March 2009 Archives

The 2009 Intel Solutions Summit (ISS) wrapped up last night after three days of discussions between the company and about 400 of its channel partners about what it considers the three defining characteristics of its offerings -- security, sustainability and mobility.

I was asked to provide a overview of the federal stimulus package and the slides from that lunch presentation are here --
IntelStimulusLaunch.pdf

The New York Times added White House confirmation to earlier reports by TechPresident.com and The Personal Democracy Forum that Vivek Kundra was back at work today as Federal CIO.

The reinstatement comes a few days after F.B.I. agents had raided his former office at the District of Columbia's technology department. Mr. Kundra was not a target of the raid. A former employee of his, Yusuf Acar, has been charged with bribery. The F.B.I. said that Mr. Kundra was not implicated in the bribery case, but he took a leave from his new federal job anyway.

The three day leave will probably be remembered as among the shortest in federal government history, and reflects the Administration's attitude (if not always its actions) to err on the side of an abundance of caution.

Now, his challenge and opportunity is to make sufficient progress quickly to get out from the cloud not of his own making that he was the guy whose old offices were raided.

It will be harder from here but, at the very least, Kundra will be around to make the journey,

A dispatch from NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd on MSNBC's First Read blog confirmed an unwelcome but perhaps inevitable development at the end of a very long day:

A senior White House official tells NBC News that the president's choice to be the nation's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has taken a leave from his position until further details become known of the FBI's investigation into Kundra's Washington, D.C. IT offices.

While the FBI has said Kundra is not connected to their investigation of a contractor that was under Kundra's supervision, the appearance apparently is enough to force Kundra to take a leave from the White House.

This line is worth repeating: "FBI has said Kundra is not connected to [its year long] investigation."  Indeed, First Read was the first to make clear that Kundra was not a target of the FBI investigation.

UPDATES (03-12-09): Newsweek online ran this extended piece from the AP on the raids, the arrests and the alleged scheme.  Separately, Government Technology noted Kundra's recent rise and recognition within the public sector IT community.

WTOP Radio tied the pair of arrests in a DC government office building to an "Obama appointee" in its web headline but only clarified that "Kundra has not been linked to Thursday's raid" in the 18th and last paragraph of its story.

The Washington Post's first report of the raid on the DC CTO's office, including the arrest of a member of its staff and a contractor in a bribery sting, noting in the fourth paragraph that the office had been headed by Kundra until last week. Later in the day, the paper added a link to a full story that clarified that Kundra "is not suspected of any wrongdoing" -- another eight paragraphs later.

Politico's Ben Smith appended a one sentence update to a post called "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee," noting "Kundra himself is not a target."

The Huffington Post was less attentive. Its story remained unchanged all day, leaving room for all manner of speculation:

FBI agents have arrested a District of Columbia government worker and another man while they search the offices of the city's chief technology officer.  The head of that city office, Vivek Kundra, recently left to take a White House technology post.

The private, non-partisan Performance Institute echoed the theme in a tweet, tying the raid to the non-targeted individual in Twitter's characteristically cryptic 140 word dispatches, "FBI agents have made two arrests after raiding the D.C. office of the man tapped to be President Obama's chief information officer."

The breaking news came as the March 10 issue of Business Week hit the news stands.  The BW profile of Kundra covers familiar territory about his penchant for open source development, data sharing across institutional lines, web 2.0 possibilities, and the cloud as the next platform for governing.  The subhead is strangely prescient, "Vivek Kundra says he'll improve the federal government's technology, but he faces an immense challenge."  And the challenge just got a little more tangled today.

The news -- as sketchy as it is -- and the accompanying headlines -- some of which are downright misleading -- created all manner of concern and confusion in the public sector IT community.  The subject line in one early e-mail made the point in the cryptic and crude language of texting -- "DC raids -- WTF?"

For his part, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty defended of his former CTO and the work of his office in comments to the Washington Post on what the district will do now that the investigation has come to this point.

 

Kundra is still standing -- on leave from his new federal appointment, but still standing. The appointment may never have been made if the raid had come a week earlier, particularly given the rush to judgment reflected in the online comments attracted by the stories on the sites noted above.

