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• News Archive: July 2009

News Archive: July 2009

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 July 29, 2009

• Archives Strategizes for Gov 2.0
  NextGov - July 22, 2009
  "The National Archives and Records Administration is out with a draft 2009 strategic plan that lays down a marker for some ambitious changes, including expanded responsibility for e-records management ... The first goal is more challenging than it looks, considering many federal employees ... do not know what a federal record is..."

• Barriers to Archival Access Stymie Historical Research
  Secrecy News - July 15, 2009
  "Nearly all Navy records ... dating from the 1960s forward are now completely unavailable to the public, said historians Larry Berman of UC Davis and William Burr of the National Security Archive."

• CDT Wants US Gov't to Detail Computer Monitoring Program
  PC World - July 28, 2009
  "U.S. President Barack Obama's administration needs to answer several questions about the privacy implications of a new version of a computer intrusion detection system that can reportedly read e-mail, a privacy and civil rights advocacy group said."

• EHR standard released by public/private group
  Federal Computer Week - July 28, 2009
  "The leading public/private standards body for health information technology has completed its initial work to develop technical standards for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) that are aligned with the economic stimulus law, the group announced."

• Evolution of Records and Information Management
  Infonomics - July/August 2009
  "How did we get here from there? As rapidly as the world of IT changes, we often forget how recently nearly ALL business documents were paper. To understand where we're going, here's a brief look at recent history."

• GAO: Weaknesses threaten Electronic Records Archive program
  NextGov - July 27, 2009
  "The National Archives and Records Administration must provide more detailed information on its progress creating a system to store the federal government's electronic records, and develop a better contingency plan in case the system fails, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office."

• How We Get to E-government 2.0
  CIO Zone - July 28, 2009
  "[D]espite the continued allocation of enormous resources, progress on the e-government front appears to have plateaued over the past few years. Many new e-government initiatives have neither generated the anticipated interest among users nor enabled clear gains in operational efficiency."

• Identity theft 101: what is an identity thief?
  Washington Examiner - July 19, 2009
  "An identity thief is a person who steals, trades or uses the personally identifiable information (PII) or business identifiable information (BII) of victims to commit identity theft. BII such as a business name and employer identification number can also be misused to commit identity fraud similar to how PII is used."

• New York Librarian Chosen as U.S. Archivist
  New York Times - July 28, 2009
  "President Obama will nominate David S. Ferriero, the director of research libraries at the New York Public Library, to become the United States archivist Tuesday, according to a White House spokesman."

• Trust, but verify, Web 2.0 sources
  Federal Computer Week - July 15, 2009
  "Stephen Colbert announced that he learned of [actor Jeff] Goldblum's death from Twitter sources ... only to have Goldblum himself appear on stage disputing that he was deceased. An argument ensued."

• Use of tracking cookies on government sites sparks privacy concern
  ComputerWorld - July 28, 2009
  "If the plan is adopted, it would mark a departure from a policy first put in place in 2000 and updated in 2003 that prohibits government sites from using persistent cookies "or any other means" such as Web beacons to track visitor activity, unless agency heads authorize thier use."

• Web 2.0 Tools Change Government CIO Collaboration
  Government Technology - July 22, 2009
  "Information technology has traditionally been about "communication" of information -- capturing it, processing it, moving it, storing it, finding it and using it. But now, with Web 2.0, we have evolved from communication to "collaboration." Well, what's the difference?"

THE SCOOP for July 22, 2009

• Agencies riddled with security holes, GAO says
  Federal Computer Week - July 17, 2009
  "A continued lack of sufficient information security controls at major federal agencies puts sensitive data at risk, the Government Accountability Office said today. GAO also said the process agencies use to report progress on information security needs to be improved."

• Amazon Fail 2.0: Bookseller's Big Brother removes Orwell's Big Brother from Kindles everywhere
  OUPBlog - July 21, 2009
  "In a move worthy of George Orwell's Big Brother, Amazon.com sent its thought police into Kindles everywhere to erase copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm."

