SAN FRANCISCO — The demonstrations in Egypt have left Google in a bind, trying to maintain a careful diplomatic distance from one of its own young employees who has become a hero to protesting crowds in Cairo – in an uprising that the company’s own technology had a small role in advancing.

Google has taken political stances in the past, most notably last year, when it opposed China’s censorship laws. Its power-to-the-people philosophy is influenced by co-founder Sergey Brin, who developed an enmity for oppression because of his Jewish family’s suffering under Communism in the Soviet Union, including efforts to block his father’s career. Google’s famous “don’t be evil” catchphrase has long been a guiding principle for the company, as it has advocated for openness on the Internet, even as the motto has become a punch line in recent years for privacy activists who object to the company’s data-collection methods.

Google’s relationship with Egypt has been relatively calm. Based on the company’s own breakdown of how frequently it is asked to remove content by authorities around the world, the government of President Hosni Mubarak has rarely objected to its search engine.

Egypt’s release this week of Wael Ghonim, the 30-year-old marketing manager for Google who has claimed credit for the Facebook page that helped start the uprising, highlights the predicament for high-profile companies whose workers’ political activism can become a liability.

Ghonim is an Egyptian who oversees Google’s marketing in the Middle East and Africa from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. He went missing Jan. 27, two days after protests calling for Mubarak’s ouster began.

One of the main tools for organizing the rallies was a Facebook page in honor of Khaled Said, a 28-year-old businessman who died in June at the hands of undercover police, a hated institution for many Egyptians.

Ghonim said he was snatched off the street and spent much of his detention blindfolded. Upon his release, he confirmed reports that he was the administrator of the Facebook page, saying he didn’t want anyone to know about it earlier because “we are all heroes on the street.”

On Tuesday, Ghonim was greeted with thunderous applause when he joined a massive crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and whipped up admirers with a chant of “Mubarak, leave, leave.” When he finished, the crowd erupted.

While the demonstrations seeking an end to Mubarak’s three decades of authoritarian rule would seem to be in line with Google’s philosophy, the company has been careful to distinguish between its employee’s off-duty political activities and its own official stance.

Google has said only that it is a “huge relief that Wael Ghonim has been released. We send our best wishes to him and his family.” In an interview with Egypt’s independent Dream TV, Ghonim said he told his managers that he had an urgent personal matter to attend to and took vacation days to travel to Egypt.

Google stepped in after Egypt cut off Internet access during the unrest. It devised a way for people to leave voice messages, then have their thoughts posted through the Twitter messaging service. The service, Speak2Tweet, is credited with helping Egyptians get around the blackout.

Politically outspoken companies such as Google must consider the safety of their own workers who might be targeted with violence if their employers are seen as taking sides. And they must navigate fast-changing government relationships while trying to keep business humming in lucrative new markets.

Experts say the stakes in such situations are high because prominent companies attract outsize attention. And the more well-articulated a company’s political beliefs, such as Google’s, the harder it becomes to disentangle the activism of employees from the company’s own actions.

What workers do on their own time typically won’t have an effect on their employers – unless those actions are political or criminal or the people involved are top managers, says Jack James, professor of management and corporate governance at the Lubin School of Management at Pace University.

He says Google is wise to stay quiet even as Ghonim’s star rises with protesters since taking a position “in a time of turmoil against a regime with 30 years of building vested interests is, in my opinion, an unwise risk.”

In an indirect way, Ghonim may help Google’s reputation. His actions have become part of the Google brand, and Google will get credit for them whether it wants to or not, says Michael Useem, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ghonim’s heroic status could “embolden voices within the company to say, `One of our missions in life is not just to make money for our very successful stockholders, but also make the world better for free expression,’” he says.

“As Google is in the business of seeing information as a powerful and liberating force, this is a case statement that indeed there is just enormous power in the kind of new medium Google has helped create,” he said. “This is symbolic, a kind of turning point of our recognition of the power of such media.”

