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"By now, California is well-acquainted with Meg Whitman, Steve Poizner and Carly Fiorina - Silicon Valley's big-name candidates this election season. But a pair of relatively unknown tech alums, sitting lower on the ballot, are even more an indication of the political maturation of the valley, a place that has traditionally favored pushing policy from the sidelines instead of crafting and enforcing it in Sacramento."

Geek politicians who want to do for CA what they did for the tech industry. Government 2.0 or crash, reboot, crash...

An eBay Inc. effort to broaden communication through the popular Twitter Web-messaging service highlights the hurdles facing corporate users of online social media. The growing Twitter audience also attracted the attention of eBay's lawyers, who last month required Mr. Brewer-Hay to include regulatory disclaimers with certain posts. Some followers think the tougher oversight is squelching Mr. Brewer-Hay's spontaneous, informal style. His experience shows the tension that can arise as more companies tap social media to reach investors, customers and others. Eighty-one Fortune 500 companies sponsor public blogs, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chevron Corp. and General Motors Corp., according to the Society for New Communications Research. Of those blogs, 23 link to corporate Twitter accounts. On Thursday, a Johnson & Johnson executive reported for the first time on the health-care giant's annual meeting via Twitter, which allows users to post "tweets" of as many as 140 characters via text messages and the Web. Such efforts raise thorny questions. Blogs and tweets can run afoul of Securities and Exchange Commission regulations on corporate communications. But sanitizing such posts risks hurting credibility with online audiences. The online auctioneer launched a corporate blog in April 2008. Two months later, blogger Richard Brewer-Hay began "tweeting" -- posting updates on Twitter -- about Silicon Valley technology conferences, eBay's quarterly earnings calls and other topics.

The U.S. government's director for cybersecurity resigned on Friday, criticizing the excessive role of the National Security Agency in countering threats to the country's computer systems. "He has tendered his resignation," Amy Kudwa, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman told Reuters. Former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Rod Beckstrom said in a resignation letter published by the Wall Street Journal it was a "bad strategy" to have the National Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense, play a major role in cybersecurity. Beckstrom headed the National Cybersecurity Center, which was created last March to coordinate all government cybersecurity efforts and answers to the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security said in a statement that it has a strong relationship with the NSA and continues to work closely with all of its partners to protect the country's cyber networks. Beckstrom wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday in his resignation letter that the NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts. "While acknowledging the critical importance of NSA to our intelligence efforts, I believe this is a bad strategy on multiple grounds," he wrote in the letter posted by the Wall Street Journal on its website. National Security Agency officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Beckstrom said in his letter that the cybersecurity group did not receive adequate support to accomplish its role during the previous administration of President George W. Bush, which only provided the center with five weeks of funding in the last year. His resignation will be effective March 13, the letter said. The newspaper said the Obama administration was conducting a 60-day review of the cybersecurity program started by Bush last year to protect government networks.

Consumers save their e-mail and documents on Google's data centers, put their photos on Flickr and store their social lives on Facebook. Now a host of companies including Amazon and Microsoft wants government agencies to similarly house data on their servers as a way to cut costs and boost efficiency. But federal officials say it's one thing to file away e-mailed jokes from friends, and another to store government data on public servers that could be vulnerable to security breaches. The push toward "cloud computing," so named because data and software is housed in remote data centers rather than on-site servers, is the latest consumer technology to migrate to the ranks of government. Companies such as Amazon and Salesforce, which do not typically sell services to the government, want a piece of the business. Google opened a Reston office last year to sell applications such as Google Docs to federal employees. Silicon Valley-based Salesforce, which has focused on selling to corporations, established a team dedicated to government contracting. Microsoft spent $2.3 billion in 2007 to build data centers for cloud computing, and IBM, Sun Microsystems and HP want to provide the government cloud.

Heartland Payment Systems CEO discusses breach, previews speech Not a week had passed after the announcement of what some have described as the largest data breach ever, when the CEO of Heartland Payment Systems, Robert Carr, began calling for better industry cooperation and new efforts directed at preventing future breaches. Recently, Carr announced that trials will begin late this summer on an end end-to-end encryption system Heartland is developing with technology partners. It is expected to be the first system of its kind in the U.S. The company is also pushing for an end-to-end encryption standard. At the upcoming Practical Privacy Series in Silicon Valley, Carr will discuss the Heartland breach and the role industry, including privacy professionals, must play to prevent future breaches. Here's a preview: IAPP: Many companies have experienced breaches. What made yours different? Ours was different because we are a processor and had passed six years of PCI audits with no problems found. Yet, within days of the most recent audit, the damage had begun. IAPP: Did you have a chief privacy office or a privacy professional on staff before your breach? Do you now? Ironically, when we learned of the Hannaford's breach, we hired a Chief Security Officer who started just three weeks before the breach began. IAPP: In the era of mandatory breach reporting, what is the trajectory of consumer reaction? As a processor it is difficult to really know this. Our customers are merchants who accept card payments. IAPP: Do you think consumers will become numb to breach notices? I believe that many are numb to so many intrusion notices. IAPP: Are breach notices good public policy? Do the notices provide an incentive for companies to change or improve practices? I don't think so. Nobody wants to get breached and the damage caused by a breach is sufficient reason for most of us to do everything we can to prevent them. IAPP: What has Heartland done differentl

The next wave of hacking into computers and stealing data will not be requests or code coming from remote points across the Web, security experts are warning. Instead, the most sophisticated Trojan Horses appearing on Wall Street financial systems may be threaded into the silicon of integrated circuits by design, their malicious instructions baked right into the tiny physical aspects and intricate mapping of the chip itself, according to scientists and academics working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the White House and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center in Dulles, Va. Detecting such malware after a chip is fabricated will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, these experts say, because the microchips that run servers have millions to billions of transistors in them. Adding a few hundred or even just tens of transistors can compromise an integrated circuit can serve attackers' purposes and escape notice. "You can never really test every single combination on the chip. Testing a billion transistors would take a very long time. It would be very difficult to detect hardware Trojans without having some idea of what you're looking for to begin with," said Scott C. Smith, associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas, co-author of a 2007 paper which described a "Hardware Threat Modeling Concept for Trustable Integrated Circuits." Tweaking chips themselves will make them prone to manipulate data, shut down a critical function, or turn a system into a bugged phone that steals and relays vital information, the experts say.