• Anticipated Web 3.0 jibes with open-government goals
  Federal Computer Week - July 17, 2009
  "Almost every morsel of government data exists in electronic form somewhere, and with the exception of classified data, it is perfectly acceptable for public consumption. However, making it easy for people to find, analyze, share and ultimately understand the information is another story."

• The doctor is in and logged on
  Los Angeles Times - July 20, 2009
  "Wow. I've just taken care of three patients in 12 minutes, and I didn't do it by 'churning' them through my office as if it's some sort of factory assembly line. Rather, those patients (their parents, more specifically -- I'm a pediatrician), e-mailed me over a secure network with questions and descriptions of signs and symptoms."

• Email, Discovery and SharePoint: 3 Key Document Management Issues
  CMS Wire - July 21, 2009
  "Earlier this year AIIM ... released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess. Revisiting the report in the cold light of day AIIM President John Mancini summed up the findings of the report on the Digital Landfill blog recently."

• Good site searches vital, experts say
  Federal Computer Week - July 16, 2009
  "Ensuring that searches work well is important because 90 percent of organizations say it is the No. 1 way people navigate Web sites, said John Sutton, director of interaction design at NavigationArts. Also, about 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if search is poor, he said."

• Group Plans Lawsuit To Unveil the CIA's Pentagon Papers
  Wired - July 21, 2009
  "The CIA and other agencies are sitting on a trove of documentary evidence of actual and suspected wrongdoing under the Bush administration, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a lawsuit Wednesday to force the intelligence community to come clean, the group says."

• Identity theft 101: what is ID theft?
  Washington Examiner - July 18, 2009
  "Identity theft occurs when a person, an identity thief, uses the identity of another person for his or her own benefit. Benefits may be financial or non-financial. Identity theft is often confused with credit card fraud and bank account fraud, although these types of fraud can meet the statutory definition of identity theft."

• Inch-by-inch to DoD-VA health record interoperability
  Federal News Radio - July 15, 2009
  "A House subcommittee gets a progress report on the effort to reach 'electronic health information interoperability' as an important legally-mandated deadline looms."

• Study finds widespread privacy failings in online social networks
  PhysOrg - July 21, 2009
  "Some 90% of sites, for example, needlessly required a full name or date of birth for permission to join. 80% failed to use standard encryption protocols to protect sensitive user data from hackers. And 71% reserved the right to share user data with third parties in their privacy policies."

• Vivek Kundra: Cloud Computing Could Improve Intergovernmental Collaboration
  Government Technology - July 15, 2009
  "Growing adoption of cloud computing could improve data sharing and promote collaboration among federal, state and local governments, according to federal CIO Vivek Kundra."

• Why feds can't stop cyberattacks
  Federal Times - July 13, 2009
  "Cyberattacks targeting dozens of government and business Web sites last week were "primitive" and "just a nuisance," not very different from the attacks that target federal systems on a daily basis, experts say — but they still caught the federal government by surprise."
  

THE SCOOP for July 15, 2009

• Biometric card idea stirs questions, doubts
  NextGov - July 13, 2009
  "Requiring all U.S. employers to verify the identity and immigration status of their workers using biometrics - such as fingerprints or iris scans -- is technically feasible but raises logistical challenges and privacy concerns, according to industry officials, immigration experts and civil liberties advocates."

• Chips in official IDs raise privacy fears
  San Jose Mercury News - July 11, 2009
  "Embedding identity documents — passports, drivers licenses, and the like — with RFID chips is a no-brainer to government officials. Increasingly, they are promoting it as a 21st century application of technology that will help speed border crossings, safeguard credentials against counterfeiters, and keep terrorists from sneaking into the country."

• Historians want to chronicle inter-government relations
  Federal News Radio - July 13, 2009
  "There are historians that study rock music, English dictionaries and Harry Potter. But right now there is no national historian chronicling inter-government relations between agencies. Sure every government agency has its own historian, but there is no communication between agencies."

