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Clips April 24, 2003

To: "Lillie Coney":;, Gene Spafford <spaf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;, John White <white@xxxxxxxxxx>;, Jeff Grove <jeff_grove@xxxxxxx>;, goodman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;, David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>;, glee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx;, Andrew Grosso<Agrosso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;, ver@xxxxxxxxx;, lillie.coney@xxxxxxx;, v_gold@xxxxxxx;, harsha@xxxxxxx;, KathrynKL@xxxxxxx;, computer_security_day@xxxxxxx;, waspray@xxxxxxxxxxx;, BDean@xxxxxxx;
Subject: Clips April 24, 2003
From: Lillie Coney <lillie.coney@xxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 15:23:35 -0400

ARTICLES

OMB putting privacy help in place
Homeland department gets into the cyberwar game
Monster.com's resume purge draws fire
E-mail virus exploits Sars fears
Students help develop Rad Tool
Organizer: 'Hackathon' Will Go On
Database pioneer Edgar Codd dead at 79
Students help develop Rad Tool
CIA, FBI wrangle over threat center
DOD presses for personnel flexibilities
FCC adds wireless services, voice mail to Schools and Libraries Program

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Federal Computer Week
OMB putting privacy help in place
BY Diane Frank
April 23, 2003

New information system privacy requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002 have spurred the Office of Management and Budget to revive the federal CIO Council's privacy committee, said Dan Chenok, branch chief for information technology and policy at OMB.

Eva Kleederman, the privacy policy analyst within the IT and policy branch, is leading the effort to develop the new committee, which will be made up of privacy experts from around government, Chenok said. He was speaking April 23 at a forum sponsored by the Council for Excellence in Government and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Additionally, OMB is working to fulfill a requirement of the E-Gov Act that will produce a "guide for practitioners," Chenok said. He added that the new guidance will build on existing policies, but OMB also is looking for input on how to best implement the privacy requirements within agencies -- many of which do not have privacy officers.

E-Gov Act's requirements are the first major changes to privacy regulations since the Privacy Act of 1974. They include calling for agencies to conduct a privacy impact assessment for every new system or information collection activity. Forum attendees expressed concern that agencies do not have much experience in performing such assessments.

One of the agencies that will be looking for the most help from new OMB guidance is the Homeland Security Department, which is the first to have a privacy officer mandated by law.

Nuala O'Connor Kelly, who started in that position April 21, said she will be working to ensure that her position "embeds privacy awareness into the structure and the culture of the organization," and that the OMB's new guidance will be essential to the department and to her job.
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Government Computer News
04/23/03
Homeland department gets into the cyberwar game
By Wilson P. Dizard III

The Homeland Security Department is simulating cyberattacks and biological assaults to help prepare for the possibility of the real thing, deputy secretary Gordon England said.

?A week ago, I participated in a war game with the Business Roundtable,? England told attendees at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?s Conference on Critical Infrastructure and Homeland Security today. The Business Roundtable is an association of corporate chief executive officers that makes policy recommendations for economic growth.

Part of the war game involved a cyberattack on financial institutions ?that sucked money out of the financial system,? England said.

Another part of the game simulated a biological warfare attack on Chicago, he said.

?The business community needs to act predictably to restore confidence? in the wake of such attacks, England said.

He endorsed the Business Roundtable?s approach of periodically reviewing its members' plans for recovery from attacks and urged the Chamber of Commerce to adopt similar plans.

In response to a question about the department?s approach to regulation, England said, ?I would like the Homeland Security Department to have as few regulations as possibleour job is to coordinate the work of other federal agencies.?

Gov. Tom Vilsack (D-Iowa) told the conference that scanty federal funding has hampered security activities in his state. While the state?s federally approved homeland security plan calls for expenditures of $48 million, the federal government has provided Iowa only $12 million, Vilsack said.

?Our plan calls for expenditures of $32 million for an interoperable [radio] communications system? alone, Vilsack said. He added that the funds given to the states have been designated by Congress for particular programs, which impedes the states? ability to put security measures in place.

Vilsack said Iowa?s plans for the year 2000 date rollover included ranking the importance of state agencies? functions and are proving useful in homeland security preparation and response.
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Wired News
DNA Fingerprinting for All!
01:46 PM Apr. 23, 2003 PT

LONDON -- Everyone should be DNA fingerprinted to help tackle crime and enhance personal security, the British inventor of the modern forensic technique suggested Wednesday.

Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, of the department of genetics at the University of Leicester, said existing criminal DNA databases were too small to catch criminal suspects.

"At the moment, we have a criminal DNA database of about 2 million profiles in the U.K.," he told reporters as scientists met at Britain's top scientific body, the Royal Society, to celebrate the discovery of DNA 50 years ago.

"The real problem in a typical crime is that even if you get DNA from a crime scene, you can't pick up a suspect because they don't have a record, so one possibility is to extend the database to include the entire population."

Jeffreys said he would feel "very uncomfortable" if such a database were run by the police.

"That would give entirely the wrong perception. But I would certainly be in favor of a database like that being established by a quite independent agency."

The database would carry a person's individual DNA profile and would certify their identity. "So it is not just a criminal investigation database but a personal security and assurance database as well," he said.

DNA fingerprinting -- from the tiniest of human specimens -- is already widely used in criminal investigations, paternity testing and to help settle applications for immigration, affecting the lives of thousands of people in a way Sherlock Holmes could not have dreamed possible.

The technique was developed in 1984 by Jeffreys after he noticed the existence of certain sequences of DNA that do not contribute to the function of a gene are repeated within the gene and in other genes of a DNA sample.

In most cases it provides an accuracy of identification in the tens to hundreds of millions to one. Its use has trapped perpetrators but has also exonerated the innocent who might otherwise have been found guilty due to circumstantial evidence.
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CNET News.com
Monster.com's resume purge draws fire
By Declan McCullagh
April 23, 2003, 7:35 PM PT

WASHINGTON--Job-hunters at Monster.com who happened to go to school in Syria or Iran may be in for an unpleasant surprise on Thursday.
So might employers using the popular job-search site, which boasts more than 800,000 job postings, to advertise open positions in Sudan, Burma and five other countries.

In a move the company claims is designed to comply with federal regulations, Monster.com on Thursday will delete most references to those countries from job postings and resumes. A note that Monster.com sent to affected users says: "Your resume will be altered, removing all sanctioned countries from your resume."

What's causing controversy is whether the company is required by law to perform the deletions. According to Kevin Mullins, a Monster.com spokesman, "Monster took the actions to be in full compliance with U.S. regulations" and consulted with the U.S. Treasury Department first.

A Treasury Department representative did not return calls Wednesday. But a senior department official told CNET News.com that no law "that I'm aware of" would require the deletions and Monster.com's scenario of legal liability was implausible.

Monster.com pointed to a federal list of sanctioned countries that restricts U.S. companies from engaging in certain business activities.

In the case of Iran, for instance, U.S. corporations can be fined up to $500,000 for importing "goods or services of Iranian origin" except for food, carpets and information. The regulations restrict "services" provided to Iranian companies but exempt "the exportation from the United States to Iran of information and informational materials, whether commercial or otherwise."

Monster.com's Mullins was unable to immediately identify what section of the rules his company was worried about. The e-mail from Monster.com to its customers said: "The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, as well as some states, maintain(s) sanctions which prohibit U.S. companies from conducting certain business activities with organizations located in or residents of the following countries Burma/Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria."

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in Washington said Wednesday that Monster.com misunderstood the law. "ADC contacted the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control and spoke to the Sanctions Section," ADC representative Laila Al-Qatami said. "They advised ADC that Monster has misunderstood the regulations. They are not required to remove or modify any data on persons' resumes."

"This practice is deeply troubling for the many that post their resumes on Monster.com," Al-Qatami said. "Altering or hiding information on resumes is not only misleading but also unjustified. Resumes are supposed to be based on truth and fact. Hiding or deleting information unfairly handicaps persons searching for gainful employment, not to mention going against standards of honesty and truthfulness."

Thursday's deletion will not affect textual descriptions of jobs that customers type in themselves, such as a U.S. photographer describing work that involved a trip to Burma. Instead, Monster.com said it will remove those seven nations from pop-up lists of countries that customers use to construct their listings and delete existing entries that use those fields from its database.

"We're not changing words in resumes," Mullins said. "We're not getting into that. It's discriminatory." Mullins said the change in policy happened because of a routine internal review of Monster.com's procedures and was not initiated by the Bush administration.

