Information Policy

Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools for the Next Generation of Public Service

Driving high performance through more engaging, accountable and citizen-focused service

Web 2.0 technologies and services have spread around the world at an amazing pace and are used by millions of people every day. Many public service organizations are also adopting Web 2.0 applications to improve their ability to collaborate and serve citizens more effectively.

Accenture believes that Web 2.0 technologies are finding resonance among governments today because they are, in fact, supportive of a broader evolution in public service: a new relationship with government that is about genuine engagement of people in their own governance.

We also believe that public service executives must balance excitement and caution in their evaluation of the potential of Web 2.0. Governments have an obligation to be good stewards of citizens' tax money. They must implement new technologies responsibly and in a way that does not compromise privacy and security.

What is needed at this point in the evolution of Web 2.0 technologies and applications is an effective way to evaluate potential Web 2.0 investments in the context of a proven framework for effective governance—one that helps assess potential advancements in citizen-centric governance against both costs and the inevitable risks that any new technology poses.

The Accenture Public Service Value Governance Framework is such an offering. Derived from Accenture research and our experience working with governments and agencies around the world, the framework provides an important way for public-service executives to evaluate Web 2.0 technologies in terms of four attributes:

* Generating positive social outcomes.

* Balancing choice and flexibility with fairness and the common good.

* Engaging the public as co-producers of public value.

* Improving accountability and transparency.

http://www.accenture.com/Global/Research_and_Insights/By_Industry/Government_and_Public_Service/EvolutionPSDWeb20.htm

U.S.: Biden announces program to expand broadband Internet access for rural areas at Pa. stop

DAN NEPHIN, Associated Press Writer

WATTSBURG, Pa. (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden outlined a $4.7 billion loan and grant program Wednesday to develop the infrastructure needed to deliver broadband, or high-speed, Internet access to areas that are underserved or without access.

America lags behind more than a dozen other countries in terms of Internet access and that has to change, Biden told about 200 people at Seneca High School, about 12 miles east of Erie.

"The bottom line is, you can't function — a nation can't compete in the 21st century — without an immediate, high-quality access for everything from streaming video to information overline," Biden said.

While Seneca has broadband Internet access, Biden said many students do not have access at home.

Providing the means for access would improve educational opportunities, he said. He also spoke of the power of the Internet to create jobs in rural America.

"We believe we are in the process of transforming rural America ... so it's integrated with the country, without losing it's character," he said. The program also covers inner-city areas without broadband access.

"Getting broadband to every American is a priority for this administration," Biden said.

The $4.7 billion is part of $7.2 billion included in the federal stimulus package to improve rural Internet access.

The Commerce and Agriculture Departments on Wednesday published the criteria they will use to judge funding applications. They will consider projects that provide wired or wireless access starting at low-end DSL speeds, but will give priority to ones promising higher speeds. They'll consider an area "underserved" by broadband, and thus eligible for grants, if half or fewer of the households can get wired broadband today, among other criteria.

Applicants can begin applying on July 14. The first round of funding will be awarded in September. Besides providing money to create the infrastructure, the funding can also go toward training people to use the Internet.

In 2007 and 2008, the Pew Internet and American Life Project asked households that lacked broadband why they haven't signed up. Lack of availability was ranked fourth, given by 14 percent. Most answered that they didn't need the Internet, that it was too expensive or too hard to use. Many people who don't use the Internet simply don't have computers.

About 95 percent of households can already get broadband, according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. But the industry hasn't been very forthcoming in saying exactly where it's available, and that's part of what the stimulus package wants to address — it has allocated $350 million to mapping U.S. broadband access.

Biden appeared with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski and U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, D-Pa., as part of a "rural America tour."

All spoke of the need for broadband access to create jobs and improve education and health care.

"Broadband is not just about being able to Google faster. It's not merely a luxury or an option for entertainment. It is an essential tool in today's world," Dahlkemper said.

On the Net:

Broadband USA: www.broadbandusa.gov

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-us-biden-stimulus-broadband,1,4779748.story

Vietnam to Allow Mobile Users to Hold Maximum of Three SIMs

The Ministry of Information and Communications has issued a decree requiring that an individual can only register up to three pre-paid mobile phone SIM cards beginning 10 August 2009, Vietnam News Brief Service reports. Beginning in 2010, under a regulation by the ministry, mobile-phone services for pre-paid subscribers will be cut if they do not provide personal information or if they supply false data to providers to obtain more phone numbers.

