Latest Commentary

DoD decision on VistA disappointing

June 3, 2013 | By
The Defense Department announcement last month that it will move forward with plans to acquire a commercial electronic health record is disappointing, if not unexpected. Proponents of the Veterans...

The DoD's problem with VistA could be its solution

May 6, 2013 | By
Defense Department intransigence on the subject of its electronic health record is well known, as is the collapse earlier this year of an effort to create a joint core system that both it and the...

Culture of secrecy's corrosive effects

April 8, 2013 | By
Intelligence agency and law enforcement overreach about publicly accessible information isn't limited to the American ones. It's a global phenomenon, as the French domestic intelligence...

Judge Illston's national security letters ruling hardly a threat to national security

March 18, 2013 | By
The changes implied or described by federal Judge Susan Illston to national security letter law that would make the program constitutional, in her ruling finding current law to be unconstitutional,...

The tragedy of Roger Baker

February 19, 2013 | By
Roger Baker's decision to leave the Veterans Affairs Department is, on reflection, a tragedy. Yes, it comes shortly after his lamentable participation in the joint VA-Defense Department total...

The White House says open data is something other agencies do

January 22, 2013 | By
Lies, damned lies, and statistics, goes the saying--and here's another one: data, open data, and transparency. My reason for saying so stems from a recent look FierceGovernmentIT took at the...

The end of TechStat

December 2, 2012 | By
The diminished frequency of Office of Management and Budget TechStat meetings is a likely indicator of an OMB oversight effort plodding toward an end. OMB itself has already publicly acknowledged...

We the People trolls deliver important message

November 19, 2012 | By
Rarely has an ill-thought-out policy effort come back to haunt an administration with so much glee as the elections' sore losers have shown by commandeering the White House online petition (the...

New Jersey's ill-considered decision to permit email voting

November 5, 2012 | By
In the face of turmoil caused by Hurricane Sandy, a decision by the New Jersey state government to permit those who have been displaced by the storm to submit their votes by email in the Nov. 6...

SASC report too blunt an instrument to address Accumulo

October 22, 2012 | By
Language in the Senate Armed Service Committee's fiscal 2013 national defense authorization bill report regarding Defense Department utilization of an open source NoSQL database may have...
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