Ben Worthen has a great interview with former President’s IT Advisory Committee co-Chair Ed Lazowska in CIO Magazine in which Lazowska, freed from his role as presidential advisor after the President allowed PITAC’s charter to expire, pulls no punches describing the failure of the Administration to adequately support and prioritize cyber security research and development. […]
President Bush ordered today that the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology shall now serve as the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), answering the question about what would become of PITAC after the President allowed that committee’s charter to expire last June. I’m not sure how the new responsibilities will be handled […]
As mentioned previously, the House Science Committee met yesterday to focus on the threat cyber security vulnerabilities pose to various critical sectors of the Nation’s critical infrastructure. Representatives from the oil and gas, chemical, electrical and communications sectors all testified that their industries are becoming more and more dependent upon public networks, those networks are […]
Apologies for the dearth of timely updates recently. As many readers familiar with the congressional calendar are aware, Congress disappears for the entire month of August so that members can find their way back to their home districts, partake in a few county fairs and local parades, and generally get a longer-than-usual glimpse of how […]
In a letter (pdf) to John Marburger, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium — a group that includes representatives from IBM, HP, SIA, Lockheed-Martin and representatives from Bay Area universities and federal labs — urged the Adminstration to address concerns about federal support […]
The Wall Street Journal editorial page leads today (subscription required) by arguing that Congress should lift the cap on H1-B visas and that the market should dictate skilled labor immigration policy. Let’s see how much I can quote and claim a fair use exemption: [The H1-B visa cap means that] any number of fields dependent […]
A nice follow-up to last week’s post on the “science gap” and some of the ways the computing community is dealing with its “image problem” can be found today over at MSNBC in a piece focusing on the new National Center for Women in IT (CRA and CRA-W form one “hub” of NCWIT — other […]
The Washington Post’s Politics Columnist (and resident contrarian) Robert Samuelson has an interesting Op-Ed in yesterday’s edition dealing with the fact that the U.S. is producing “a shrinking share of the world’s technological talent.” After noting that there’s a pay disparity between science and engineering PhDs and other “elites” like MBAs, doctors and lawyers that […]
It will come as a surprise to no reader of this blog that gangs and organized crime have moved into cyberspace. And it will also come as no surprise that the media, legislative staff, and elected officials are usually a bit slow to grasp advances in technologies and their commensurate threats. (Let us not forget […]
Gene Spafford passed on an article from VARBusiness which illustrates the technical media’s attention to PITAC even two months after its expiry. The article speaks glowingly of PITAC, which it describes as “a group of technology-industry luminaries and academics assembled to act as a council [sic] to the president, Congress, and the federal agencies that […]
