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  2. September 2016

September 2016

Unleashing Digital Talent in the next administration

[Commentary] The adage “good help is hard to find” is especially true for Information Technology (IT) talent in the federal government. The White House recently announced its Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Strategy, which includes a goal of hiring an additional 3,500 cybersecurity and IT specialists by January 2017. The use of existing flexibilities in the government’s system of hiring, training and nurturing talent could enable the government to meet that goal and improve performance today. But many senior IT and human resources managers do not know how to use the system well enough to make this happen. And further, in some areas, the system is so badly broken it is impossible to make progress without substantive reform. The next president should take a pragmatic path to hire more and better IT talent through existing hiring laws, while also enacting a targeted reform program to deliver even better mission results.

[W. Scott Gould is a senior adviser at Boston Consulting Group and former deputy secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department. Jeffrey Neal is a senior vice president at ICF International, former chief human capital officer for the Homeland Security Department, and publisher of the blog ChiefHRO.com.]

Judge rules a police ‘hack’ can be a search

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that hacking someone’s computer counts as a “search,” meaning police must get a warrant to hack into someone’s computer. Senior US District Judge David Alan Ezra of the San Antonio division of the Western District of Texas court ruled that the FBI needed a proper warrant when it hacked Jeffrey Jerry Torres’s computer.

Torres is facing charges of receiving and possessing child pornography. Torres and others were allegedly caught by the FBI for using the dark web child pornography site, Playpen. “[The contention that] Mr. Torres did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address is of no import. This was unquestionably a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes,” Ezra wrote. In February 2015, the FBI seized and then ran Playpen, for two weeks. In that time they installed malware on users computers to identify suspects. In a previous case, a judge had ruled that because when users accessed Playpen, via the dark web browser Tor, they made their IP address known to another computer to access Tor, thus giving up any reasonable expectation of their privacy of their IP address. Ezra disagreed with this, supporting the idea that Tor users had a reasonable expectation of privacy on the platform. The warrant that the FBI used in the Torres case also came under question because it was used to obtain information beyond the district that it was issued in.

Do presidential debates matter? Here's the political science evidence.

How much do the debates even matter, anyway? The evidence isn’t entirely conclusive, but in my read of it, debates have the potential to make a small but real impact on the race. Polls have often shifted by a few percentage points during debate season, and in a close race, that could really matter. Now, the effect of general election debates has been overhyped by some. There’s little historical evidence that they’ve ever swung polls by more than a few percentage points. General election debates aren’t like primary debates — there are strong partisan loyalties, the vast majority of debate viewers have already made up their minds about who they’re voting for, and few are willing to change their minds because of what happened in one debate. But, in a close race, with a very polarized electorate, a shift of just a few percentage points could matter a great deal. And even if debates don’t swing the presidential outcome, if they help or hurt a presidential candidate by a few percentage points, that could have a domino effect in down-ballot races — such as the battle for the Senate.

If the media judges Trump by extremely low expectations, or if his outrageous conduct is normalized, that could really affect how some viewers understand what happened. Overall, if Hillary Clinton were still leading Trump by 9 percentage points, then she and her supporters could feel confident that the debates would be highly unlikely to change that. A lead of about 3 percentage points is a different story, though.

Silicon Valley built an app to beat Trump where it matters

Silicon Valley has signed petitions against Donald Trump. It is also writing checks and telling employees that it’s important to vote. But so far the brightest minds in tech haven’t deployed much in the way of ... tech to defeat the Republican nominee. Amit Kumar says he wants to try, with a mobile app designed to rally votes against Trump where it matters: In swing states.

Kumar is CEO of Trimian, a sort-of-stealth company that is building networking apps for groups like college alumni. But in August he built #NeverTrump, an app that’s supposed to tell mobile users about people they know in battleground states, so they can reach out to them and ask them to vote. If you want, #NeverTrump will do the asking, too, with pre-programmed messages it will send up to four times before the election. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that Silicon Valley workers’ votes won’t have any impact on the electoral college, since California is already a lock for Hillary Clinton.

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