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On October 06, 2008, OASIS issued a public call for participation in a new technical committee chartered to define specifications for use of Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable information sharing across content management repositories from different vendors. The OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC will build upon existing specifications to "define a domain model and bindings that are designed to be layered on top of existing Content Management systems and their existing programmatic interfaces. The TC will not prescribe how specific features should be implemented within those Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. Rather it will seek to define a generic/universal set of capabilities provided by an ECM system and a set of services for working with those capabilities." As of February 17, 2010, the CMIS technical work had received broad support through TC participation, industry analyst opinion, and declarations of interest from major companies. Some of these include Adobe, Adullact, AIIM, Alfresco, Amdocs, Anakeen, ASG Software Solutions, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Citytech, Content Technologies, Day Software, dotCMS, Ektron, EMC, EntropySoft, ESoCE-NET, Exalead, FatWire, Fidelity, Flatirons, fme AG, Genus Technologies, Greenbytes GmbH, Harris, IBM, ISIS Papyrus, KnowledgeTree, Lexmark, Liferay, Magnolia, Mekon, Microsoft, Middle East Technical University, Nuxeo, Open Text, Oracle, Pearson, Quark, RSD, SAP, Saperion, Structured Software Systems (3SL), Sun Microsystems, Tanner AG, TIBCO Software, Vamosa, Vignette, and WeWebU Software. Early commentary from industry analysts and software engineers is positive about the value proposition in standardizing an enterprise content-centric management specification. The OASIS announcement of November 17, 2008 includes endorsements. Principal use cases motivating the CMIS technical work include collaborative content applications, portals leveraging content management repositories, mashups, and searching a content repository.

1. U.S. and European antitrust cases put lawyers and non-technologists in charge of important final product decisions.

The company long resisted releasing pertinent interoperability information in the United States. On the European Continent, this resistance led to huge fines. Meanwhile, Microsoft steered away from exclusive contracts and from pushing into adjacent markets.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper this morning released a report detailing new rules aimed at reforming the way signals intelligence is collected and stored by certain members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). The long-awaited changes follow up on an order announced by President Obama one year ago that laid out the White House’s principles governing the collection of signals intelligence. That order, commonly known as PPD-28, purports to place limits on the use of data collected in bulk and to increase privacy protections related to the data collected, regardless of nationality. Accordingly, most of the changes presented as “new” by Clapper’s office  (ODNI) stem directly from the guidance provided in PPD-28, and so aren’t truly new. And of the biggest changes outlined in the report, there are still large exceptions that appear to allow the government to escape the restrictions with relative ease. Here’s a quick rundown.

Retention policy for non-U.S. persons. The new rules say that the IC must now delete information about “non-U.S. persons” that’s been gathered via signals intelligence after five-years. However, there is a loophole that will let spies hold onto that information indefinitely whenever the Director of National Intelligence determines (after considering the views of the ODNI’s Civil Liberties Protection Officer) that retaining information is in the interest of national security. The new rules don’t say whether the exceptions will be directed at entire groups of people or individual surveillance targets.  Section 215 metadata. Updates to the rules concerning the use of data collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act includes the requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (rather than authorized NSA officials) must determine spies have “reasonable, articulable suspicion” prior to query Section 215 data, outside of emergency circumstances. What qualifies as an emergency for these purposes? We don’t know. Additionally, the IC is now limited to two “hops” in querying the database. This means that spies can only play two degrees of Kevin Bacon, instead of the previously allowed three degrees, with the contacts of anyone targeted under Section 215. The report doesn’t explain what would prevent the NSA (or other agency using the 215 databases) from getting around this limit by redesignating a phone number found in the first or second hop as a new “target,” thereby allowing the agency to continue the contact chain.

National security letters (NSLs). The report also states that the FBI’s gag orders related to NSLs expire three years after the opening of a full-blown investigation or three years after an investigation’s close, whichever is earlier. However, these expiration dates can be easily overridden by by an FBI Special Agent in Charge or a Deputy Assistant FBI Director who finds that the statutory standards for secrecy about the NSL continue to be satisfied (which at least one court has said isn’t a very high bar). This exception also doesn’t address concerns that NSL gag orders lack adequate due process protections, lack basic judicial oversight, and may violate the First Amendment.

Hi, CDF folks- While we had hoped that more implementations might emerge that passed the CDF and WICD test suites [1], such that these specifications would meet the criteria as W3C Recommendations, it does not seem that this will happen in a reasonable timeframe. Despite good partial implementation experience, implementers have not show sufficient interest to justify further investment of W3C resources into this group, even at a background level. In order to clarify the status of the CDF WG specifications, including Compound Document by Reference Framework 1.0 [2], Web Integration Compound Document (WICD) Core 1.0 [3], WICD Mobile 1.0 [4], and WICD Full 1.0 [5], all in Candidate Recommendation phase since July 2007, we have decided to publish them as Working Group Notes instead, and to close the Compound Document Formats Working Group.

