A Vote For I.T.

With cybersecurity and privacy, there's little difference in the candidates' agendas to promote better ways to safeguard data and networks while assuring privacy of personal data. In practice, however, the last few years have shown how complicated these issues can be.

Under Bush's watch, the Homeland Security Department created the National Cyber Security Division a year ago to provide around-the-clock threat analysis, issue alerts and warnings, improve information sharing, respond to major incidents, and aid in national recovery efforts. However, many federal agencies continue to fail in congressional assessments of cyberse- curity readiness.

Homeland-security efforts also have complicated the privacy debate, meeting with scrutiny from privacy advocates. For example, the Justice and Homeland Security departments two years ago invested more than $12 million in the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, a pilot project for interstate sharing of law-enforcement data. Most of the 16 original states have pulled out of the program, citing privacy concerns, costs, and data-security concerns. Another federal pilot program, the Transportation Security Administration's Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, has been criticized by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee for possible violations of the Privacy Act.

As the security-privacy and offshoring-jobs debates show, business-technology issues aren't easily distilled to a few sentences and don't make for simple sound bites. Of course, the election won't be won or lost on broadband-access taxes or R&D tax credits. The economy, however, will make a difference. And both Kerry and Bush acknowledge technology's role as a driver of the economy. At least one day last month they did.

Illustrations by Hanoch Piven

Continue to the sidebars: "Offshoring"
"Health Care" and "Broadband"

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