Monster.com's parent company is TMP Worldwide. Its shares closed Wednesday at $14.32, up $0.69.
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CNET News.com
Marketers unite to cook spam's goose
By Stefanie Olsen
April 23, 2003, 3:58 PM PT

A group of digital marketers is pushing a new antispam system aimed at saving the lucrative e-mail advertising industry.
Called Project Lumos, the plan offers a technological blueprint for establishing an e-mail registry and authentication system, the Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC) said Wednesday. The group's 30 members include e-mail marketers DoubleClick and Digital Impact.

The system would require the close cooperation of Internet service providers to implement. In order to gain access to the system, large-volume e-mailers would be required to provide verified address information and to promise to abide by certain best practices.

Project Lumos relies on a central registry that would enroll, verify and track e-mail senders, then dole out performance ratings. Once ISPs have a method like this to identify quality e-mail senders, they will be better able to block spammers, according to ESPC. Small mailing-list operators will also be able to sign on to the ID system, but people who send only a few messages at a time would not be included.

"Today, the e-mail system is somewhat unintelligent--people can spoof identities (and) change them easily, and spammers can hide," said Trevor Hughes, executive director of ESPC. "Senders will now have to identify themselves and be held accountable for their sending practices over time, and that's a fundamental change to how we e-mail and manage e-mail."

Spam, or unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail, frequently includes misleading headers and return address information, effectively concealing the sender's identity and offering no chance of refusal. Spammers may also hijack network resources, sticking ISPs or their unsuspecting customers with the bandwidth costs associated with delivering millions of e-mail messages.

While the idea for an e-mail registry system has been bandied about for years, the ESPC's proposal is the first to be supported by a wide number of e-mail marketers. Members of ESPC, which is a part of the industry group Network Advertising Initiative, represent about 200,000 commercial marketing clients. The Project Lumos plan, however, requires wider support from the Internet and technology community to help develop e-mail guidelines, an authentication system and a registry, or federation of registries.

"The head start we have is that the legitimate sender community is behind this," Hughes said.

Meanwhile, another group is proposing similar open standards for e-mail protection. At the ISPCON conference this week in Baltimore, privacy consultancy the ePrivacy Group introduced an antispam approach that would require senders to identify themselves. The concept, Trusted Email Open Standard (TEOS), is based on ePrivacy's existing Trusted Sender technology, an industry self-regulation program that aims to separate legitimate e-mail from spam and prevents spoofing. Next week, at the Federal Trade Commission Spam Forum in Washington, the ePrivacy Group intends to propose contributing some its intellectual property to the public domain if a critical mass of support can be achieved for TEOS.

"The idea for a network of registries, or federated trust organizations, certifying their constituencies has been kicked around for a while, but it's a good one," said Ray Everett Church, privacy officer at ePrivacy Group.

"The challenges are that it's up to the registries to come up with standards methods for enforcement. The concept doesn't work without having those questions answered, such as how are you going to authenticate the e-mail."

The e-mail marketers behind Project Lumos are especially interested in saving their industry from the demise that could await it if spam continues on its current trajectory. More than 40 percent of e-mail traffic is reported as spam, according to the group, and that percentage is expected to grow. As the amount of spam has risen, the tactics used to fight it have gotten more drastic, and now often include throwing the good out with the bad. This is particularly irksome to the marketing industry, which sees e-mail at its best as a low-cost, effective way to communicate with consumers.

"Nothing is more important to the viability of e-mail as a medium and the survival of our industry than eradicating spam," said Hans Peter Brondmo, senior vice president of strategy for Digital Impact and chair of the ESPC technology working group.

The proposal is still only in the conceptual stage, Brondmo said, but it is up for review by the technical community over the next couple of months. He said to fully implement such a system would take about two years and would require at least 20 percent of ISP market to climb on board.

"The first step to make this happen is to create a well-lit, clean place for the legitimate guys to stand up (and) make changes to the infrastructure that allows for accountability."
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BBC Online
E-mail virus exploits Sars fears
April 24, 2003

The computer virus, known as Coronex, takes advantage of public panic about the real life virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

The mass-mailing Windows worm aims to persuade people to open an attachment offering details on the current epidemic.

