Security Blanket

Earlier this week I wrote about the Government 2.0 conference and how its corporate hype and Web 2.0 enthusiasm ignored the need for legislative participation and systems of authentication that make political participation possible between trusted parties. Last month there was a conference, also in Washington D.C. for the Cyber Leap Year Summit, which was oriented toward much more substantive issues about how questions of provenance and trust could be negotiated. Of course, the conference reflects the Obama administration's continuing interest in developing a comprehensive "cybersecurity" policy, but it much more accurately reflects the concerns of policy makers and the anxieties of the public about infrastructure and privacy than the Gov 2.0 congratulatory get-together, even if the metaphor of "game changing" in these documents does seem somewhat trite.

The hosting agency, Federal Networking and IT research, which has its own .gov domain, deals with questions involving large scale networking, human-computer interaction, high confidence software and systems, and other issues that could make transformative e-government actually attainable and sustainable.