And that is the part of this affair that is so frustrating: in a single news cycle, we have been witness to a rush to judgment that presumes guilt, by association or otherwise, based on word of an investigation the details of which remain sealed. Surely, at this point, the presumption must be with Kundra, not against him. And for those of us tempted to say more than we know, it is time to let the process be the process.

The AP confirms speculation that Craig Fugate, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, is the Obama Administration's nominee to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Fugate, 49, led Florida's disaster response to eight hurricanes that hit the state over two years.

Fugate told the Miami Herald that he was first contacted by staff at the Department of Homeland Security.  He met Wednesday with Secretary Janet Napolitano in Washington.

Fugate faces daunting challenges as the director of FEMA, which, as Eric Holdeman of ICF International details in a recent op-ed piece in Emergency Management magazine, lost focus as its mandate expanded to be all things under all circumstances.

If defending a landmark $3.6 trillion federal budget proposal and a $787 billion economic stimulus package was not enough, the Obama administration has been dogged by persistent complaints about persistent cookies used by YouTube in embedded videos on administration web sites. 

Persistent Dogging over Persistent Cookies

The big dollar spending initiatives have dominated the news cycles but blogger, self styled cyber activist and academician Chris Soghoian remained on the embedded video watch as the Obama team has successively launched its transition site (change.gov) after the election, the new whitehouse.gov site after the inauguration and the stimulus tracking site (recovery.gov) after the passing of the economic recovery act.

The Original Complaints

As detailed in this blog's post last December, Soghoian's initial call for team Obama to "ditch YouTube" was based on three concerns:

1. The use of persistent cookies by YouTube that would violate a long standing prohibition of the use of long-term cookies on federal websites;
2. Favoratism through the exclusive use of what Soghoian repeatedly reminds us is the Google-owned YouTube; and,
3. Lack of transparency about privacy and user choice.

Soghoian's critique of the transition site softened only slightly with the launch of POTUS 44's White House.  He noted with alarm that White House lawyers had written in an exemption for embedded YouTube videos from the White House privacy policy.  And he gives a grudging nod to a subsequent technical fix that he admits will protect most (but perhaps not all) visitors.

Soghoian implies a correlation between his critiques and the technical fix, which he suggests may be modeled after the the Electronic Frontier Foundation's MyTube privacy tool. 

Making YouTube Safe for Federal Websites

If all of these changes took place incrementally on whitehouse.gov, the more fully formed package of fixes debuted with recovery.gov.

1. Visitors guarded from YouTube Persistent Cookies until they Click









The image of a embedded YouTube (left) and the actual embedded video (below).










 







As Soghoian describes it "YouTube is now only able to use cookies to track users who click on the "play" button on an embedded YouTube video -- the majority of people who scroll through a page without clicking play will not be tracked."








2. Exclusive use of YouTube and the Appearance of Favoritism

Below the screen, users are given the option to download the video directly or access it from an alternate video sharing site (vimeo).

3.  Transparency about Privacy and User Choice

The initial screen (image, not the actual embed) includes a link to the YouTube privacy policy, which users can compare to the administration's privacy policy (linked below the video) before they click on anything.





What Have We Learned?

The administration has taken the same kind of pragmatic approach to the persistent cookie problem as it has with larger policy issues.  It brings with the risk of alienating the most zealous in its base but it also brings the promise of getting things done.

There are two other alternatives.  Soghoian clearly wants a crack down on Google for the privacy-invading cookie-collecting practices of its YouTube service (even with the privacy work arounds in place).  Drawing attention to concerns over the administration's use of these technologies is also the best shot at what Soghoian really wants -- a congressional investigation.

Within the civil service, federal web masters report that they have been in discussions with YouTube for about a year to establish a YouTube just for government to provide a comprehensive, once and for all policy-based solution to concerns over privacy and commercial encroachment.  The problem is, there is no once and for all on the Internet.  The other problem with a YouTube-of-Its-Own approach is that it would be isolated from the real YouTube, that space where 80.7 million people gather voluntarily to watch videos -- a place where the eye balls that public agencies want to reach gather naturally.