Government cybersecurity efforts have been shrouded in too much secrecy, CDT said in a Policy Post released today. Greater openness is needed to ensure the public understanding of cybersecurity efforts, while also holding government accountable for its efforts.

Of course not every jot and tittle of the government’s cybersecurity strategy needs to be “open source.” Many details should remain classified; the “spy vs. spy” game in cyberspace demands as much. However, the level of secrecy toward cybersecurity the last Administration displayed put the success of the program at risk by not providing enough information for the public to understand what the government was trying to do, the role of the private sector, and how privacy would be protected.
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It is good to see the Obama Administration is moving forward on its pledge to open up the White House using the Web. The new Open for Questions site is well designed, easy to use and engaging. Let’s hope that this is really the start of a new kind of national conversation.

The White House dubs this a “community-moderated online town hall.” You submit questions and vote on others that you think are the most engaging. On Thursday, President Obama will answer some of the most voted on questions… and he’s going to do it live.

A nice little interactive touch, the site is keeping a running tally of the number of questions asked and votes cast, as of this writing, that tally stands at:

3,822 people have submitted 3,618 questions and cast 101,067 votes

On Monday the folks running Google’s China operations began to notice a dramatic drop in YouTube traffic. By Tuesday afternoon YouTube had turned into a digital ghost town; traffic dropped to nearly zero, the company told the New York Times.

Chinese officials, big shocker, have given Google no official reason for shutting down access to the video platform, nor have they actually admitted shutting down the YouTube pipes. Instead, Chinese officials are engaged in their own fanciful brand of obfuscation. “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet,” said Qin Gang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “In fact it is just the opposite.” Sounds like some Chinese press aide has been reading a little too much George Orwell.

This incident makes me believe that the leaders of the Middle Kingdom are operating from a playbook published in some mythic tongue straight out of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and there’s no Gandalf around to interpret. No company can possibly devise a coherent push back policy when there’s not even a set of rules to push against.

While Beijing may be operating with blinders on, the rest of the world is watching this game of geopolitical charades in crystal clear, high def. The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is fast approaching and the Chinese aren’t taking any chances that subversive digital propaganda will trickle into their country on the bitstream

These actions come as no surprise, or shouldn’t. There is a long history of China violating the international right of free expression. On Monday they flipped some switches, monitored some blinking LEDs on a console, and choked off YouTube’s air supply. Twenty years ago they did the same sort of thing, but did it with tanks, troops, bullets and blood.

The recent FOIA debacle at the Office of the US Trade Representative is a text-book example of “transparency theater,” a luscious term coined by John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation to describe the comedy of anti-openness and transparency missteps in the first weeks of the Obama Administration.

USTR’s recent denial of an FOIA request for documents regarding a highly anticipated trade negotiation on “national security grounds” raised hackles in BlogNation and launched 10,000 (give or take a thousand) tweets.

It appears, however, that someone inside the White House–if not the President, himself–is jacked in to the strum und drang of the electronic Metaclass because there’s been a “come to Jesus” meeting at USTR that has resulted in a thorough review of its polices regarding transparency.
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In a rather complicated story last week, CNET News reported that Amazon had sent a cease-and-desist letter to the moderator of an online discussion forum dedicated to eBooks, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPM or digital rights management – DRM) included in digital copyrighted works. Several posts on the site had linked to a script and instructions that allowed eBooks downloaded from libraries or purchased at sites other than Amazon.com to be displayed on Amazon’s popular Kindle reader. With respect to the Kindle itself, I question whether there is really a DMCA violation here, in that the script in question doesn’t exactly remove or circumvent any Kindle-based TPM, but rather enables the Kindle to display DRM-protected eBooks that the device doesn’t natively support. Ultimately, the script on its own is used not to violate any copyrights, but simply to allow legally purchased eBooks (just not from Amazon.com) to be read on the Kindle, a use that is arguably socially beneficial in terms of interoperability, competition, and innovation.
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Today Attorney General Eric Holder released new federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines that put sunlight back into the process of public access to government information. Holder’s memo encourages each federal agency to release information and not keep it secret “simply because it may do so legally.”

This is a tremendous move and is line with the transparency and open government suggestions we made to the Obama Transition Team.

The memo also rolls back the restrictive information policies put in place by former AG John Ashcroft.

Holder’s memo also reminds agency personnel that, by executive order, they are to “use modern technology to inform citizens what is known and done by their Government.” And in the course of doing that, agencies should “readily and systematically post information online in advance of any public request.”

And perhaps Holder caught a little of the hue and cry that rose up from the Internet regarding the bewildering episode of an FOIA denial coming out of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, because he clearly notes to each agency’s Chief FOIA officer: “I ask you to transmit this memorandum to all such personnel.”