There’s a circular element to Ghonim’s case as well.

Ghonim’s relationship with Google is what drove press coverage of his disappearance. Now that he has revealed his involvement in the protests, his activism may remain tied to Google’s brand in people’s minds.

—

AP Technology Writer Jessica Mintz contributed to this story from Seattle.

If you followed the almost 12-month-long battle Oracle (ORCL) waged to acquire Sun in 2009, you probably remember a lot of hot air from the European Union (EU) about the MySQL enterprise software. You might forget the fact that Oracle said all along that the acquisition was really all about Java enterprise software and that the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) briefly held up the acquisition in order to better understand Java licensing terms and conditions.

What the DoJ was asking about in June 2009 finally played out in the information-technology (IT) marketplace on Dec. 9, 2010, when one of the purest of open source purists – the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) – pulled out of the pseudo-open standards and code-sharing efforts that have surrounded Java over its 20-plus-year history. The JAVA community coordinating effort is currently called the Java Community Process (JCP). The ASF and JCP have been loosely linked since around 2000, and around 2002 the ASF convinced the JCP and Sun to become more open, in that Sun would give up some of its intellectual property (IP) rights to the community, something the ASF always interpreted to mean Java was becoming open source as defined by the Open Source Initiative.

But Sun never gave up all of its IP rights and Oracle never intended to become more open after it acquired Sun (and probably always intended to be less open given its opinion that Java was the jewel in the Sun acquisition). In particular Sun and now Oracle maintained “field of use” restrictions on its Java framework that said – for example – that a programmer of JCP-framework-derivative software is “prevented from freely using that software and that hardware in any application where the computer was placed in an enclosed cabinet, like an information kiosk at a shopping mall, or an X-ray machine at an airport.”

On Dec. 8, the JCP essentially voted to explicitly accept this previously implicit type of license condition in the next version of the Java framework.

Although the ASF is one of the purest of the open source purists, it is not just a bunch of programming guys hanging around the Elks lodge that is the open source community. The ASF is best known as the sponsor of what is probably the most successful open source software project ever, the Apache HTTP (web) Server. Apache in turn is sponsored heavily by Facebook, Google (GOOG), HP (HPQ), Intuit (INTU) and other IT investment household names. IBM (IBM) made significant in-kind donations from the beginning, although it is not listed as an official sponsor. And Microsoft (MSFT) also sponsors the ASF primarily to help it meet its EU Competition Commission obligations vis a vis Windows interoperability. (By the way, many of the same companies make up the executive committees of the JCP, minus Microsoft plus Red Hat (RHT).)

What does that mean for IT investors? Not a lot. The 10-year ASF/JCP relationship was always just a licensing terms and conditions/IP discussion. The relationship among all the players that you would invest in stays the same and might even be considered stronger in that Oracle and IBM had agreed in October to work on a “limited field of use” Java framework project that would compete with the ASF’s unlimited use Java framework project. Sun always made it clear that it owned Java. When very late in its history Sun sort of called Java and its other IP “open source,” it was a marketing ploy. In fact, most companies that tout open source do so as a marketing ploy, but Sun even went so far as to change its stock symbol to JAVA.

As for the ASF, it sponsors dozens to hundreds (counting projects in incubation) of other open source projects. Some programmers may continue the ASF Java Framework work just for the sport of it. Or Google, which is having its own IP battle with Oracle, might encourage such an effort. But the ASF is likely to move on and use its resources where they are appreciated.

Disclosure: No financial interest in companies mentioned.

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By Marjorie Censer
Capital Business Staff Writer
Sunday, December 5, 2010; 8:29 PM

The General Services Administration‘s decision last week to move its e-mail program to a Web-based system modeled on Google’s popular Gmail program is part of a major government drive to increase federal use of cloud computing.

The GSA is the first federal agency to make the Internet switch, and its decision follows the Office of Management and Budget‘s declaration last month that the government is now operating under a “cloud-first” policy, meaning agencies must give priority to Web-based applications and services.

