Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled the IT Dashboard yesterday. The focus of this website is providing detail on all information technology investments by the various federal agencies. It’s a graphics-intensive effort, with charts and graphs at your disposal to help examine individual projects, individual agencies, and comparisons across projects and agencies.

What’s covered by the website, according to the FAQ:

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Here are some items in the June issue of Communications of the ACM that have policy relevance. As always, much of the content in CACM is premium content, and free content one month may require a subscription or fee the next. You need to be a member of ACM or subscriber to CACM to access such content online.

News

Micromedicine to the Rescue, Don Monroe

A description of how potential advances in targeted drug delivery can be facilitated through molecular-scale computing.

Content Control, Leah Hoffman

Notes on advances in access control technology, one means of combatting intellectual property theft.
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As part of its elevation from committee to council, USACM recently completed elections for at-large seats on its Council. The voting members of the Council are the USACM Chair, any Co-Chairs, the ACM President or President’s Designee, Chairs of all Subcommittees, and six At Large members.

The full membership of USACM Council is as follows:

• Eugene Spafford (USACM Chair)
• Annie Antón (USACM Vice-Chair)
• Edward Felten (USACM Vice-Chair)
• Bill Aspray (At Large)
• Charles Brownstein (Former USACM Chair)
• Lorrie Cranor (At Large)
• Jeremy Epstein (At Large)
• Stuart Feldman (ACM Past President/President’s Designee), ex officio
• Juan Gilbert (At Large)
• Andrew Grosso (Law Subcommitee Chair)
• Harry Hochheiser (Accessibility Subcommittee Chair)
• Jim Horning (At Large)
• Paul Hyland (Intellectual Property Subcommittee Chair)
• Douglas W. Jones (Voting Subcommitee Chair)
• Jeanna Matthews (SIG Representative)
• David Robinson, (Open Govenrment Subcommittee Chair)
• Bobby Schnabel (Chair, Education Policy Committee), ex officio
• Stuart S. Shapiro (Secuirty and Privacy Subcommittee Chair)
• Barbara Simons (Former USACM Chair)
• Ollie Smoot (At Large)
• Emil Volcheck (SIG Representative)
• John White (ACM CEO), ex officio
• Cameron Wilson (ACM Director of Public Policy), ex officio

June 25

Hearing:

The House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on cybersecurity activity at NIST and the Department of Homeland Security.
2 p.m., 2318 Rayburn Building

June 16

Hearing:

The Research and Science Education and the Technology and Innovation Subcommittees of the House Science and Technology Committee will hold a joint hearing on agency responses to the recent cybersecurity review. Witnesses include personnel from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.
2 p.m., 2318 Rayburn Building

Meeting:

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Health IT Policy Committee will meet. The public can participate via web or audioconference. Click the link for more details.
10 a.m., 200 Independence SW,

June 18

Hearing:

The Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on behavioral advertising.

On June 10 the Research and Science Education subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing on cybersecurity. This is the first of three planned hearings prompted by the Obama Administration’s recent cybersecurity review. On June 16 the Research and Science Education subcommittee will hold a hearing with the Technology and Innovation subcommittee on the Administration’s review, and on June 25, the Technology and Innovation subcommittee will hold a hearing focusing on efforts at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The witnesses for the June 10 hearing were:

Seymour Goodman - professor of international affairs and computing, and co-director, Information Security Center and Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology

Liesyl Franz - vice president, Information Security and Global Public Policy, TechAmerica

Anita D’Amico - director, Secure Decisions Division, Applied Visions

Fred Schneider - professor of computer science, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University

Timothy Brown - vice president and chief architect, CA Security Management

Both Drs. Goodman and Schneider are members of USACM.

You can access the webcast and related hearing materials. online.
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June 10

Hearing:
The Research and Science Education subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on research and development in cybersecurity.
10 a.m., 2318 Rayburn Building

Here are some items in the May issue of Communications of the ACM that have policy relevance. Remember, much of the material in CACM is considered premium content, and what may be free content during the month of the issue might slip behind a password wall. You will need to be a member of ACM or a subscriber to CACM in order to access this material online.

The May issues featured the first series of excerpts from Blog@CACM, where 13 bloggers regularly write on a variety of issues. The associated blogroll includes the ACM Tech Policy Weblog.

News

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, David Essex

A short update on the state of computational advertising, the algorithms that help place advertisements, which has policy implications with respect to privacy of consumer information.

Viewpoints

Law and Technology
The Network Neutrality Debate Hits Europe, Pierre Larouche

The author provides the European perspective on the network neutrality debate, noting the different policy issues and technical constraints that make that debate different from what is happening in the United States.
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Yesterday, during the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference (CFP), USACM coordinated a panel to speak on voting and using the internet. It was chaired by Ed Felten of Princeton, who is also Vice-Chair of USACM. The panelists where Amy Bjelland and Craig Stender from the State of Arizona, Susan Dzieduszucka-Suinat of the Overseas Vote Foundation, Avi Rubin from Johns Hopkins University, and Alec Yasinsac from the University of South Alabama. I’ll dispense with an effort to summarize the panel and the discussion, and refer everyone to Ed Felten’s blog entry on the panel, over at Freedom to Tinker.
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CONTENTS

[1] Newsletter Highlights
[2] ACM Co-sponsors Hill Briefing on Computer Science Education
[3] USACM Elevated to Council Status in ACM
[4] Congress Moves to Strengthen Computer Science Education
[5] Obama Administration Releases Cybersecurity Review
[6] Obama Administration Puts Open Government Blog Online
[7] Advisory Board Urges Updates to US Privacy Policies
[8] About USACM

[An archive of all previous editions of Washington Update is available at
http://www.acm.org/usacm/update/]
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On Monday the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released a draft of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) Version 1.1 for public comment. This version of the VVSG is an update of the current version of the VVSG, approved in 2005 and in effect since 2007. The comment period will close in late September, and the EAC plans to release the final edition of VVSG 1.1 in late 2009.

In late 2007 the EAC released a different set of the VVSG, which is now considered VVSG 2.0. USACM submitted comments on those proposed guidelines, and the EAC still intends to release this next iteration at some time in the future. For now, the proposed revisions focus on areas that the EAC and NIST believe will not require significant effort to implement. They cover the following areas:

1) Hardware and software performance benchmarks and test method
2) Software workmanship
3) Test plan and test report
4) TDP and voting equipment user documentation
5) Non-EMC environmental hardware
6) Human factors requirements
7) System security documentation requirements
8) Election records
9) Voter verified paper audit trails (VVPAT)
10) Cryptography
11) External interface requirement
12) EAC requests for interpretation (RFI) decisions
13) General edits

Again, the public comment period will be open until late September. Comments may be submitted electronically, by mail, or via an online comment tool that will be made available sometime during the summer. We’ll post updates to this blog as this process moves forward.

The ACM Executive Council recently elevated its U.S. Public Policy Committee - USACM - to council status. This change reflects ACM’s increasing attention to public policy issues. The elevation to council status will streamline the decision-making processes of USACM both internally and within ACM. As a council, USACM has established subcommittees to work on issue areas of consistent and continued interest: voting, privacy and security, computing and the law, intellectual property, accessibility and digital government. The Education Policy Committee continues as an independent entity from the new US Public Policy Council.