• History at risk over unclassified and declassified information
  Federal News Radio - July 14, 2009
  "A new report indicates that many federal employees really don't know what "unclassified" means. The study from OMB Watch says labels like "Controled Unclassified" and "Sensitive But Unclassified" are just plain confusing and lead to problems with document handling."

• How to Implement a Solid Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery Plan
  eWeek - June 30, 2009
  "Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are essential components of overall business and IT planning. Since disasters do happen, it's critical to have business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place before the need arises."

• Privacy rather than banking secrecy at stake in Miami
  Financial Times - July 13, 2009
  "Judge Alan Gold must certainly be enjoying his moment in the sun in Miami. After all, the federal judge is presiding over the landmark civil case launched by the US Internal Revenue Service to force UBS to reveal the names of some 52,000 unidentified US taxpayers it suspects of holding undeclared offshore accounts with the big Swiss bank."

• Scholars Race to Preserve Guantánamo Records
  Chronicle of Higher Education - July 10, 2009
  "Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Selma, Ala., are more than 1,100 miles apart, but in Mark P. Denbeaux's mind they are neighbors. Each has been witness to political dramas whose impact will be felt for decades, but the daily, personal experiences that made up those events are vulnerable to failing memories and historical rewrites."

• State Privacy Rules Reduce Electronic Medical Sharing By 24 Percent, Warns Management Insights
  Science Daily - July 13, 2009
  "States that have passed privacy laws restricting the ability of hospitals to disclose patient information have seen the sharing of electronic medical records suffer by more than 24%, according to the Management Insights feature in the July issue of Management Science."

• Top 10 Must-Haves When Evaluating Automated In-House eDiscovery Solutions
  Computer Technology Review - July 13, 2009
  "In litigation, the key data sources that are subpoenaed in eDiscovery are email, email archives, enterprise content management (ECM) repositories and network file shares. An eDiscovery solution needs to address all content repositories, as well as provide an integrated legal hold management capability to comply with FRCP rules."

• TYPEWRITE & WRONG
  New York Post - July 13, 2009
  "The city is plunking down nearly $1 million on typewriters for its keystroke cops. That's right -- typewriters."

• U.K., not North Korea, source of DDOS attacks, researcher says
  ComputerWorld - July 14, 2009
  "The U.K. was the likely source of a series of attacks last week that took down popular Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea, according to an analysis performed by a Vietnamese computer security analyst."

THE SCOOP for July 9, 2009

• Archives' record-keeping lapse
  ABC News - July 5, 2009
  "National Archives visitors know they'll find the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the main building's magnificent rotunda in Washington. But they won't find the patent file for the Wright Brothers' Flying Machine or the maps for the first atomic bomb missions anywhere in the Archives inventory."

• Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe Not Yet, But It Could Someday
  ReadWriteWeb - July 7, 2009
  "Remember when Wikipedia was laughed at, because anyone could edit it? Most people feel differently about that site now, and it's not hard to see a future in which many more people will come to appreciate Twitter as something more important than they do today."

• Facebook's future: Web 3.0?
  Seattle Times - July 6, 2009
  "If Google ignited the so-called Web 2.0 business era, Facebook may be ushering in Web 3.0..."

• FTC Rule on Identity Theft Draws Strong Criticism From Bar Groups
  LAW.COM - July 1, 2009
  "The New York State Bar Association Monday became the latest bar group to protest new Federal Trade Commission rules requiring lawyers to become involved in preventing identity theft, calling the move unauthorized, unnecessary and destructive to the attorney-client relationship."

• High court won't touch privacy law
  Nashua (NH) Telegraph - June 30, 2009
  "New Hampshire survived the strongest legal test to a law making doctors' prescription-writing habits confidential. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced it refused to hear the appeal of two data-mining companies that analyze and sell prescription dispensing information."

• How Greensburg, Kansas Became Greentown, USA
  Infonomics Magazine - May/June 2009
  "Leveled by a monster Tornado, this heartland community rebuilt green--and paperless--by embracing enterprise content management."