The White House is requiring federal agencies to consider using a standard configuration developed by the Justice and Homeland Security departments to share information across the public and private sectors. More than a month ago, the Office of Management and Budget issued guidance to agencies on the website of the National Information Exchange Model, a joint DOJ-DHS program. The OMB document, which is not posted on its website, includes instructions for assessing the framework's merits by May 1. "All agencies shall evaluate the adoption and use of the National Information Exchange Model as the basis . . . of reusable cross-boundary information exchanges," said an enclosed memo from Kshemendra Paul, the federal chief architect. "The Office of Management and Budget is working jointly with the NIEM Program Management Office to provide guidance and the tools necessary to help you meet this requirement."

NIEM launched in 2005 with the goal of linking jurisdictions throughout the country to better respond to crises, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, large-scale crime and other emergencies handled by Justice and Homeland Security. The standards are intended to expedite the secure exchange of accurate information.

If anyone in the United States Senate had any doubts that the proposed Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA) was universally hated by a range of civil society groups, a literal blizzard of faxes should’ve cleared up the issue by now. What’s not getting attention is a CISA “alternative” introduced last week by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va) and Susan Collins (R-Me). Dubbed the “FISMA Reform Act,” the authors make the following claims about the bill:  This legislation would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to operate intrusion detection and prevention capabilities on all federal agencies on the .gov domain. The bipartisan bill would also direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct risk assessments of any network within the government domain. The bill would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to operate defensive countermeasures on these networks once a cyber threat has been detected. The legislation would strengthen and streamline the authority Congress gave to DHS last year to issue binding operational directives to federal agencies, especially to respond to substantial cyber security threats in emergency circumstances.

The bill would require the Office of Management and Budget to report to Congress annually on the extent to which OMB has exercised its existing authority to enforce government wide cyber security standards. On the surface, it actually sounds like a rational response to the disastrous OPM hack. Unfortunately, the Warner-Collins bill has some vague or problematic language and non-existent definitions that make it potentially just as dangerous for data security and privacy as CISA. The bill would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to carry out cyber security activities “in conjunction with other agencies and the private sector” [for] “assessing and fostering the development of information security technologies and capabilities for use across multiple agencies.” While the phrase “information sharing” is not present in this subsection, “security technologies and capabilities” is more than broad — and vague — enough to allow it.

The bill would also allow the secretary to “acquire, intercept, retain, use, and disclose communications and other system traffic that are transiting to or from or stored on agency information systems and deploy countermeasures with regard to the communications and system traffic.”

Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity. I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage. Whistleblowers don’t sign up to be whistleblowers. Almost always, they begin their work as true believers in the system that conscience later compels them to challenge. “It took years of involvement with a mendacious war policy, evidence of which was apparent to me as early as 2003, before I found the courage to follow my conscience,” Matthew Hoh recalled this week.“It is not an easy or light decision for anyone to make, but we need members of our military, development, diplomatic and intelligence community to speak out if we are ever to have a just and sound foreign policy.”

Hoh describes his record this way: “After over 11 continuous years of service with the U.S. military and U.S. government, nearly six of those years overseas, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as positions within the Secretary of the Navy’s Office as a White House Liaison, and as a consultant for the State Department’s Iraq Desk, I resigned from my position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of war in 2009.” Another former Department of State official, the ex-diplomat and retired Army colonel Ann Wright, who resigned in protest of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, is crossing paths with Hoh on Friday as they do the honors at a ribbon-cutting — half a block from the State Department headquarters in Washington — for a billboard with a picture of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Big-lettered words begin by referring to the years he waited before releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. “Don’t do what I did,” Ellsberg says on the billboard.  “Don’t wait until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.

The billboard – sponsored by the ExposeFacts organization, which launched this week — will spread to other prominent locations in Washington and beyond. As an organizer for ExposeFacts, I’m glad to report that outreach to potential whistleblowers is just getting started. (For details, visit ExposeFacts.org.) We’re propelled by the kind of hopeful determination that Hoh expressed the day before the billboard ribbon-cutting when he said: “I trust ExposeFacts and its efforts will encourage others to follow their conscience and do what is right.” The journalist Kevin Gosztola, who has astutely covered a range of whistleblower issues for years, pointed this week to the imperative of opening up news media. “There is an important role for ExposeFacts to play in not only forcing more transparency, but also inspiring more media organizations to engage in adversarial journalism,” he wrote. “Such journalism is called for in the face of wars, environmental destruction, escalating poverty, egregious abuses in the justice system, corporate control of government, and national security state secrecy. Perhaps a truly successful organization could inspire U.S. media organizations to play much more of a watchdog role than a lapdog role when covering powerful institutions in government.”