[e-gov] E-Gov News 10-23-2007
- From: "Patrice McDermott" <pmcdermott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "e-gov@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <e-gov@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:06:28 -0400
- GSA shuts down California domain after hacker incidents
- Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency
- CIO Council turns focus on privacy
Patrice McDermott, Director
OpenTheGovernment.org
www.openthegovernment.org
202.332.OPEN (6736)
- GSA SHUTS DOWN CALIFORNIA DOMAIN AFTER HACKER INCIDENTS
By Trudy Walsh
10/22/07
Some of California's state Web sites vanished temporarily early this month as
the federal General Services Administration tried to limit the impact of a
hacker attack. GSA closed down the ca.gov domain for more than seven hours
after someone - the perpetrator hasn't been caught - hacked into the
Transportation Authority of Marin's Web site at www.tam.ca.gov and redirected
some of the links to pornographic Web sites. Officials at GSA, which
manages all .gov domains, noticed the links Oct. 2 and promptly pulled the plug
on all Web sites with a ca.gov address. more [GCN]
***
- HACK, MASH & PEER: CROWDSOURCING GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY
Jerry Brito
October 21, 2007
In order to hold government accountable for its actions, citizens must know
what those actions are. To that end, they must insist that government act
openly and transparently to the greatest extent possible. In the Twenty- First
Century, this entails making its data available online and easy to access. If
government data is made available online in useful and flexible formats,
citizens will be able to utilize modern Internet tools to shed light on
government activities. Such tools include mashups, which highlight hidden
connections between different data sets, and crowdsourcing, which makes light
work of sifting through mountains of data by focusing thousands of eyes on a
particular set of data. [George Mason University - Mercatus Center -
Regulatory Studies Program]
Links: Document download [SSRN - 508K, pdf]
For examples of how this works in practice - mysociety.org
***
- CIO COUNCIL TURNS FOCUS ON PRIVACY
By Jason Miller
October 23, 2007
The CIO Council is formally addressing privacy issues - much the same way it
looks at enterprise architecture, best practices and workforce challenges. In
May, the council created the Privacy Committee, headed by Karen Evans, the
Office of Management and Budget's administrator for e-government and
information technology and director of the CIO Council, and Ken Mortensen, the
Justice Department's acting chief privacy and civil liberties officer. The
committee's purpose is to discuss privacy issues related to governance, policy
and security. Mortensen said privacy incidents are personal and used the
example of salary information to illustrate his point. "For political
appointees, the information is public, but for most others, salary information
is very personal," he said. "Privacy incidents can occur in a format that has
nothing to do with technology, though technology usually is linked in some
way." more [FCW]
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