March 2010

[Commentary] At the Federal Communications Commission's Future of Media workshop, Jerry Fritz of Allbritton Communications was asked whether there were any stations not fulfilling their public interest programming obligations. Fritz challenged the FCC's right to define what those obligations are for every TV and radio station in the country.

"The problem the government faces ... is, whose public interest are we talking about?" he said. "Everybody here has a different sense of how they would program their station. There isn't anything called the public interest." In his opening remarks, Fritz said broadcasters take the job of figuring out what's in the public's interest rather seriously. "Notwithstanding historical attempts to impose someone else's idea of necessary programming, broadcasters, as content creators, monitor what the public wants on a daily basis," he said. "We evaluate what they are, what they watch, when they watch and how they watch. We even speculate on why they watch."

To some, Fritz's combativeness might be seen as a tad excessive. Truth is, broadcasters don't have much in the way government-imposed public interest programming obligations today. Essentially, they are required to air three hours of decent educational or informational programming for children each week. That's about it. But Fritz is rightly concerned that the regulatory pendulum that swung so far toward deregulation in the 1980s is swinging back toward regulation now.

Smartphone applications are where the money is at for advertisers and brands.

It is where mobile ad network AdMob is focusing most of its efforts today, more so than the mobile Web, following an explosion in both smartphone and mobile app usage, Charles Yim, part of the North American business development team for AdMob, told an audience of entrepreneurs, investors and developers at the Mobilex conference. AdMob, which was acquired by Google in November for $750 million, observed its own network traffic reach a crossover point at the end of 2009 when smartphones traffic surpassed feature phone traffic, Yim said. Now smartphones are experiencing explosive growth in use and mobile ad utilization. At the same time, WiFi usage is driving more mobile app usage, which Yim expects to continue with the introduction of new mobile computing platforms like Android-based computing tablets and Apple's iPad.

In response to the ongoing threats to federal systems and operations posed by cyber attacks, President Bush established the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) in 2008. This initiative consists of a set of projects aimed at reducing vulnerabilities, protecting against intrusions, and anticipating future threats. GAO was asked to determine (1) what actions have been taken to develop interagency mechanisms to plan and coordinate CNCI activities and (2) what challenges CNCI faces in achieving its objectives related to securing federal information systems.

To do this, GAO reviewed CNCI plans, policies, and other documentation and interviewed officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), among other agencies. GAO also reviewed studies examining aspects of federal cybersecurity and interviewed recognized cybersecurity experts.

CNCI faces several challenges in meeting its objectives:

• Defining roles and responsibilities. Federal agencies have overlapping and uncoordinated responsibilities for cybersecurity, and it is unclear where overall responsibility for coordination lies.
• Establishing measures of effectiveness. The initiative has not yet developed measures of the effectiveness in meeting its goals. While federal agencies have begun to develop effectiveness measures for information security, these have not been applied to the initiative.
• Establishing an appropriate level of transparency. Few of the elements of CNCI have been made public, and the rationale for classifying related information remains unclear, hindering coordination with private sector entities and accountability to the public.
• Reaching agreement on the scope of educational efforts. Stakeholders have yet to reach agreement on whether to address broad education and public awareness as part of the initiative, or remain focused on the federal cyber workforce.

GAO is recommending that OMB take steps to address each of the identified challenges. OMB agreed with five of six recommendations, disagreeing with the recommendation regarding defining roles and responsibilities. However, such definitions are key to achieving CNCI's objective of securing federal systems.

Until these challenges are adequately addressed, there is a risk that CNCI will not fully achieve its goal to reduce vulnerabilities, protect against intrusions, and anticipate future threats against federal executive branch information systems.

(GAO-10-338)

On Thursday at the University of Washington, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra set out his vision for getting the government up to speed in matters IT.

As well as getting the nation online to pay their taxes, he wants to give people easy access to their health records, but is more than aware of the magnitude of the task ahead. The most pertinent point that Kundra made was the difference in attitudes to technology projects between publicly-funded projects and those in the private sector. While companies approach a task thinking "what does the consumer want?" Government projects tend to focus on how the thing will work, which usually ends up with them losing sight of their original aim--which, in this case, should be user simplicity. In IT terms, the Obama administration is already way ahead of the previous POTUS's attitude during his two terms of office. The Government has long since grasped that, for the concept to work, it will need to be full of open-source goodness, and will need the input of the private sector as well as the federal government's own boffins. Microsoft, Google and even Amazon could eventually be hosting the information in their Cloud computing systems.

Vivek has, though, got the right idea--"Think about the iPhone," he said, at the launch of the open-source 311 API on Wednesday, which aims to standardize cities' 311 services with the help of the people. "Apple didn't go out there and develop 150,000 applications. It developed the platform." Detractors of open-source projects will point out ever-constant security issues, but isn't that the case for proprietary software as well?