Subject lines include "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome", "SARS Virus" and "Hongkong.exe".

If opened the worm forwards itself to all contacts in the Outlook address book.

The computer virus is rated as a low-risk to computer users by experts.

Psychological trickery

The malicious code is part of the current trend in virus writing for so-called social engineering, picking up on issues that are of interest to the wider public.

It was only a matter of time before someone tried to exploit the killer bug, say experts.

"The worm has been deliberately coded to exploit the public's genuine concern about Sars," said Graham Cluley Senior Technology Consultant for anti-virus firm Sophos.

"It is just a further demonstration of the ways that virus writers attempt to use psychological trickery to spread their creations," he added.

He also said that it was important that people and anti-virus firms call the virus by its proper name, rather than the Sars virus.

"If they don't it will only add to the confusion and panic," he said.

More details about the Coronex worm are available from anti-virus firms and the advice is the same as ever.

"Keep anti-virus software up to date and patch against operating system vulnerabilities," said Mr Cluley.

In the past virus writers have used pictures of celebrities in the news, interest in the Gulf conflict and major sporting events such as the World Cup as ways of enticing people to open up dangerous attachments.
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Federal Computer Week
Students help develop Rad Tool
BY Dibya Sarkar
April 23, 2003

With the help of four University of Virginia undergraduate students, Falls Church, Va.-based Defense Group Inc. has developed a software tool enabling first responders to make better decisions when faced with a "dirty bomb" or accidental radiation release.

"The tool now allows a user in the field to more rapidly identify the scope of a scenario that might involve radiologicals," said Donald Ponikvar, DGI's senior vice president. "[It will] hopefully identify what's causing the radioactivity to be present, and then rapidly assess the threat and then quickly generate some guidelines that are appropriate for that scenario."

The "Rad Tool" will enhance the company's Chemical Biological Response Aide (CoBRA) software package that is being used by FBI-accredited state and local bomb squads, nearly 2,000 first responder agencies across the country, and several federal civilian and military agencies, Ponikvar said. CoBRA provides first responders with extensive information about what to do in case of chemical and biological attacks.

The students' involvement comes through the Capstone program at the university's Department of Systems and Information Engineering. Capstone essentially is a senior research thesis project in which students must design a "real-world design project," sponsored by government agencies and industry, said Ponikvar, who added that he is a former classmate of the department's chairman, Donald Brown.

Starting in August 2002, the students, with help from a faculty adviser, worked on formal design and requirements analysis, risk management, graphical user interface design and adapting algorithms.

DGI provided the students with "technical guts," he said, including a methodology developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that predicts how radioactive dust and gases may drift based on known meteorological conditions and terrain. It also can also calculate people's exposure to radioactivity.

"If they get it on the outside of their body, it's different than if they breathe it in," he said, a function that is quite advanced from what's is presently available.

Ponikvar said the Rad Tool will be unveiled April 25 at a university conference. It also will be integrated into CoBRA and tested this year during a federally sponsored exercise simulating a chemical, biological and radiological attack.

Using CoBRA, in use since fall 2001, first responders can tap into guidelines published by federal and other agencies for responding to large-scale incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. Such information, he said, has been "distilled" into a standardized set of standard operating procedures and interactive checklists. Other tools enable users to get information about the level of threat, the kind of chemicals involved, potential hazards to the surrounding community. Ponikvar said that all actions are automatically logged and can be reported through a wireless Internet connection.

"It not only allows you to plan for the event and guide your actions on scene but it allows you afterwards to reconstruct the event and do analysis then subsequent to see whether your procedures were as good as they could be," said Ponikvar.

Besides the radiological software tool, other enhancements to CoBRA include improved electronic reporting tools and searchable chemical database, a DuPont Co.-produced database of chemical protective suits under its different brand names, and a school safety planning resources provided through license with Jane's Information Group.

"The fact that the same software meets the needs of all those different user communities, it gives them sort of a common language to speak when they do the joint exercises," said Ponikvar.
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Wired News
Organizer: 'Hackathon' Will Go On
02:00 AM Apr. 24, 2003 PT

A Canadian programmer says he will go ahead with plans to hold a "hackathon" for participants in an open-source project, despite a decision by the U.S. military's civilian research arm to yank funding for the event.