Government information-technology contractors, many of them based in the Washington area, have been anticipating the shift for months, trying to position themselves for future work.

The Obama administration has said that cloud computing will allow more people to share a common infrastructure, cutting technology and support costs. But some technologists have warned that Web-based software may not be as secure as systems built for a dedicated purpose. And the programs often depend on stable network connections.

The push for Web-based computing is part of a broader government effort to consolidate its 2,100 data centers by at least 40 percent by 2015.

Last week, GSA announced its decision to adopt Google’s e-mail system as part of its decision to award a $6.7 million, five-year task order to Unisys, a Pennsylvania-based contractor that has an extensive local presence. Unisys is partnering with Google, Tempus Nova and Acumen Solutions to deploy and manage the system.

Casey Coleman, GSA’s chief information officer, said the urgency to shift to cloud-based e-mail was because its in-house program depended on servers that were six years old, making it hard to find replacement parts.

“We have experienced some situations where it has come close to an outage that we could not afford to have,” she said.

Under the contract, GSA will migrate 17,000 e-mail accounts to the cloud. The new system is projected to cost about half as much as the existing one to manage, Coleman said. In addition, the new system will be easier to upgrade.

Michael Bradshaw, director of Google Federal, said GSA users will see some similarities between their federal e-mail and Google’s consumer Gmail, which should shorten the learning curve when the new software is introduced.

Federal officials said they hope that GSA’s shift will encourage more federal organizations to embrace cloud computing for e-mail and other applications. Cloud-focused contractors, whose numbers continue to grow, are also hoping that the move results in more business.

Unisys, for instance, has had a federal cloud strategy in place for several years, said Venkatapathi “PV” Puvvada, the company’s vice president and managing partner for civilian agencies.

“This positions us for other cloud-based opportunities,” he said.

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By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 6, 2010; 8:55 PM

LONDON – Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks Web site, was in negotiations with British authorities late Monday to come out of hiding for what is set to be a high-profile extradition hearing to face criminal allegations in Sweden.

Assange – whose Web site’s release of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables is generating outrage and embarrassment in official circles – was reportedly close to agreeing to appear in a British courtroom as early as Tuesday. Scotland Yard declined to comment on the negotiations.

On Monday, Scotland Yard received a fresh warrant for Assange’s arrest from Swedish authorities. He is being sought for questioning related to allegations of sexual assault on two women.

Assange and his supporters have denied the accusations, calling them part of an elaborate plot to silence WikiLeaks. Since publication of the latest round of documents began last week, the pressure has mounted on Assange, who was being sought internationally on an Interpol warrant, and on WikiLeaks itself, which is in a global battle to keep its financial and distribution system intact.

U.S. officials expressed outrage Monday after WikiLeaks released a State Department cable that listed sites worldwide whose “loss” could “critically impact” the health, communications, economy or security of the United States. In addition to listing dams, bridges and mines, the cable identified specific factories that are key producers of vaccines and weapons parts.

The release of the list “is really irresponsible. It is tantamount to giving a group like al-Qaeda a targeting list,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.

Assange, a 39-year-old Australian national, has been in hiding for weeks and is thought to be in southern Britain, not far from London. In a video statement to the BBC, Assange’s attorney, Mark Stephens, said Scotland Yard notified him late Monday about the extradition request and asked for a meeting to interview his client. “We are in the process of making arrangements to meet with the police by consent,” Stephens said.

Stephens declined to say when that meeting could take place. But according to the Guardian newspaper, which has partnered with WikiLeaks in reviewing and publishing select cables, Assange may be preparing to appear in a British courtroom as early as Tuesday to try to negotiate bail, which could run from $160,000 to $320,000.

In a warning to Swedish and U.S. authorities – who are investigating whether Assange can be brought up on charges related to the release of classified documents – Stephens said this weekend that his client was prepared to retaliate if charged. He said Assange may release the secret code – with a 256-bit encryption key – of a massive file quietly distributed this summer that contains thousands of un-redacted documents.