There is currently to maximum limit on the number of SIM cards a mobile user can hold. With six telecoms service providers already operating in the country, and Gtel Mobile to start services in July, some users hold more than one SIM card with different operators. The ministry’s new decree is a move to manage unregistered pre-paid mobile subscribers, preventing mobile-phone harassment and spam messages.

https://communicationsdirectnews.com/do.php/130/36094?7649

Politics 2.0 - The Obama Campaign

Barack Obama’s electoral campaign represents a masterpiece in online-campaigning. The use of ICTs and the creation of an Obama-brand were the key features to mobilising the masses. Obama’s opponent, senator McCain, couldn’t motivate as many people to participate in his campaign.

Barack Obama was registered on more than a dozen different social media, the main ones (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter) included, and succeeded in forming an online community that strongly supported his goals. The online-headquarter was my.barackobama.com (MyBO) “[which] was at the heart of the campaign’s new media strategy. [… The] site allowed users to create events, exchange information, raise funds, and connect with voters in their area. MyBO was the digital home from which the campaign could mobilise its army of supporters.” [2] This portal helped creating a community with more than two million profiles. Of course, the easy-to-use website also attracted adversaries, which made community managers essential to evaluate and delete certain statements if necessary.

Citizens participate in Obama’s Campaign

The operators of MyBO established a strong sense of community as everyone with political interest could participate. In blogs, people could express themselves and report about their personal experiences during the campaign. Useful information, such as phone lists and guides for campaigning, were distributed via this internet-portal; even fund-raising-statistics of all members were included. However, the “real spirit of the community could be seen in the more than 200,000 offline events organized through MyBO.” [2]

The Obama campaign collected 13 million email addresses and sent one billion emails to mobilize its supporters. “The Obama team used email as an integral platform to engage supporters, bloggers, and online media. Often overlooked by traditional communications departments, email has one major advantage: speed.” [2] Putting email recipients into groups gave the campaign the opportunity to send individually designed messages to specific groups of people. An even faster way to communicate is SMS, which can be used to contact people without internet access, especially in rural areas.

Citizens make President independent

Obama’s blog was the centre where all news and information were displayed. “It was the hub that captured all activities in the Obamaverse and shared them with the world. The blog was the campaign’s repository, a place where stories, videos, news, and pictures were captured and pushed out to Obama’s many social network profiles.” [2] As people could participate, the campaign’s theme “Yes we can!” was emphasised. One of the Obama’s campaign stated goals was to involve people and to make them participate.

The fund-raising was well organised, and, instead of a few companies making large donations, many citizens donated small amounts of money. “3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.” [4] Even though Harfoush states different sums, one thing is for sure: Obama’s success in fund raising is based on small donations by many people. As a result, Obama’s campaign was neither dependent on financially strong lobbies nor on his party. The campaign’s activities in the Web 2.0 made Obama become a one-man-party. “Without entirely realizing it, America elected its first Independent president.” [3]

The campaign was successful because it was both consistent and authentic in all the different media used. Despite the campaign’s uniform appearance, campaign managers created a specific concept for each online-platform. Citizens could participate in the campaign; feedback was wanted, appreciated and heard. In summary, many volunteers supported and influenced Obama’s campaign and consequently led to the historic election outcome.

Source:
http://pep-net.eu/wordpress/?p=533

'.eu' internet domain to be available also in Cyrillic and Greek alphabets

Speakers of Bulgarian and Greek will soon be able to have .eu websites in their own languages. The European Commission today adopted new EU rules to make it possible for internet users and businesses to register domain names under .eu using the characters of all the 23 official languages of the European Union, now including Cyrillic and Greek scripts. This means that later this year .eu will also be available in the alphabets used by Bulgarians, Greeks and Cypriots and special characters used in other languages. Until now, Czechs could only use 27 of 42 characters, and Lithuanians 23 of 32. A new report of the Commission on the development of Europe's top level domain, published today, shows that the number of .eu domain names registered (currently at around 3 million) grew by 11 % in both 2007 and 2008.

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1044&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

UK launches dedicated cybersecurity agency

The UK government has announced that it is to form a cybersecurity agency, one of whose functions will be to develop a cyberattack capability.

The Office of Cyber Security (OCS), dedicated to protecting Britain's IT infrastructure, will be created in line with a model proposed — and in part practised by — the US, the Cabinet Office said on Thursday. The OCS will have charge of a cross-government programme of work, while a multi-agency Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), based at GCHQ in Cheltenham, will coordinate the protection of critical IT systems.

As well as cyber-defence and cyberattack coordination, the OCS will act as a conduit for information security collaboration between government and industry experts. Robert Hannigan, the prime minister's security adviser, told ZDNet UK that the OCS would be about "drawing together what people are already doing in the Ministry of Defence, the intelligence services and the police".

