March 2010

Four years after Congress told the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies to form an interagency center for crisis communications, the project is "in the early stages of development," has delays and a lack of clear direction, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

The proposed interagency Emergency Communications Preparedness Center (ECPC) has problems with making group decisions, agreeing on a strategy, demonstrating value to its members, maturing as an organization and defining its relationships with other organizations, GAO said March 3. DHS officials declined to comment on the report. Breakdowns in emergency communications following Hurricane Katrina led Congress to mandate more federal coordination. Post-Katrina legislation established the DHS Office of Emergency Communications. Congress also required federal agencies, including DHS, to form and operate a Emergency Communications Preparedness Center.

DHS officials began working on the interagency project in the fall of 2007. The 12 federal organizations in the interagency center drafted a charter that was approved in October 2009. To date, four out of six milestones for the interagency project have been met either on schedule or close to it, including development of an online clearinghouse for project updates that should be available this month, GAO said. However, overall, despite meeting those four milestones, the report described the project as "in the early stages of development" and said it was behind schedule on two out of six milestones.

The Initiative for Open Authentication, an industry coalition promoting the use of open standards for interoperable strong authentication, used its annual meeting at this week's RSA Security Conference to discuss plans for an interoperability certification program.

The group, usually called OATH, considers interoperability one of its key focuses, said Don Malloy, the institute's marketing chief and director of business development for Nagra ID Security SA. The coalition has been working on the program for about six months and expects to launch it in another six, and will be restricted to members of the institute. Common architectures and specifications do not necessarily mean that implementations by different vendors will work with each other, and the goal of the program is to ensure that any back-end authentication system will be able to work with any of the institute's schemes or algorithms. The institute was organized five years ago to make the use of strong, two-factor authentication simpler and more widespread, increasing security and making it easier to conduct sensitive online transactions. It has produced a reference architecture based primarily on existing standards with a goal of making authentication schemes interoperable across networks and vendor platforms. One of the organization's guiding principles is that open architectures rather than proprietary solutions are required for the widespread adoption of a technology.

Howard Schmidt, the new cybersecurity czar for the Obama administration, has a short answer for the drumbeat of rhetoric claiming the United States is caught up in a cyberwar that it is losing. "There is no cyberwar," Schmidt told Wired.com in a sit-down interview Wednesday at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

"I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept," Schmidt said. "There are no winners in that environment." Instead, Schmidt said the government needs to focus its cybersecurity efforts to fight online crime and espionage. His stance contradicts Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence who made headlines last week when he testified to Congress that the country was already in the midst of a cyberwar — and was losing it.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has awarded more than $2.4 million to five research teams to study how "patient-recorded observations of daily living" can be captured and integrated into clinical care.

Three of the five teams are based in California, including two in the Bay Area: one at San Francisco State University and a second team made up of researchers at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and The Healthy Communities Foundation. The foundation said new technologies, such as smartphones and sensors, make it possible to gather information - such as diet, exercise, sleep patterns, medication usage and pain - from the flow of people's lives. Through its national Project HealthDesign program, RWJF says it's funding five groups to find out how such data can be collected, interpreted and used in clinical settings. Each will receive a two-year $480,000 grant.