The allegations against Assange in Sweden stem a trip he took there in August, during which he had brief relationships with two women, engaging in what he has since described as consensual sex.

Both women, according to Swedish authorities, have conceded that sex with Assange started as consensual but allege that it later became non-consensual. If convicted on the most serious of charges against him, Assange faces up to four years in prison.

Staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan in Washington and special correspondent Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi in London contributed to this report.

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By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 1, 2010; 8:15 PM

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday recommended creating a do-not-track system that would prevent Web sites from collecting unauthorized consumer data, part of a widely anticipated agency report on improving Internet privacy.

The FTC report, aimed at helping policymakers and lawmakers craft privacy rules, also calls for Web sites to disclose more about the information they gather on users, including what has been collected, how it is used and how long it is stored. It also recommended that companies offer users more choices for opting out of data collection schemes.

Regulators and lawmakers are focusing more closely on online privacy after a spate of high-profile data breaches, including Google’s recent admission that it collected personal data from Wi-Fi networks in several countries.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a news conference Wednesday that the current, largely unregulated approach to Internet privacy has fallen short. That approach is favored by advertisers, social-network operators and Web search companies.

The agency’s recommendations – passed unanimously by the five-member commission – seek to balance the concerns of Web advertisers, media companies and retailers that have devised business models around tailored advertisements based on profiles of users. The agency is taking comments on its report until Jan. 31.

“The FTC wants to help ensure that the growing, changing, thriving information marketplace is built on a framework that promotes privacy, transparency, business innovation and consumer choice,” Leibowitz said. “We believe that’s what most Americans want as well.”

The idea for a do-not-track mechanism borrows from the agency’s popular Do Not Call list, a registry of phone numbers that are off-limits to telemarketers, but it would be implemented differently.

Rather than submitting their names on a centrally maintained list, consumers would use a tool on their Web browsers to signal that they do not wish to be tracked or to receive targeted advertising. Leibowitz said Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have all experimented with do-not-track technology on their browsers.

The agency said the do-not-track mechanism could be created through legislation or an effort initiated by the Web industry and enforced by the FTC.

Soon after the report’s release, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said he would introduce privacy legislation that would give the FTC more rulemaking authority to carry out some of its recommendations. As an enforcement agency, the FTC has limited ability to issue new rules.

“We can take a hybrid approach to enforcement where the most critical rights are protected through rulemaking while others may be subject to a complaint and adjudication process,” Kerry said.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

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By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 4, 2010; 9:59 PM

A brazen series of computer intrusions into Google networks in China announced by the search engine company earlier this year were directed by the highest levels of the Chinese government, a “well-placed” Chinese source told U.S. Embassy officials in Beijing in January.

The revelation was contained in a classified State Department cable, part of a cache of cables leaked to the site WikiLeaks and disclosed Saturday.

“A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems,” the cable said. “According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.”

The penetrations resulted in the theft of “significant” intellectual property, Google officials said. The company surprised many by publicly reporting the hacking, and further by saying its investigation found that the attacks originated in China. But the company stopped short of saying the attacks were directed by the government.

U.S. officials have not verified the report. “There is a single-source report that the attack was directed by the Chinese government,” said a senior U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “We have never been able to corroborate that.”

Senior State Department officials raised concerns about the attack on multiple occasions and asked China to investigate, spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

China has said it would look into the allegations.

Many experts said then and now that an attack of this scale and sophistication was most likely directed by the Chinese government. The hacking affected more than 30 other large U.S. corporations in addition to Google.

“This was a big collection program – it was more than Google, so it was probably authorized by the standing committee,” said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and cyberpolicy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It was the equivalent of a presidential finding for covert action. The Chinese have been good at mixing economic and political espionage.”

The contents of the January cable and others, if confirmed, would begin to pull back the curtain on the operation.

According to the January cable, a source told an embassy political officer that “the closely held Chinese government operations against Google had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office,” which reports directly to the Politburo Standing Committee, the nine most powerful members of the government.