Theo de Raadt, project leader for OpenBSD, an effort to develop a Unix operating system with a security emphasis, said he intends to seek donations or pay himself, to rent space for the gathering, in which coders detect and create fixes for security holes.

"The hackathon will go on," de Raadt said. "There's no way I'll be taking 60 people's personal flights and wasting them."

The event, expected to draw close to 60 programmers from several countries, was scheduled to begin May 8 in Calgary, Alberta, where de Raadt lives.

But plans for the gathering were put on hold last week after de Raadt's research colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania received a notice from the agency funding the project to stop work.

"No reason was given to Penn for this action," said Phyllis Holtzman, a university spokeswoman. After receiving the notice, Holtzman said, the university researchers in charge of the project told colleagues to stop working on it.

The university had been carrying out research on OpenBSD as part of a $2.1 million grant it received in 2001 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a brand of the Department of Defense. De Raadt had been hired by the university as a contractor on the project.

According to Holtzman, the university first received notice from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the organization sponsoring the grant through DARPA, broadly stating that work on the project should stop.

On Monday, Holtzman said, researchers received another notice from DARPA itself, saying that the stop work notification would only apply to the hackathon, which it referred to as a "security fest." The chief University of Pennsylvania researchers involved in the project could not be reached for comment regarding the notices.

De Raadt, an organizer of the hackathon, suspects there was a political motive behind the abrupt suspension of funding. Earlier this month, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, De Raadt said he was "uncomfortable" with having the Department of Defense fund his work in the OpenBSD project.

"I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built," de Raadt told the newspaper. A few days after doing the interview, de Raadt said he spoke with Jonathan Smith, lead researcher on the project at the University of Pennsylvania, who he said expressed concern about the statements made in the newspaper.

A DARPA spokeswoman did not respond to questions regarding a possible political motive behind the cancellation of funding.

In previous statements, including one published in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania newspaper, a DARPA spokeswoman said the funding cancellation was "due to world events and the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation-states," and was not a response to the thoughts of an individual.

De Raadt said he believes his statements did play a role in the decision to stop funding.

"So many people are not answering questions. The best we know is this fits into a pattern of behavior," he said, adding that the agency has not objected to providing funding for previous hackathons.

Since mid-2001, de Raadt said, the DARPA grant has paid for three prior hackathons, at a cost of about $20,000 each.
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USA Today
Database pioneer Edgar Codd dead at 79

AVENTURA, Fla. (AP) Edgar Frank Codd, a mathematician and computer scientist whose theories led to the creation of organized computer databases, has died. He was 79.

He died at his South Florida home Friday of heart failure, said his wife, Sharon B. Codd.

Before Codd's work found its way into commercial products, electronic databases were "completely ad hoc and higgledy-piggledy," said Chris Date, a former business partner of Codd's, who was known as Ted.

Codd's ideas, based on mathematical set theory, was to store data in cross-referenced tables. Relational databases were created with that principle and are now used in systems ranging from hospitals' patient records to airline flights and schedules.

While working as a researcher at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory in the 1960s and 70s, Codd wrote papers outlining his ideas.

But the company didn't decide to create a product based on Codd's ideas until 1978. IBM was beaten to the market by Lawrence Ellison, who used Codd's ideas as the basis of a product that was the foundation of Oracle.

"The sad thing is that Ted never became rich out of his idea," Date said.

Codd was born in 1923 in Dorset, England. He pursued his undergraduate studies at Oxford University. In 1948 he moved to New York and obtained a job with IBM.

He and his first wife, Elizabeth, were divorced in 1978. In 1990, Codd married Sharon Weinberg, a mathematician and IBM colleague.

Codd is survived by his wife, a daughter, three sons and six grandchildren.
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Federal Computer Week
Students help develop Rad Tool
BY Dibya Sarkar
April 23, 2003

Starting in August 2002, the students, with help from a faculty adviser, worked on formal design and requirements analysis, risk management, graphical user interface design and adapting algorithms.

"If they get it on the outside of their body, it's different than if they breathe it in," he said, a function that is quite advanced from what's is presently available.

"The fact that the same software meets the needs of all those different user communities, it gives them sort of a common language to speak when they do the joint exercises," said Ponikvar.
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Federal Computer Week
CIA, FBI wrangle over threat center
BY Matthew French
April 23, 2003

A little more than a week before the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) is to commence operations, questions remain over how the organization will be run.

