CRA Government Affairs

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From AP:

A steep decline in graduate school applications from foreign students has university administrators pushing the federal government to reform the visa process. Their argument: The trend could cost U.S. schools much-needed revenue and research help, and make America seem isolated in the eyes of the world.

Here’s the full story: Universities Lobby for Simpler Visa Process

I’m back from the 2004 edition of ACM’s Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference, held this year at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California. This is the second time I’ve attended, and I’ve enjoyed it each time. The conference’s focus on the intersection between technology and civil rights brings together a fascinating blend of personalities — from EFF Founder John Gilmore to Rachel Brand of the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice to Bill Scannell, of DontSpyOn.us to Nualla O’Conner Kelley, Chief Privacy Officer, Department of Homeland Security. The sessions are always lively and thought-provoking.
A few issues seemed to get the most attention at this year’s conference — the perils of “Direct Recording Electronic” (DRE) voting systems, government profiling using TIA-like systems, and civil liberties issues surrounding Google services. Of these, I was particularly frustrated by the government profiling discussions. A number of speakers made the point (though Doug Tygar probably made it most emphatically) that the government spends a disproportionate amount of its IT privacy and security research funding on security rather than privacy. Given the current state of funding for federal cyber security R&D (see previous blog entry), that’s a sobering thought. But the frustrating part for me is that many of the same people at CFP who are now clamoring for more federal R&D for privacy related research were among the loudest voices calling for cancellation of DARPA’s TIA project (I’m not including Tygar in this, as I don’t know where he stood on TIA). Let me explain.
DARPA’s Total Information Awareness (pdf) project was an attempt to “design a prototype network that integrates innovative information technologies for detecting and preempting foreign terrorist activities against Americans.” In order to do this, DARPA was funding research into a range of technologies including real-time translation tools, data mining applications, and “privacy enhancing technologies” including development of a “privacy appliance” that would protect the identities of all individuals within any of the databases being searched until the government had the appropriate court order to reveal them. At CFP, Philippe Golle, from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, described one such project at PARC (led by Teresa Lunt), that DARPA agreed to fund for 3 years as part of TIA. The plan was to create a “privacy appliance” that owners of commercial databases of interest to the government could deploy that would control government access to the databases using inference control (deciding what types of queries — individually or in aggregate — might divulge identifying information), access control and an immutable audit trail to protect individual privacy. Really neat stuff.
Anyway, the idea that the government might one day deploy a TIA-like system before all of the privacy and security challenges had been sorted out and thereby imperil American civil liberties and security was worrying to a great many people and organizations, including CRA. However, there seemed to be a number of different approaches among the various people and organizations to deal with the concerns. There was a vocal contingent that believed Congress should cancel TIA outright — the threat the research posed was greater than any possible good. CFP participant Jim Harper, of Privacilla.org, addressed this approach directly at the conference, saying the reason groups like his try to kill government programs when they’re still in R&D and small is because they’re too hard to kill when they get big.
CRA had a more nuanced view, I believe, that argued that the challenges that needed to be overcome before any TIA-esque system would ever be fit for deployment were large and that CRA would oppose any deployment until concerns about privacy and security were met. However, we also argued that the research required to address those concerns was worthy of continued support — the problems of privacy and security (as well as the challenge of ever making something like TIA actually work) were truly difficult research problems…”DARPA hard” problems — and so we opposed any research moratorium.
Unsurprisingly, the “nuanced” position failed to carry the day once Congress got involved. At about the same time Congress was deciding TIA’s fate, stories broke in the press about DARPA’s FutureMAP project — which attempted to harness the predictive nature of markets to glean information about possible terrorist activities — and JetBlue airline’s release of customer data to the Defense Department (in violation of their privacy policies) that helped cement opinion that DARPA was out of control. It also didn’t help that the TIA program resided in DARPA’s Information Assurance Office, headed by the controversial Adm. John Poindexter. TIA’s fate was sealed. Congress voted to cut all funding for the program and eliminate the IAO office at DARPA that housed it.
However, Congress also recognized that some of the technologies under development might have a role to play in the war against terrorism. They included language in the appropriations bill (Sec 8131(a)) that allowed work on the technologies to continue at unspecified intelligence agencies, provided that work was focused on non-US citizens. As a result, much of the research that had been funded by DARPA has been taken up by the Advanced Research Development Agency, the research arm of the intelligence agencies. Because it’s classified, we have no way of knowing how much of TIA has been resurrected under ARDA. We also have no way of overseeing the research, no way of questioning the approach or implementation, no way of questioning the security or privacy protections (if any) included. In short, those who argued in support of a research moratorium just succeeded in driving the research underground.
Finally, one thing we do know about current TIA-related research efforts is that PARC’s work on privacy-enhancing technologies is no longer being funded.