The New York Times, which received access to the unredacted cables, reported Saturday that according to a May 18, 2009, cable, Li Changchun, a member of the standing committee, was disturbed to learn that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s international site. When he Googled himself, he found “results critical of him,” according to the cable.

According to the January cable, Li himself ordered up or helped coordinate the attack, the paper reported.

But the Times said that another person cited in the cable, who apparently is the source of the information on Li, acknowledged that Li “personally led a campaign against Google operations in China,” but to his knowledge “had no role in the hacking attack.”

According to the Times, the January cable states that the Google intrusions were coordinated with the oversight of Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang, China‘s top security official. Both Li’s and Zhou’s names were redacted from the memos posted by the two newspapers.

The January cable also cites a source as saying that the operations “against Google ‘were one hundred percent’ political in nature.’ ” Some analysts at the time speculated that the attacks were motivated by a desire to undermine Google in favor of Baidu, the Chinese search engine that is far less powerful but has far more market share in China.

Google spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker declined to comment. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request to comment.

After discovering the Chinese hacking, Google threatened to pull out of China unless officials agreed to let it run an uncensored search engine in the country.

In April, after failing to reach an agreement with authorities on the censorship issue, Google redirected its Google.cn search traffic to servers in Hong Kong. The company still has marketing, advertising and engineering operations in Beijing and Shanghai.

China has been probing and breaking into U.S. computer systems for the better part of a decade. One of the earliest intrusions reported was code-named Titan Rain – attacks by government-sponsored hackers, disclosed in 2005, that over a number of years stole massive amounts of data from military and other systems.

A November 2008 cable posted by WikiLeaks revealed that since late 2002, government organizations have been targeted by hackers in China using e-mail messages intended to fool recipients into downloading malicious software in an operation dubbed Byzantine Candor. That, in turn, is a part of a larger operation called Byzantine Hades, the cable stated.

Targets include the U.S. Army and the Department of Energy, as well as private-sector networks. The goal, the cable said, is to “exfiltrate massive amounts of sensitive data from the networks.”

In November 2008, Shanghai-based hackers linked to the Chinese military penetrated several computer systems of a commercial Internet service provider inside the United States. According to investigators, the hackers used the compromised systems to facilitate incursions into U.S. and foreign systems, including at least one U.S. government agency.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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By Ashley Halsey III
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 22, 2010; 12:57 AM

A cheap and simple fix in the computer software of new airport scanners could silence the uproar from travelers who object to the so-called virtual strip search, according to a scientist who helped develop the program at one of the federal government’s most prestigious institutes.

The researcher, associated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he was rebuffed when he offered the concept to Department of Homeland Security officials four years ago.

The fix would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror, but any potentially dangerous objects would be clearly revealed, said Willard “Bill” Wattenburg, a former nuclear weapons designer at the Livermore lab. The scanners normally produce real-time outlines of the naked human body, and the Transportation Security Administration has been embroiled in controversy since installation of the new scanners began last month.

“Why not just distort the image into something grotesque so that there isn’t anything titillating or exciting about it?” Wattenburg said.

TSA spokesman Nick Kimball said he could not immediately confirm Wattenburg’s 2006 conversation with federal officials. “That was another administration,” Kimball said.

But Obama administration officials made an effort over the weekend to address travelers’ complaints.

People who object to the scanners are given the option of an “enhanced” pat-down by TSA agents that includes the touching of clothed genital areas. For many, that option is even less palatable; opponents have likened the process to sexual assault.

President Obama said in Lisbon on Saturday that he had asked TSA officials whether there’s a less intrusive way to ensure travel safety. “I understand people’s frustrations,” he said, adding that he had told the TSA that “you have to constantly refine and measure whether what we’re doing is the only way to assure the American people‘s safety.”

Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole reiterated in a statement Sunday that the agency would make screening methods “as minimally invasive as possible.”

