August 2009

Melissa Hathaway, the White House's senior aide on cybersecurity, has decided to resign following delays in the appointment of a coordinator to spearhead the government's efforts to protect the nation's computer networks. Hathaway, who also served as a cybersecurity aide during the Bush administration, had been a contender for the position of cybersecurity coordinator. But in an interview Monday, she said she had withdrawn her application. "I wasn't willing to continue to wait any longer, because I'm not empowered right now to continue to drive the change," she said. "I've concluded that I can do more now from a different role," most likely in the private sector. Hathaway noted that it has been two months since President Obama made a highly acclaimed speech on the importance of cybersecurity and pledged to "personally" select a cybersecurity coordinator. A colleague close to Hathaway said she had become dismayed by the delay in the appointment. The colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that Hathaway had "the sense that this was very political, that she has been too closely tied to the Bush administration."

The doors of the communications revolution were thrown open in Iraq after the American-led invasion in 2003: In rushed a wave of music videos featuring scantily clad Turkish singers, Web sites recruiting suicide bombers, racy Egyptian soap operas, pornography, romance novels, and American and Israeli news and entertainment sites that had long been blocked under Saddam Hussein's rule. Now those doors may be shut again, at least partially, as the Iraqi government moves to ban sites deemed harmful to the public, to require Internet cafes to register with the authorities and to press publishers to censor books. The government, which has been proceeding quietly on the new censorship laws, said prohibitions were necessary because material currently available in the country had had the effect of encouraging sectarian violence in the fragile democracy and of warping the minds of the young.

Veronis Suhler Stevenson will release predictions in the Communications Industry Forecast today. Veronis Suhler invests in information, education and media, and those fields are what it measured in the forecast, the 23rd annual version. The company looks at the total spending on communications, including advertising, spending from consumers or businesses and items like retransmission fees for television. It includes traditional and new media along with information providers to businesses (like Lexis-Nexis), trade shows and education and training information, making its analysis broader than most other media reports. Despite all the bad news about the media industry, it is expected to be the third-fastest-growing economic sector over the next five years, after mining and construction. Almost none of that growth is forecast to come from shrinking traditional media, however. Instead, it will be drawn from areas like word-of-mouth marketing and public relations (with a 9.2 percent compound annual growth rate from 2008 through 2013), branded entertainment (9.3 percent) and the Internet and mobile devices (10.2 percent).

Dozens of large and small companies are turning to wireless technology to achieve what the Obama Administration is seeking through legislation: a health-care system that keeps people healthier for less. But claims about cost savings from new technology often don't pan out. There are "precious few" studies that back up such promises involving remote monitoring, says Mark Holland, managing director of System Research Services, an advisory firm focusing on health-care technology. And if reimbursements from Medicare or private insurers don't cover the cost of high-tech approaches, doctors and hospitals won't want to deploy them.