January 2011

The ink was hardly dry on the Comcast/NBCU deal Jan 29 when critics -- including Free Press. Media Access Project, Common Cause and the Writers Guild of American East -- filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission promising to keep a close eye on the new company and asking FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to do the same.

"The Comcast-NBC merger is the new face of media consolidation," they wrote. "As organizations representing hundreds of thousands of diverse, local citizens around the country, we are pledging today to be vigorous watchdogs, monitoring this newly merged media giant, and consistent advocates for the public interest. We ask you to make the same pledge."

“We cannot win the future with a government of the past,” President Barack Obama said during the State of the Union address. The fact is that we live and do business in the information age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the middle of the last century. Over the past few decades, there has not been a business or large organization that has not rethought, retooled, and revamped how they did their job to respond to a growing, more competitive global economy and an ever-changing technology landscape. Yet too often, it seems that the federal government is stuck in the age of black-and-white television while we are competing in the age of the iPad. For millions of Americans, this can lead to frustrating encounters trying to get the services you need and a waste of taxpayer dollars. For many businesses, it means that they may not have all the assistance they need to compete around the world. For instance, we have more than a dozen different agencies involved in exports. They all work with well with each other, but this is certainly not the optimal organization or allocation of resources if you were designing a system from scratch.

President Obama has picked Jeffrey Zients, our nation’s first Chief Performance Officer (CPO), to lead the reorganization effort. The first focus will be looking at trade and exports to see how we can better reform these functions to give American companies a leg up in the global economy.

For the past two years as CPO and Deputy Director for Management of OMB, Jeff has led our Accountable Government Initiative (AGI), the President’s initiative to make government more efficient and effective, open and responsive. On his watch, we have cut government waste, bringing down the amount of improper payments on our way of reducing them by $50 billion by 2012; starting to get rid of unused federal buildings and property; overhauled how IT is purchased and used, saving billions; and deployed the latest technologies to make it easier of people to get the information and services they need from their government. Jeff’s years of private sector experience means that he brings a unique perspective to his job as CPO and to this new assignment. Having been a CEO, management consultant, and entrepreneur, Jeff has a deep understanding of business strategy, process reengineering and operational management. In fact, Jeff spent the majority of his career leading two companies that help corporations around the world improve their performance by adopting best management practices.

The President has also asked Lisa Brown to take on a new position and work with Jeff on this endeavor. Lisa is currently Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary and previously served as Co-Chair of the Agency Review Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. In these capacities and from her prior government service, she has developed a keen understanding of how the executive branch works. She also brings management and legal acumen, having run a national non-profit organization and been a partner at a DC law firm.

In recent years, governments and allied grass-roots advocacy groups had largely ceded cyberspace to extremists, who use the Internet to recruit, raise money, spread their ideology and disseminate instructions on bomb-making and other terrorist techniques. Governments have carried out covert operations to undermine or take down extremist Web sites, but many pop back within days or weeks. Now these governments, often working with international organizations like the United Nations and European Union, and more quietly with private or nonprofit groups, are opening a counterattack to try to undermine the appeal of terrorists, expose their lack of legitimacy, and attack the credibility of their ideology and online messengers. Counterterrorism officials from more than 30 countries met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last week under the auspices of the United Nations and Naif Arab University to share tactics and strategies on how to use the Internet to counter the appeal of extremist violence. “The terrorist message, for all its deviancy and destructiveness, has gone unchallenged for too long,” said Richard Barrett, a conference organizer who heads a United Nations office that monitors sanctions on Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Egyptian government has ordered all wireless phone carriers to curb mobile services in the country.

Vodafone, one of Egypt's largest mobile providers, said in a statement: "All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it. The Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course." The mobile phone shutdown follows the government ordering the suspension of Internet service on Jan 28, just after midnight Egypt time. On Jan 27, BlackBerry Wed data was blocked, and on Tuesday, Twitter and Facebook were unavailable to Egyptians. The protests in Egypt have centered around frustrations with high unemployement and the presidency of Hosni Mubarak, who has been in power for more than three decades. The lack of Internet access has caused alarm among many human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Center for Democracy and Technology.