.com grapples with privacy in a Web 2.0 world
Computerworld - May 16, 2008
"WhitePages.com does exactly what you'd expect from the name -- it tries to provide phone-book-style listings for both the U.S. and Canada...As Web 2.0 social networking and a changing idea of personal privacy have come to the fore, WhitePages.com has also started to ask itself how it might offer users more control over their information while providing more and different kinds of information."Will NARA be ready for Bush's e-records?
Federal Computer Week - May 15, 2008
"A key portion of the National Archives and Records Administration's decade-long, $453 million project to create an electronic records archiving system might not be ready in time to receive the Bush administration's electronic records, according to government auditors and the agency's inspector general."
THE SCOOP for May 14, 2008
10 things you should look for in an in-house eDiscovery solution
Tech Republic - May 8, 2008
"Here are 10 tips for choosing an eDiscovery solution that can get up and running quickly, solve the problems you need it to, and pay for itself within months."Dark Data
B-EYE-Network - May 7, 2008
"...there is a lot of data that is not visible to data administrators. It exists primarily in personal files whose content is managed directly by individuals rather than by any corporate applications. This is dark data."The darker side of Webmail
Computerworld - April 28, 2008
"Web-based e-mail is booming. Services such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are convenient, accessible and, best of all, free...But second thoughts may be in order, according to security experts, privacy advocates and some Webmail users."E-records haunt OSC chief
Federal Computer Week - May 12, 2008
"In November 2007, investigators for the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general discovered that [Scott] Bloch had hired a commercial company to erase all of the files on his government-issued computers."Opinion: Benefits of personal health records will eclipse privacy concerns
Computerworld - May 7, 2008
"In five years, the privacy debate over personal health records will be over, and you and I will be storing our medical records at a central location. Why? Because the benefits of better care and less paperwork will outweigh our current fears about breaches and inappropriate data-sharing."Opinion: Document management gets interesting
Blocks and Files - May 8, 2008
"Document management is suddenly on government, board room and media agendas -- there's nothing more effective at focusing the mind than survival. Make no mistake, today's compliance landscape is a minefield where the key to business continuity is the ability to manage risk, maintain resilience and ensure recovery."Records management practices need improvement
Network World - May 8, 2008
"Cohasset Associates has published the results of a survey that provides some interesting findings on records management: Only 60% of the respondents' organizations had comprehensive records retention schedules in 2007 that include electronic records, up from 51% in 1999."Restaurant chain served up payment card data to hackers
Computerworld - May 13, 2008
"In the third data theft incident of its kind to come to light since March, Dallas-based restaurant chain Dave & Buster's Inc. today disclosed that credit and debit card numbers were stolen last year from the computer systems at 11 of its locations during the card verification process."Sensitive but unclassified category simplified
Federal Computer Week - May 12, 2008
"The Bush administration has released new standards for how agencies should label sensitive but unclassified (SBU) information to simplify the more than 100 different markings or handling instructions that officials now attach to that data."White House reveals e-mail backups missing
Federal Computer Week - May 6, 2008
"White House officials have disclosed that the administration does not have e-mail disaster recovery tapes dated between March 2003 and May 22, 2003 -- a period that includes the invasion of Iraq."More coverage:
IT politics killed White House email project
ZD Net - May 6, 2008
THE SCOOP for May 8, 2008
Archives plans system to store agencies' electronic records
Federal Times - April 29, 2008
"The National Archives and Records Administration hopes to have a governmentwide electronic records system online by 2015, a senior official says. The system, called the Electronic Records Archive, would allow federal agencies to store their unclassified records on a network of NARA servers. The agency plans to have at least 20 clusters of servers around the country to protect against data loss."Bill targets messy e-records
Federal Computer Week - May 5, 2008
"A bill introduced by House Democrats would preserve e-mail messages whose loss could create gaps in the country's historical record and leave agencies vulnerable to legal actions, some policy observers say."Crimeware server exposes breadth of data theft
Government Computer News - May 6, 2008
"Last month Researchers at online security company Finjan uncovered a 1.4 gigabyte cache of stolen data from North America, Europe, the Middle East and India on a Malaysian server that provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers."Just Between Us
Newsweek - April 30, 2008
"The Bush administration is refusing to disclose internal e-mails, letters and notes showing contacts with major telecommunications companies over how to persuade Congress to back a controversial surveillance bill, according to recently disclosed court documents."Keeping up with the files explosion
The Sunday Business Post (Ireland) - May 4, 2008
"The data explosion is still with us. Terabytes of new data are being generated every day, and by and large, the world is coping by simply adding more storage to contain it. But from a business point of view, data is also information."More agencies adopt wikis to share knowledge
Federal Computer News - April 29, 2008
"Wikis are proliferating in the federal government as officials seek effective ways to share information and collaborate, experts said April 28 at the ninth annual Knowledge Management conference in Washington."National labs develop improved searches
Federal Computer Week - April 29, 2008
"Employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory were so fed up with using the Google search engine that they developed their own electronic knowledge management tool to better work through large information archives."Roots of surveillance standoff go back decades
Government Executive - April 29, 2008
"...The digital revolution generated a constant tension that exists to this day, a push and pull between the federal government in one camp and technology corporations and civil-liberties activists in the other to control the development of the global communications system, and so the balance of power in the Information Age."Suppliers Suggest White House Email Fixes
Byte and Switch - May 1, 2008
"The White House case illustrates the challenges facing many organizations: First, to archive email in an efficient manner; second, to organize it and make it searchable; and third, to restrict the use or movement when litigation is pending."Travel group warns: Corporate data at risk from laptop searches at border
Computerworld - April 30, 2008
"The Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE) is warning its members to limit the amount of proprietary business information they carry on laptops and other electronic devices because of fears that government agents can seize that data at U.S. border crossings."