Last week Pistole defended the body scanners and “enhanced pat-downs” in the face of questions from two Senate committees.

On CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who isn’t subject to the screening, said she understands “how difficult it is and how offensive it must be for the people who are going through it.”

But terrorists are “getting more creative about what they do to hide explosives in, you know, crazy things like underwear,” she said. “So, clearly, there is a need.”

If she did have to be screened, she said, she would opt for a pat-down instead.

Protests in security lines

Some travelers are planning a protest against the new security measures on the day before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest travel days of the year.

An Ashburn man, Brian J. Sodergren, is organizing a national “opt out” day to encourage passengers to say no to using the new body scanners. He wants people to insist on public pat-downs.

“Many people only fly around the holidays and may not be aware of the security changes,” Sodergren told The Washington Post. “I think once people are made aware of what is happening, they may have reservations about the new procedures.”

The pat-downs will also probably slow security lines. According to the TSA, the body scan takes about five seconds, with an extra 10 to 15 seconds for processing. Pat-downs take 1 to 2 minutes.

According to a holiday travel message by Pistole that was released over the weekend, you can opt out of using the full-body scanner, but if you make that choice “you will receive a thorough pat-down by someone of the same gender. If you alarm either the metal detector or the [body scanner] , you will also receive a thorough pat-down by someone of the same gender.”

Pistole says fliers can request that the pat-downs be conducted in a private room and can request that it be “witnessed by a person of your choice.”

A California man became an instant folk hero among the protestors when a recording he made with his camera phone at airport security in San Diego went viral on the Internet. In the video, he threatens a TSA agent with arrest if “you touch my junk” during a pat-down. Last week in Indianapolis, a passenger was arrested after he submitted to a body scan and then punched a TSA agent who didn’t respond to his questioning about enhanced security procedures.

Last week, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) even introduced a bill, the American Traveler Dignity Act, to discourage the new screenings.

“It establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any U.S. law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person,” Paul said on the floor of the House.

For most Americans, however, the new system appears to be an acceptable next step in a series of security upticks to combat terrorism. In a CBS poll, 81 percent of people said they supported using full-body scanners. With 1.6 million Americans planning to fly during Thanksgiving weekend, the TSA said that Internet and talk show conversations have morphed rumors into incorrect “facts.”

A predicted outcry

Wattenburg said that when news reached Livermore in 2006 that the TSA planned to buy the new generation of “backscatter” full-body scanners, the problem seemed clear. “We knew what was going to happen,” he said. “People are immediately going to scream like hell because they’re taking the clothes off everybody.”

Livermore engineers have been deeply involved in enhancing airport security.

Wattenburg said a Livermore colleague, Ed Moses, turned to him and said, “There must be some way to modify the scanner images so that they do not reveal embarrassing things about a person’s body profile.”

Wattenburg, whose long resume includes designing anti-terrorist devices, sketched out a possible solution and delivered it to Moses, whose computer experts refined the concept.

“Materials you were looking for would still be there, but body shapes wouldn’t be apparent,” Moses, the principal assistant director of the Livermore lab said on Saturday. “From the point of view of imaging it’s very straightforward. Someone should do a quick study of it in an operational setting.”

The Livermore laboratory sent off a final application to the U.S. Patent Office on Nov. 23, 2006, and about three weeks later Wattenburg said he called the Department of Homeland Security to share the good news. The patent application is on appeal, according to government records, but the federal government owns the rights to the idea.

“These guys usually come to us when they have a huge problem,” Wattenburg said on Thursday. “If it’s something simple, we tell them and they don’t listen.”

Wattenburg says the program is so simple that “a 6-year-old could do the same thing with Photoshop.”

He said the TSA scanners could be altered so that they “would record an image that you would recognize; it would be totally uninteresting,” but any potentially dangerous objects would be just as evident as they are now.

“There is absolutely nothing that they would lose in terms of the imagery by using this,” Wattenburg said.