The House Science Committee is circulating a draft (pdf) of a bill to amend portions of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 to address issues about coordination among federal agencies doing IT R&D. This is an important bill for a couple of reasons. First, the original HPC Act — besides being the bill sponsored by then Senator Al Gore that was the reason behind to the infamous “I took the initiative in creating the Internet” line from the 2000 presidential campaign — established the current structure for the now $2.0 billion a year federal investment in IT R&D and has done much to shape the discipline and the enormous amount innovation that has resulted…innovation that, in turn, has driven the new economy. So any alteration of the bill bears the weight of all of that success.
Second, the new bill is important for the message it sends. At a time when the overall budget for federal IT R&D has been basically flat (some agencies up, other down) for several years (graph) and when the Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has defended the flat budgets by claiming IT is a “mature” field, without the same complexity as the life sciences, it’s important to have Congress note that IT R&D is still vital to the nation for a whole host of reasons and is rich with challenges to solve.
The bill is also important because it attempts to address concerns within the computing community about interagency coordination in the NITRD program generally, and specifically within the high-performance computing community. If there’s one important point to take away from the Atkins Cyberinfrastructure Report, it’s that the cyberinfrastructure revolution is already underway. Agencies are already planning their own cyberinfrastructure strategies — NSF has reorganized and created a division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure, DOE has it’s own plan, NIH is considering its own health sciences network, NASA is considering its own geosciences network. It’s not clear, however, that there’s a whole lot of coordination going on between the agencies, despite the NITRD interagency coordination plan already in place. While a diversity of funding agencies is probably desirable in this space, coordination between the agencies can help insure that funding is spent in the most effective ways possible. The Science Committee bill addresses this by requiring the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) review the NITRD coordination effort every two years and report to the President and Congress.
The bill also amends the HPC to direct the agencies under the Science Committee’s jurisdiction (NSF, NASA, DOE, NIST, NOAA, and EPA) to do a number of things consistent with their missions. You can see the complete list of responsibilities by looking at this section by section analysis of the bill (provided by the Committee staff). The Committee also provided this short-form summary of the bill’s intent:

Assuring U.S. Researchers Access to the Most Advanced High-Performance Computing Systems Available: the bill requires the High-Performance Computing Research and Development Program to “provide sustained access by the research community in the United States to high-performance computing systems that are among the most advanced in the world in terms of performance in solving scientific and engineering problems, including provision for technical support for users of such systems. The bill also specifically requires the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science at the Department of Energy to provide U.S. researchers with access to “world class” high-performance computing systems.
Assuring Balanced Progress on All Aspects of High-Performance Computing: in addition to assuring U.S. leadership in hardware infrastructure, the bill requires the program to support all aspects of high-performance computing for scientific and engineering applications, including software, algorithm and applications development, development of technical standards, development of new computer models for science and engineering problem solving, and education and training in all the disciplines that support advanced computing.
Assuring an Adequate Interagency Planning Process to Maintain Continued U.S. Leadership: the bill requires the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to “develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of high-performance computing systems for use by the research community in the United States.” This and other provisions in the bill are designed to ensure a robust ongoing planning and coordination process so that our national high-performance computing effort is not allowed to lag in the future.

The only negative that I can see with the bill is the lack of authorization funding amounts. The committee doesn’t set out any recommended funding levels for any of the agencies within the bill. This is largely, I think, a political necessity to avoid the difficulties that authorization bills with large funding levels encounter in the legislative process. The previous attempt to authorize NITRD programs (HR 3400, introduced by Research Subcommittee chair Nick Smith (R-MI)) failed to receive floor consideration in the 107th Congress because the House Leadership — already worried about a growing deficit — balked at the funding levels authorized in the bill.
Failing to include the numbers is a disappointment, mainly because having a set of authorized funding levels gives the community a useful target to use in advocated for appropriations from year to year. It’s also important symbolically, as an expression of the strength of support for the programs in Congress. However, not having any funding recommendations will likely make the bill sail through the legislative process.
CRA is interested in your feedback on the bill. Please give it a look and add your comment. The Committee plans to hold a hearing on the bill on April 29. Scheduled to testify are: OSTP Director John Marburger; Bill Bishop, CEO of SGI; Rick Stevens, from Argonne National Labs; and Dan Reed, CRA Board Member and University of North Carolina. The bill is on a fast track — the committee plans to mark it up and pass it out the following week.