• North Korea Suspected in Cyberattack
  Washington Post - July 8, 2009
  "South Korea's intelligence agency suspects that North Korea may have been behind an Internet attack that on Tuesday and Wednesday targeted government Web sites in South Korea and the United States, lawmakers in Seoul told Yonhap news service."

• Placing Former Employees On Legal Hold
  InformationWeek - July 7, 2009
  "Legal hold is a term used to set aside certain data to make sure it is not altered while a legal case is being settled. One of those situations is employee termination. The chances are there for the employee to file a wrongful termination lawsuit and for the data center that means placing exiting employees' data on legal hold."

• Recommendations for reducing government secrecy roll in
  FederalComputerWeek - July 6, 2009
  "An advisory group plans to hold a public meeting July 8 to collect suggestions on how the Obama administration can improve policy around the classification of government data."

• Social Security numbers fall out of favor as personal identifiers
  NextGov - July 7, 2009
  "Government and industry should stop using Social Security numbers as a primary method for verifying identity, according to the author of a recent study that showed how easily thieves can use a combination of personal information and computer software programs to figure out the nine digits."

THE SCOOP for July 1, 2009

• Doctors object to penalties for avoiding EHRs
  American Medical News - June 29, 2009
  "Physician-delegates at the AMA Annual Meeting in June formally came out against planned penalties included in this year's federal stimulus bill that would dock Medicare pay for physicians who do not have a qualifying electronic health record."

• E-mails can jeopardize your job, the Mark Sanford scandal shows
  Los Angeles Times - June 27, 2009
  "If ever there was a reminder to be cautious with e-mails, it came this week as romantic missives from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to his Argentine lover surfaced in the national press."

• FTC Testifies on Efforts to Combat Identity Theft
  7th Space - June 18, 2009
  "The FTC's testimony recommended that, to help prevent identity theft, Congress should establish data security standards across the private sector requiring all organizations that hold sensitive consumer data to take reasonable measures to safeguard it, and to notify consumers when the security of their information has been breached."

• Homeland Security to kill domestic satellite spying program
  CBS news - June 23, 2009
  "Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano plans to kill a program begun by the Bush administration that would use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law enforcement, a government official said Monday."

• Monitoring electronic discovery developments through the Web
  State Bar of Wisconsin - July 1, 2009
  "Electronic discovery is an evolving issue for lawyers and their clients. Many have read about the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure e-discovery rules, data retention, Internet-based evidence ..., and third-party vendors. This article highlights a few Web sites and blogs that monitor these subjects and electronic discovery cases."

• New Privacy Law Getting Closer
  PC World - June 30, 2009
  "Comprehensive legislation to protect consumers' privacy is closer to becoming a reality in the U.S. Congress than it's been in several years, officials with the Center for Democracy and Technology said Tuesday."

• Outsourcing disaster recovery services vs. in-house disaster recovery
  Search Storage - June 29, 2009
  "The in-house approach may be tempting, with the assumption that the work related to DR can be performed by existing staff. Unfortunately, experience shows that in-house disaster recovery is more likely to fail than outsourced DR services."

• A Pound of Cure
  Technology Review - July/August 2009
  "The federal government is about to spend big on health-care IT. Too bad the medical industry has a vested interest in inefficiency."

• Web site offers glimpse of how IT projects are performing
  NextGov - June 30, 2009
  "Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra on Tuesday unveiled a public Web site aimed at showing correlations between taxpayer dollars and the performance of federal information technology investments."

• Web Squared: Web 2.0's Successor?
  ZDNet - June 28, 2009
  "With the term 'Web 2.0' enjoying its fifth birthday (and supposedly entering dictionaries as the millionth phrase in the English language) the web cognoscenti need new terminology to help define what's coming up next."

• White House Denies Access to Visitor Records
  ARMA NewsWire - June 2009
  "The Secret Service has denied separate requests for White House visitor logs, stating that the logs are not agency records covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but instead are governed by the Presidential Records Act."

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