Wattenburg said the new TSA machines could be readily reconfigured. “It’s probably a few weeks’ modification of the program,” he said. “It’s like changing the video card in your computer. They just strip out all the coding and put the very simple algorithm in. You could teach a kid how to do it.”

David McCallen, a deputy director for national security at Livermore who developed the idea with Wattenburg, said the concept is simple and should be put through rigorous field testing.

“What it needs is vetting with real testing,” McCallen said Saturday. “This is important stuff so you want to do very thorough testing.”

TSA official Kimball said the agency is working on development of scanner technology that would reduce the image to a “generic icon, a generic stick figure” that would still reveal potentially dangerous items.”

“It isn’t up to the standard we would like, but it’s getting close,” Kimball said.

Wattenburg is semi-retired and works as a consultant to Livermore and several major government contractors. Familiar with the federal bureaucracy, he said he doubts the TSA will take the simplest course of action.

“They are so far down the road in buying all the equipment that they’re too embarrassed to reverse course,” he said. “Their very sophisticated equipment can be made to do this.”

halseya@washpost.com Staff writer Derek Kravitz contributed to this report

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Just before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Hanoi late last month, Vietnamese authorities redoubled their assault on Internet dissent. Two more bloggers were arrested and another due to be released had his sentence extended. Dissident websites came under cyber attack, taking them offline at a time when they most needed to be visible.

Meanwhile in Washington, a battle is raging over funding for organizations and projects supporting “Internet freedom.” Like many Washington fights, this one makes it harder for the U.S. government to help real people with real problems.

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent. Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks. Such attacks disable activists’ websites at politically crucial times. Email accounts are hacked and computer systems are breached, enabling intruders to install spyware and monitor every electronic move. They are desperate for training and technical help to fight increasingly sophisticated, well-funded adversaries.

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Associated PressVietnamese students surf the Internet in Hanoi earlier this year.

The cyber-attacks are one of several new and intractable problems faced by online activists, alongside the older and more clear-cut problem of Internet censorship. A number of repressive governments, including Vietnam, Iran and China, block local Internet users from accessing politically sensitive overseas websites, as well as commercial social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. Anybody can get around this blockage if they know how to use what is called “circumvention technology.” Several U.S-based organizations have developed a range of circumvention tools.

Tools for circumventing censorship are indeed important for activists. But they do nothing to protect against cyber-attacks, or to address a growing number of other ways that governments work to prevent activists from using the Internet to access information, get their message out, and organize. Still, many in Congress and the media have bought into the fantasy that all the U.S. needs to do is put enough money into these circumvention tools, and one in particular—and freedom will flood through the crumbling firewalls.

Since 2007, Congress has inserted a total of $50 million of earmarks into the State Department’s budget to fund organizations dedicated to fighting Internet censorship. One group that has been lobbying hard for the money is the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, run mainly by practitioners of the Falun Gong, a religious sect banned in China. The GIFC has produced a suite of circumvention tools that work well, as long as the user doesn’t mind that GIFC engineers can see their unencrypted communications, or that the security of the tool has not been vetted by independent experts.

The GIFC has found powerful allies in Mark Palmer, who was U.S. ambassador to Hungary when the Iron Curtain fell, and Michael Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official and longtime advocate for human rights and religious freedom. They argue that if the GIFC can get sufficient funding to scale up their tools, authoritarian regimes will be brought to their knees.

The State Department has come under fire in the Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times for failing to support GIFC. And it’s true that of the $20 million already allocated, most went to other groups that are less radioactive as far as U.S.-China relations are concerned. Some of these groups work to help activists with training and security against surveillance, cyber-attacks and other threats, in addition to circumventing censorship.

In August, $1.5 million out of $5 million available for 2009 was finally awarded by the State Department to the GIFC via the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The bidding process for a remaining $30 million is expected to start soon. With the mid-term elections now finished, we can look forward to a new surge in the war over who gets to be hero of the fairy tale “Toppling the Iron Curtain 2.0″

Meanwhile in real life, the human rights watchdog organization Freedom House warns of a “global freedom recession.” They point to a decrease in online freedom even in many countries that engage in little or no website blocking.