The government has never admitted that it has the systems and personnel to launch a cyberattack. However, according to a senior government official, who wished not to be named, the OCS will have a role in coordinating cyber-offense capabilities that will build on the resources the government currently has.

In extreme cases, the government will launch a cyberattack in response to intrusions into the UK's own systems. "Yes, we will do things proactively," the Whitehall official said at a Cabinet Office press briefing. "Information assurance has been about building stronger walls, but there's only so much you can do. You come to a point when you are allowing criminals and others a low risk in continuing to attack, and there comes a time when that has to change. This is the first time we are saying publically we are not going to sit back."

The government will develop information systems to allow it to launch denial-of-service attacks and to spy on chosen targets, said the official. "We will have a whole range of offensive capabilities, including distributed denial-of-service," said the official. "DDoS is not a first response — we definitely need graduated responses."

"Aggressive attacks are pretty far up the scale, and we want to avoid collateral damage as far as possible. It's a fine line. We don't want to get into cyber-warfare, but it's not reasonable to sit back," the official added.

The Cabinet Office official said the government would try to respond to attacks on UK systems by recourse to the law: "Whenever we can, we will pursue criminals through legal frameworks, but that only works in some countries. Clearly, in other areas of the world, people are acting with impunity."

The threat of cyber-warfare among countries was highlighted by the May 2007 attacks on the Estonian national infrastructure. Further attacks, on countries such as Georgia, have strengthened the government's resolve to address IT security issues.

The model for the OCS is similar to that in the US, which plans to quadruple the number of security experts defending against cyberattack, while cyber-offense capabilities are currently under the aegis of the US Air Force. The Pentagon will create a cyber-command to oversee US cyber-military efforts.

The OCS will come under protection of the Cabinet Office and will report to the National Security Secretariat in that office. No director has been named for the department.

The office will pool intelligence capabilities from MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence, the Metropolitan Police e-Crime Unit, and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (Soca). Other government agencies involved include the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS); the Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA); CESG, the information-assurance arm of GCHC; and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI).

The OCS will launch with a staff of 16 to 20, while the CSOC in Cheltenham will have 20 to 25. "We will start small and learn from initial US attempts [to build a cyber-security department]," said a Cabinet Office official. "We want to establish a core team."

The government will also reach out to industry to create a pool of IT security expertise, given the scale of the task of securing UK public and private sector IT infrastructure. A key priority for implementing the strategy will be to develop a cyber-industry with "opportunities for high-tech businesses in the UK", according to a government statement.

In addition, the OCS plans to launch a cyber-skills strategy to address skills gaps in government and industry, and work with other countries to develop international law in that area.

The OCS will seek to strengthen links with countries, such as the US, and develop links with other European partners like Germany and France. Hannigan said cybersecurity collaboration with Nato is in the early stages, but that work is planned to build channels of communication with the European Network Security Agency (Enisa).

On Thursday, prime minister Gordon Brown announced the OCS as part of the government's 2009 National Security Strategy, which for the first time includes an IT security component called the Cyber Security Strategy 2009.

In a statement, Brown said securing cyberspace was necessary to give people confidence in the security of web transactions.

"Just as in the 19th century we had to secure the seas for our national safety and prosperity, and in the 20th century we had to secure the air, in the 21st century we also have to secure our position in cyberspace in order to give people and businesses the confidence they need to operate safely there," said Brown.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39667231,00.htm

SKorea to set up cyber warfare command: official

SEOUL (AFP) — South Korea's military is looking to launch a cyber warfare command designed to fend off computer attacks from North Korea and other countries, officials said.

The plan will be included in a military reform package to be presented to President Lee Myung-Bak, a defence ministry spokesman told AFP.

South Korea's military computer networks are under ever-growing cyber attack.

The South's military security unit said in a report last month that every day the military counters an average of 10,450 hacking attempts and 81,700 computer virus infections.

Experts say South Korea -- one of the world's most wired societies -- needs an integrated unit to fight cyber attacks by North Korea and China, which run elite hacker units.

In 2004 hackers based in China used information-stealing viruses to break into the computer systems of Seoul government agencies.

Last year South Korean Prime Minister Han Seung-Soo warned his cabinet against what he said were attempts by Chinese and North Korean computer hackers to obtain state secrets.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5geMDsdejQoeSn8FQseQHZKeTe50A

Kazakhstan to tighten internet law

Kazakhstan's parliament has approved a law tightening state control of the internet, which, media rights activists say, will limit freedom of speech in the former Soviet state.

The bill would subject blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites to possible criminal prosecution, enabling the courts to block all websites considered in breach of Kazakh law.

Media rights activists say the law is designed to allow arbitary crackdowns on anyone opposing Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's president.

