Obama Administration

James Traub in Foreign Policy:

As the Justice Department hunts for the latest batch of missing federal e-mails, the officials who oversee spending of $71 billion a year for information technology got a big raspberry Friday for a 14-year-long failure to ensure that government e-mails are preserved.

For all the spending it oversees, the Federal Chief Information Officers Council is virtually unknown to the general public. Now it has "won" this year's Rosemary Award for the worst open government performance.

Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke in Policy Review:

Roughly 40 percent of Americans do not have high-speed Internet access at home, according to new Commerce Department figures that underscore the challenges facing policymakers who are trying to bring affordable broadband connections to all Americans.

The Obama administration and Congress have identified universal broadband as a key to driving economic development, producing jobs and bringing educational opportunities and cutting-edge medicine to all corners of the country.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Internet Explorer browser waters, a new threat has emerged despite Microsoft's speedy out-of-band security patch. Symantec has confirmed a new exploit for the security hole used in the recent high-profile attacks against Google and other companies. The new exploit is in the wild and IT administrators who haven't applied Thursday's emergency patch are at risk.

The new threat is not the same Trojan.Hydraq malware that was used in the recent attacks against Google.

Flanked by a coterie of gadgets in a private suite at the USA's biggest consumer electronics show, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers might seem like the proverbial fish out of water.

Yet the leader of the computer-networking giant had delivered a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show [and] was outlining its consumer plans.

It's all part of Cisco's audacious gambit to plunge into new markets, spend billions to snap up companies and partner with others, despite a sour economy.

Paul Waldman in The American Prospect:

The Boston Re

The Obama administration has decided to join United Nations talks on cyberwar and Internet crime. After several years of staying out of talks between the U.N. and other countries, the U.S. will participate in discussions with Russia and the U.N.'s Arms Control Committee, sources told The New York Times.

The committee has been leading the talks between nations that wish to tackle cybercrimes. The U.S. is interested in reducing cybercrimes and limiting military use of cyberspace, while other countries such as Russia are interested in talks on cyberterrorism.