washington post
Cybersecurity plan on hold
This Wednesday was supposed to see the release of the White House’s battle plan for cybersecurity. But the Washington Post and others report that the Bush administration will hold off and seek more industry input. So instead, the world will get another draft of the proposal, which Tiffany Olsen, an aide to White House cybersecurity adviser Richard Clarke, describes as a “living document.” “We wanted to make sure we have buy-in from all the parties involved before the official release comes out,” Olsen explained. Tech companies will have 60 days to comment on the report, with an official launch of the plan now expected by year’s end — or about 15 months after the war on terrorism began. Word in Washington is that the tech industry was unhappy with some of the plan’s proposals, such as the appointment of a privacy czar to monitor how firms handle the personal data they collect from customers.
Bioterrorism threat ruins even group showers
Chalk up mass-washings as another activity wrecked by the spectre of terrorism. Thirty years ago, a call for volunteers to strip to their skivvies, as the coy Washington Post puts it, would have signaled some post-Summer of Love fun. These days, it refers to a far more sober scrubbing: the debut of a new $350,000 chemical, biological and radiation decontamination facility at the Inova Fairfax Hospital in northern Virginia.
Dude, computer science is so sophomoric
The Washington Post takes a look at what effect the tech industry downturn has had on enrollment in undergraduate computer science programs. The short answer is that growth has ground to a halt. In 2001, CS enrollment dropped 1 percent, according to a report from the Computing Research Association. “And educators in the field say the trend seems to be accelerating, with some colleges seeing much greater drops as the new academic year begins,” the paper says. In its own backyard the Post found that at Virginia Tech, enrollment of undergraduates in the computer science department will drop 25 percent this year, to 300. At George Washington University, the number of incoming freshmen who planned to study computer science fell by more than half. Ironically, the Post notes, while near-term prospects may be a little dim, the U.S. Labor Department projects that software engineering will be the fastest-growing occupation between 2000 and 2010, with other computer-related industries trailing close behind.
When to pull the cyber trigger
The Washington Post, which built its reputation covering the federal government, has in the last year or two carved out a respectable niche in the tech sector. The two come together in stories like this, in which reporters Ariana Eunjung Cha and Jonathan Krim delve into the debate underway in the Bush administration on the proper rules of engagement for cyberwarfare. Bush’s point man on the topic, Richard Clarke, says it’s still nation-states that pose the biggest threat in the cyber arena, not terrorist groups. The administration has traced break-ins back to foreign governments and even reckons a state may have been involved in developing last year’s damaging Code Red virus. The prospect of more attacks has led the government to explore how far it is willing to go to counter such incidents. The Geneva Convention prohibits attacks on civilians, and given the interconnectedness of computers around the world, any campaign against an enemy military network could seep into computers at large — and even back to the U.S. itself. It’s a fun, thought-provoking read. So go read it.