By David B. | Published: January 31, 2008
Our next post in this series on Technology Policy in 2008 focuses on two connected issues – Identity Theft and Data Security. Data breaches continue, as a recent theft of a hard drive at Georgetown University demonstrates. According to PrivacyRights.org, since January 2005 there have been over 218 million records exposed. To date a corresponding [...]
By Cameron | Published: January 29, 2008
Peter Harsha at the Computing Research Association has a good analysis of the impact that Congress’ flat funding of the physical science agencies will have this year. His analysis (excerpted below) includes the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. We thought that we add the impacts to the National Institute [...]
By Cameron | Published: January 26, 2008
Continuing our weekly posts reviewing key technology policy issues facing Congress, this week we tackle the so-called “innovation agenda.” This agenda has been defined by a loose collection of business, academic groups and professional/scientific societies (both ACM and CRA work on these issues) interested in improving the innovation ecosystem. The agenda is organized around four [...]
By Cameron | Published: January 23, 2008
This morning the Associated Press reported that a high-profile study the Motion Picture Association of America issued in 2005 is significantly flawed. Specifically, the study said that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from students’ illegal downloading at universities. Today MPAA says that due to “human error” that figure is more like 15 [...]
By David B. | Published: January 18, 2008
The release last Friday of the final rule for REAL ID did not mark the end of the road for this issue, but the end of the beginning. In this second of our series of posts taking a high-level look at various technology policy issues, we focus on REAL ID, and how it stands a [...]
By David B. | Published: January 17, 2008
Today, several ACM groups, including USACM, released a statement on measures that should be taken to increase web accessibility. You can read the press release and statement online. The statement is a joint statement of USACM; the ACM Special Interest Groups on Accessibility (SIGACCESS), Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web (SIGWEB), and Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI); and [...]
By David B. | Published: January 16, 2008
Update January 17 – USACM issued a press release on the final rules, which is available online. As mentioned in the previous post, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its final rules for the REAL ID program on Friday, January 11. Last May USACM submitted comments on the proposed rules released in March 2007, [...]
By David B. | Published: January 11, 2008
At a press conference earlier today, the Department of Homeland Security released the final rule on REAL ID. The press release summarizes the proposed changes – at least those addressing the deadlines for implementation. The Department released preliminary rules on REAL ID in March of 2007, and in May USACM submitted lengthy comments objecting to [...]
By Cameron | Published: January 11, 2008
We are starting a series of weekly posts taking a high-level look at some of the hot tech policy issues in Congress for 2008. The first is an area that we’ve already covered extensively — electronic voting reform. Last year three big stories dominated e-voting issues: 1) controversy over how e-voting machines preformed during the [...]
By Cameron | Published: January 7, 2008
This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has a great piece on the dynamics of electronic voting issues in the United States. The article gets a number of things right and is well worth a read. First, it discusses the relatively recent trend of local election officials asking much tougher questions about the reliability, security [...]
By David B. | Published: January 4, 2008
CONTENTS [1] Newsletter Highlights [2] ACM Launches Education Policy Committee [3] Research Funding a Casualty of Appropriations Meltdown [4] NSF Education Directorate Seeking Computer Science Expertise [5] About USACM [An archive of all previous editions of Washington Update is available at http://www.acm.org/usacm/update/]
By Cameron | Published: January 4, 2008
The National Science Foundation’s Education and Human Resources Directorate is looking for a new program director to serve as the point person on computer science education issues. The position is located within the Division of Undergraduate information and the description/duties are below: “The person selected for this position will serve as the Lead Program Director [...]
