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17 Jan 2009
The bunting is going up, the crowds are flocking to Washington for the inauguration on Tuesday and the Secret Service is working overtime to make sure Obama's first presidential command isn't 'Duck!'
Tuesday's swearing-in will be a landmark not only for its cultural and social implications, but for its impact on technology. Obama has promised to be more in touch with the cutting edge of the internet and tech worlds than any previous president.
John McCain may not have known how to use a computer, but Obama used the internet to raise millions in small donations and has big plans.
He has already said that the nation will get its first chief technology officer, and has started making appointments that put people with technological knowledge in the driving seat rather than politically reliable hacks.
As the US gets ready for the end of the Bush era and the beginning of the Obama one, we thought it right to suggest a few IT priorities that the new president might like to consider. No honourable mentions this week, as the new president has quite enough on his plate already.
10. Webcasting
Iain Thomson: For the past decade we've been hearing about how the
internet is going to outpace television, but there's been precious little
movement by the US government in this direction.
We're hoping to see a lot more use of the internet in broadcasting government business. It's not enough to make sure the TV stations get to publicise government initiatives; the web needs addressing too.
The fact is that people don't want to wait and watch the TV at a particular time of day in order to find out what their government is doing. We all work harder and at different hours, and putting more government business on the web makes it accessible to more people.
Democracy relies on an informed population, and it's about time government turned to the internet to make more folks aware of what's going on.
Shaun Nichols: If Obama wants to live up to the promise his campaign made on the internet, he'll need to put an unprecedented amount of information up on the web.
While posting sound and video clips on YouTube doesn't seem like a big deal for most young people, it could prove very difficult for the White House. The new president will not only have to deal with the traditional media, he will be faced with managing his image on the web as well.
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Surely Number 1 Should be Avoiding Security Risk and Data Loss
With the the inauguration of Barack Obama as President, more than 3,300 staff in and around the White House will see their existing employment contracts come to an end. With a new generation of staff joining the ranks, being rehired and redeployed, the process creates a massive IT and data security project. For the central legislature and the various government departments the task ahead is to ensure that access to IT systems and sensitive data is withdrawn from outgoing staff and enabled for incoming staff. The staff changes in Washington DC mirror the staff upheaval that could take place here following the next British election, with MPs losing and gaining seats while civil servants, advisors and contractors face redeployment and replacement by a new government. As illustrated by data losses at HM Revenue and Customs and the Ministry of Defence, authorised IT users cause more damage than hackers, making employees and contractors with legitimate access to applications and databases by far the most serious threat to information security. According to a 2008 report by the US Secret Service and Carnegie Mellon University titled Insider Threat Study: Illicit Cyber Activity in the Government Sector, more than 85 percent of incidents were committed by staff with authorised access to IT systems, and 69 percent of the time access control gaps helped the insider abuse the system. Organisations need to prioritise access assurance to protect their data from internal vulnerabilities just as much as, if not more than, they focus on hacking or other external threats. Government in particular has a responsibility to its constituents to deploy technology that tracks the changes to employee access and helps ensure the security of sensitive data.
Posted by: Stuart Hodkinson, general manager UK for Courion 19 Jan 2009