Take Russia, for example. In a new book published by the Open Net Initiative, “Access Controlled,” University of Toronto scholars Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert point out that while the Russian government doesn’t block many websites, it stifles online dissent in a range of other ways. Government critics in Russia face cyber-attacks, surveillance, and good old-fashioned intimidation.

In a growing number of countries including China, domestic Internet companies are enlisted in this effort through regulatory pressures. Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.

In real life, conceiving and implementing an effective set of policies, programs, and tools for promoting a free and open global Internet requires hard work by both the public and private sectors. This work has barely begun.

A range of fast-evolving technical problems requires an array of solutions. Activists around the world need technical assistance and training in order to fight cyber-attacks more effectively. We need more coordination between human rights activists, technology companies and policy makers just to understand the problems, and how they can be expected to evolve in the next few years.

What’s more, existing research indicates that many of the problems aren’t technical, but rather political, legal, regulatory and even social. Other obstacles to free expression are probably best addressed by the private sector: Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.

Circumvention technology is one tactic to support access to information and online dissent. It makes sense to keep funding these tools, so long as activists are given choice. On their own, however, they are not the silver bullet that many claim. The State Department and Congress need to approach freedom of speech issues strategically, based on a clear understanding of purpose and effect.

Ms. MacKinnon is a Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Related Articles

• Circumvention is not enough (hyperorg.com)
• Rebecca MacKinnon: No Quick Fixes for Internet Freedom (online.wsj.com)
• Evaluating censorship circumvention tools and “irresponsibility” (ethanzuckerman.com)
• Smith Plans To Reintroduce Internet Freedom Bill (techdailydose.nationaljournal.com)
• Re-framing the Internet Freedom Debate: National Security Will Always Prevail Over Personal Liberty (gauravonomics.com)

Nov 19th 2010, 15:09 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES

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This month jobs portal Seek listed 36 roles requiring Cobol skills, including 25 full-time placements.

Cobol skills remain in demand among banks and govnerment departments, but the traditional mainframe platform is under pressure from modern Unix, Windows and Linux systems.

Local mainframe migrations include financial services firm IOOF, the Western Australia Department of Industry and Resources and the Australian Jockey Club.

According to software vendor Micro Focus, the Cobol skills shortage is affecting the whole industry – including itself – but that won’t change the strategic role of the language.

Micro Focus country manager for Australia and New Zealand Bruce Craig said some companies are even recruiting Cobol developers “out of retirement” and today’s students are used to GUIs, not green screens.

“Cobol remains strategic and is used by all types of mission critical applications like those in banking and telecommunications,” Craig said. “There are more Cobol transactions than Google searches every day and mainframe use is growing as people make more use out of them.”

Craig said mainframe use is growing in terms of the number of transactions being processed, not by server count, as organisations work to get the most out of their existing infrastructure.

“Our development environment is similar to Java and C++ and since it’s cross-platform companies can move Cobol applications to Linux or Windows.”

Micro Focus president for the Asia Pacific and Japan, David Taylor, said IAG New Zealand used the company’s software to migrate an application from a mainframe to HP-UX system and then to Windows.

Taylor said MBF is one case where its local operations are run out of a US mainframe because the local mainframe was not cost-effective enough.

“Cobol can ‘live-on’ with open systems without the mainframe,” Taylor said.

UK grocery chain Tesco is opening operations in Thailand and since it couldn’t justify a mainframe it chose a Linux platform, he said.

“Cobol needs better education programs as universities don’t really understand the language,” Taylor said, adding restrictions on 457 visas for people with just Cobol skills are not helping the shortage.

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• Micro Focus announces CICS for .NET (eon.businesswire.com)
• Veryant introduces isCOBOL for HP OpenVMS Systems (zdnet.com)
• Micro Focus shares continue to struggle (ft.com)