When President Obama signed a Transparency and Open Government memo as well as a Freedom of Information Act memo on his first day in office, we were very heartened to see transparency made a key element of the start of this administration. In his first day in office, the President revoked Bush-era policies of data secrecy and returned the federal government to a presumption of openness, and we lauded him. We could not say it any better than the memos did: “In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure,� and “openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.�

Unfortunately, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative seems to have missed these memos. Last week, the USTR denied a FOIA request for information about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). This trade agreement, which contrary to its name is expected to cover a potentially broad range of copyright issues with no connection to actual “counterfeiting,� has been the subject of a variety of fears and rumors during its largely secret negotiations. CDT has expressed concern about this lack of transparency. Unfortunately, instead of embracing the new era of openness in action, USTR denied the FOIA request using the same non-specific national security exemptions that were used in the Bush administration.

Despite these alleged national security concerns, lobbyists and advisors all over the world have been given access to ACTA documents. According to Knowledge Ecology International, anyone on a USTR advisory committee gets access to the ACTA materials. However, the representatives from major industries who serve on these committees are not the only stakeholders in the international copyright debate; consulting with only a few handpicked partners will likely lead to a narrow, slanted, and incomplete understanding of the policy issues at stake. The proposed treaty could touch on a wide range of issues, but no draft text has been released. The lack of transparency creates a serious risk that controversial provisions could be adopted with no meaningful opportunity for input or debate from groups representing users and advocating the greater public interest. With respect to copyrighted works, readers, watchers, and listeners might well be more likely to respect policies they feel are developed with some consideration of their legitimate interests in an open and balanced debate.

There is no substitute for a transparent process that allows for careful scrutiny and input by the full range of potentially interested parties. The negotiators of ACTA, in particular USTR, need to open up the process. If the USTR thinks that it is receiving a diverse and representative set of opinions from a limited set of privileged advisors, then its conception of copyright’s stakeholders is as pinched and outdated as its Bush-era approach to FOIA requests.

After several years of saying that it doesn’t target ads based on profiles of users, Google took a giant step into behavioral targeting by beginning to target ads on its AdSense network (although not on search or display advertising… but that only seems to be a matter of time at this point).

On the whole, the move raises concerns for privacy advocates. Industry has long promised improved self-regulation, but has only delivered on dribs and drabs of improvements. Until the whole process becomes more transparent to the consumer, as well as easier to understand, users are going to continue to be confused and wary of a business model that tracks their online usage.
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The nation’s preeminent health policy publication, Health Affairs, is holding an event today highlighting a series of major policy papers published in its latest issue. CDT’s Deven McGraw, director of the Health Privacy Project, will speak today about key points contained in one of those papers that she and several CDT colleagues authored for the peer-reviewed journal.

HPP’s paper describes a proposed privacy framework developed by the Markle Foundation’s Connecting for Health initiative that would incorporate key privacy principles. Those principles include specific network design features, and oversight mechanisms to establish greater public trust in health IT.

The folks at Health Affairs will cover the event the health IT event live on Twitter. You can follow those updates by following the hashtag #HAHIT (health affairs health IT); you can search Twitter for that hashtag by clicking this link.

The Health Affairs communications staff will be sending “tweets” about speakers key points; linking to abstracts, news coverage, websites, or other relevant information online; and posting photos from the event.

Here’s how Health Affairs describes the current issue:

As the U.S. government prepares to embark on major new investments in health information technology, the latest issue of Health Affairs explores the benefits, challenges and potential risks of transforming the health care system through the use of IT. A series of papers and perspectives suggests that the gains could be real and dramatic – but are often not easy to achieve.

Despite the promises health IT offers, protecting the privacy of people’s health information is a major challenge to ensuring widespread adoption of health IT in the United States. Several papers in the March-April issue tackle the various debates over health information privacy, and offer potential solutions to this thorny issue.

Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports have long among the most sought after unclassified government documents. Despite the fact that these documents are produced with taxpayer money, they have been deliberately kept from easy public accessibility despite repeated calls to “Free CRS Documents.”

CRS, which generates detailed reports relevant to current political events for lawmakers, are freely available to the public, but only through the arcane process of specifically requesting them from a member of Congress or seek them out on third-party websites.

There have been many proposals to free CRS reports, but so far nothing has worked better than asking the public to put together reports at Open CRS. Whereas years ago, you had to buy these reports from resellers or ask your legislator for a paper copy, now many recent CRS reports are available online at Open CRS or other collections.

Senator Lieberman has long been an advocate for public access to CRS reports, and his newest letter urges Sen. Schumer as chair of the Committee on Rules and Administration to become an advocate as well.

Last week, Sen. Lieberman asked the courts to step up in terms of openness as well as personal privacy on their PACER service – the Senator is on a roll! We’re encouraged by this letter, and hopefully the 111th Congress will finally free CRS reports.

Given that many recent CRS reports are now available on third-party websites, it only makes sense to make them available—onlin–from the government. As Sen. Lieberman notes, it is high time for an officially sanctioned, free way to distribute the reports to the people.