Commerce Department Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez admitted yesterday that a plan to  digitize the collection of Census Bureau information is a bust. The Census Bureau gave $600 million given to Florida-based Harris Corp to make tiny, snazzy computers that would collect information from citizens who don’t fill out ...

Federal bureaucracies are often accused of being a step slow in integrating new technology. But as the Washington Post’s Stephen Barr reports, the Office of Management and Budget has done much with the information-sharing technology used to create Wikipedia. Last year, OMB worked with other federal agencies to ...

An invaluable public resource may disappear in the next few days.  The FCC is preparing to auction off radio spectrum at a key moment in communications history -- when wireless and web-based technologies could finally converge to allow you, wherever you are, to do all your Internet and voice communications from one device, with a dependable signal, on whatever phone or laptop or PDA you want to use, and at a lower price.  But then again, maybe not -- the FCC has structured the auction in a way that may prevent all this from happening. 

The federal-state board that oversees a $7 billion industry-provided fund for low-income and rural telephony has proposed splitting the fund into three different applications, Corey Boles of the Wall Street Journal reports.  One-third would be used to increase broadband Internet accesss in rural areas, with the remainder devoted ...

As the expression goes, you can’t make chicken soup without a chicken.

At the Army Corps of Engineers, it appears as though the workers have flown the coop.

Check out Jenny Mandel’s account in Government Executive about the turn of fortunes at the Corps.  It seems as ...

A recent Associated Press (AP) story provides a grim report card on computer security performance.  Nearly a score of federal agencies lost personal information either through shoddy security practices or theft/hacking.  You’ll recall the widely-reported case of the stolen Veteran Affairs laptop containing data on nearly 27 million people.

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Imagine getting 99 hits out of 100 at bats.  Or correctly spelling 99 of 100 previously unknown polysyllabic words.  How about writing 100 memos and getting 99 of them through your management chain without any changes?

Not bad, eh?  Excellent, but a 99.5% accuracy rate in some large federal programs isn't ...

We've all read or heard about the loss of sensitive data from the Veteran Affairs Department, IRS, and other agencies.  OMB is reemphasizing the need to promptly report these breaches, i.e., within one (1) hour.

This is just another example of how far we still need to progress as we try ...

Again we're bombarded by breached computer security.  This time the FBI is the target.  Eric Weiss's article in The Washington Post (7/6/06) is interesting, frustrating, maddening, and amusing, all rolled into one nice narrative.  The story elicits these emotions because it reminds us how much in the Information Age infancy we remain.  ...