But authorities say the legislation aims to curb the distribution of child pornography, extremist literature and other unsuitable material.

"This law is not a regulation of the internet. The amendments introduced to the law are aimed at stopping the dissemination of illegal information on the internet," the government's state information agency said.

http://english.aljazeera.net//news/europe/2009/06/2009625115714327645.html

Kevin Anderson: Net surveillance and filters are a reality for Europe, too

The internet is playing such a key role in ­getting information out of Iran that attention has focused, once again, on how much Iran controls the internet within its borders. Iran controls the internet gateways into the country, and in 2006 the government outlawed any connection faster than 128kbps – until the policy met stiff opposition from business leaders and even members of the Iranian parliament.

It's easy to point to countries such as Iran, which the Open Net Initiative says maintains some of the most extensive internet controls in the world, while overlooking the increasing filtering and surveillance of the internet in Europe.

Yaman Akdeniz, the director of Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties, spoke at the recent Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum about the increasing number of websites blocked in Turkey. In 2007, the Turkish parliament fast-tracked ­legislation to regulate the internet, ­passing the bill in just 59 minutes. Supporters defended the legislation on the grounds that it would protect children. In two years, the number of sites blocked went from zero to 2,600.

But many of the sites being blocked have little to do with protecting children from inappropriate content. Blogger, Google's blogging service, was blocked temporarily because one blog was being used to distribute pirated videos of football matches. Richard Dawkins's site was blocked over complaints from Turkish creationists, and Turkey is one of a handful of countries in the world that completely blocks YouTube, Akdeniz says. The Turkish government had asked YouTube to remove videos seen as defamatory to the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. YouTube's owner, Google, offered to block Turkish users from seeing the offending videos, but the Turkish government demanded the videos be taken down from the global site.Of course, whether in Iran or Turkey, the filters are ineffectual.

The Turkish government may be able to block YouTube on computers, but they haven't figured out how to block the service on Apple's iPhone. But it's not just on the edge of Europe, in Turkey. Let's look to the heart of Europe, to Germany, which has just passed a law to crack down on child ­pornography sites by adding offending sites to a DNS blacklist.

German net activists launched an e-petition opposing the plan. They needed to get at least 50,000 signatures in six weeks for the petition to be read in parliament, but they needed only three days to get that number. When the ­petition was closed six weeks later, it had 130,000 signatures, making it the most successful e-petition.

Instead of using filtering technology, the internet community suggested targeting the offending sites. Using leaked blacklists – such as Germany was proposing – net activists were able to get 60 sites containing child pornography shut down, by contacting international internet service providers, the internet activist and blogger Markus Beckedahl said.

The German government backed down on completely blocking the sites after civil rights and even victims' rights groups joined internet activists to oppose the plan. Now, internet users coming to a restricted site will see a ­government warning telling them viewing child pornography is a crime, but the user will still be able to access the site.

Child pornography is an easy target, and it has long been used as a rallying cry by internet censors. But we often don't know what is being blocked.

Here in the UK, it is illegal to even look at the list of blocked sites kept by the Internet Watch Foundation. And while a crackdown on websites makes good headlines, net activists question whether the filtering works or tackles the issue of the exploitation of children.

"Instead of effectively investing time and efforts to have illegal content removed from the internet, the German government is choosing censorship and blocking – an easy and dangerous way out," says Beckedahl.Akdeniz told Deutsche Welle, "In a sense, blocking access to these Web sites does not necessarily make the problem go away. We just push it off our computer screens — whether in Germany or the United Kingdom or any other country- but that doesn't necessarily mean the serious problem of sexual exploitation of children and child pornography disappear from the Internet."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/24/kevin-anderson-internet-filtering

Pentagon approves creation of cyber command

The Pentagon will create a Cyber Command to oversee the U.S. military's efforts to protect its computer networks and operate in cyberspace, under an order signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday. The new headquarters, likely to be based at Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., will be responsible for defending U.S. military systems but not other U.S. government or private networks, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Asked if the command would be capable of offensive operations as well as protecting the Department of Defense, Whitman declined to answer directly. U.S. officials have voiced growing concern in recent years about being vulnerable to attacks on the country's civilian or military networks as technology takes on an ever-increasing role, including in military operations. President Barack Obama said last month he would name a White House-level czar to coordinate government efforts to fight cybercrime. The United States has said many attempts to penetrate its networks appear to come from China but it has stopped short of accusing Chinese authorities of being responsible. Whitman said the new command will consolidate existing Pentagon efforts to protect its networks and operate in cyberspace.

http://www.ejc.net/media_news/pentagon_approves_creation_of_cyber_command/