Management Toolkit

Weighing Bush's mixed technology legacy

Tags:
Principles,
Legacy,
Association,
Intellectual Property

Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 20 Jan 2009 13:37 GMT

...an internet climate optimal for internet companies by supporting policies and legislation such as the Global Online Freedom Act, Black said.

"Increasingly, we've seen country after country use the power of the government to block sites and to make companies liable for doing those things," Black said. "The internet was created by the US, and for the US not to have been a forceful advocate of US principles of openness was squandering an opportunity."

The administration's silence on the issue may have been influenced by its defence of warrantless wiretapping, which may have caused it to be reticent on this topic.

"We didn't do any work on [privacy policy] in the past eight years, and the work we did do nobody wants to keep, like the warrantless surveillance programme," said James Lewis, a director and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies. "9/11 knocked the privacy balance askew. There were things we needed to do [to ensure national security], but we never tackled them in a way that doesn't weaken privacy."

'Greatest threat to privacy'
While the Bush team was collecting information on its own, it did little to stop the private sector from its own questionable data collection, said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, a liberal group that advocates more federal regulation.

The Federal Trade Commission essentially ignored "the greatest threat to privacy we've ever experienced", Chester said.

The ramifications of commercial data collection is evident in the financial meltdown of the past year, Chester said, given that many people fell prey to online targeting of questionable financial services.

On the other hand, the Justice Department did mount an aggressive challenge to Google's planned advertising deal with Yahoo, even going so far as to hire a well-known litigator for the job. Google walked away from the deal in November, citing antitrust concerns.

Homeland security was supposed to mastermind the government's cybersecurity efforts, combining what had previously been the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Defense Department's National Communications System, the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, an Energy Department analysis centre and the Federal Computer Incident Response Center. But six years later, the agency proved to be anything but efficient at that task, prompting calls to move the responsibility to the White House or the National Security Agency.

Homeland Security managed to pour $400m (£300m) into cybersecurity without coming up with a coherent 'cybercrisis' plan. And in 2004, the Homeland Security Department was given a discretionary reserve fund of $5.6bn for Project BioShield, part of the president's war on terror.

"You had this idea you could apply the tech-heavy solutions we used on the Department of Defense side to fix what were seen on problems on the homeland-security side," said Lewis, who chaired CSIS's Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. "The tendency in the US is to spend a lot to reduce risk. We've been doing that since the 1950s, so this might have been the reaction [to 9/11] no matter who was in office."

Encryption protection
The tech industry can be grateful for one important Bush administration decision: it never resumed the legal assault on encryption software, including PGP and web browsers, which the Clinton administration had escalated in the 1990s. Even after the 9/11 attacks, when some Republican senators and thinktanks were calling for domestic restrictions on encryption without backdoors for government surveillance, the White House never followed suit.

The White House points out that president Bush signed into law the largest federal R&D budget in history, and funded programmes such as the $1.9bn Networking and Information Technology Research and Development initiative.

Kei Koizumi, director of the R&D budget and policy programme for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted that the Bush administration's support for R&D was strong in the first term but cut back substantially in the second term because of overall budget deficits. Large investments in war and a stated desire to cut domestic federal spending drained funds that could have gone to support the American Competitiveness Initiative, which was created to strengthen maths, science and foreign-language education in the US.

"When you talk about a Bush legacy for science funding you have to talk about legacy for the federal budget," Koizumi said, "and by most accounts that's not great because of debt".

Bush's vision for Nasa to carry out human exploration of the moon and Mars has also created a quandary for the agency, which lacks the funding for all its goals.

"The unwritten legacy is Nasa will have to squeeze, juggle and cut its portfolio to keep doing non-human exploration, climate research and work on the space shuttle," Koizumi said.