The center is intended to be a joint effort between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that will serve as a data repository and analysis center for pursuing leads in the war on terror. However, the intelligence agencies do not yet see eye-to-eye on how the TTIC -- which will launch May 1 -- should be run.

In March, the CIA announced that its deputy executive director, John Brennan, would lead the center from the CIA's side. The FBI has yet to name Brennan's Bureau counterpart, a fact that does not sit well with executives at the CIA and some lawmakers.

"We don't agree with the FBI's decision to do this and reject the notion that this should be a CIA-run organization," said Bobby Brady, the CIA's deputy chief information officer. "We don't believe it should just be the CIA because the CIA is just too vulnerable, and there would not be enough involvement from the FBI and other agencies."

At a February meeting of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) questioned whether all the agencies had clearly delineated functions.

"I'd like to see an executive order or a decision by the agencies involved placing the responsibility exactly where you say it is," Levin told the panel of FBI, CIA and Homeland Security Department officials. "We cannot blur it. We cannot duplicate it." Without clear responsibilities, agencies will be able to "duck accountability," he said.

Brady said he and CIA chief information officer Alan Wade plan to meet this week with W. Wilson Lowery, the FBI's executive assistant director for administration, to pressure the FBI to name its leader for TTIC.

"The FBI doesn't have to provide someone who is an [information technology] expert or anything like that," Brady said, speaking at an event hosted by the government market research firm Input. "All we need is someone who understands how the FBI runs and can help out in getting this organization off the ground."

Brady said the TTIC initially will consist of about 50 people, whose task it will be to coordinate efforts among the CIA and the FBI, as well as several other federal agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the departments of State and Homeland Security.

By this time next year, the number of people associated with TTIC should grow substantially, and the organization should have its own facility.
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Federal Computer Week
DOD presses for personnel flexibilities
BY Colleen O'Hara
April 23, 2003

Defense Department officials are pushing ahead with their proposal to overhaul the department's civilian personnel system.

In a legislative package sent to Capitol Hill April 11, DOD proposed to transform how its civilian employees are hired, paid and managed. The existing system was "organized for a world that no longer exists," said David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness.

DOD plans to use the Homeland Security Department (DHS) as a template in creating a new National Security Personnel System, he said. DHS was granted broad personnel flexibilities but has only just begun to develop its departmentwide human resources system.

DOD, however, is off to a good start, Chu said. It wants to expand across the department some programs it has tested, such as pay banding.

The department's plan is to link pay to performance. DOD officials want to ensure that top performers receive the bulk of the bonuses and that employees who don't perform do not receive an annual increase.

It also wants to turn over to its civilian workforce jobs that are being performed by about 300,000 military personnel. Managers cannot get the flexibility they need from the existing personnel system, Chu said April 22 at an event hosted by the IBM Corp. Endowment for the Business of Government. It's unclear how many of these jobs might be outsourced to a contractor.

Ultimately, DOD's goal is to have a single personnel system. Ginger Groeber, deputy undersecretary for civilian personnel policy at DOD, said that eventually the existing Defense Civilian Personnel Data System and the Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, which is under development, "will meet as a single system."

Other highlights of the DOD proposal include:

* Establish minimum qualification requirements and standards for acquisition, technology and logistics positions, and designate career paths for them.

* Establish an Acquisition Corps.

* Establish universal pay banding for five career groups.

* Bargain with employee unions at the national level instead of the local level.

* Offer voluntary separation incentive pay and early retirement.

* Hire Americans older than 55 who would maintain their retirement benefits.

* Hire experts for up to five years.

* Offer overseas pay and benefits for certain civilian employees working outside the country.

* Hire someone on the spot for hard-to-fill positions.
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Government Computer News
FCC adds wireless services, voice mail to Schools and Libraries Program
By Jim Sweeney
April 24, 2003

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday added wireless services and voice mail to the list of services that can be funded through its Universal Service Fund Schools and Libraries Program.

The commission also approved simplified application and billing processes for the program.

The Schools and Libraries Program, also known as the E-Rate Program, subsidizes discounted access to telecommunications services, Internet access and related equipment. The funds come from fees paid by telecommunications carriers.
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