Obama Administration Appoints Top CIO

Technologizer ^ | 5:32 pm on Thursday, March 5, 2009 | David Worthington

[Golden Eagle]

The White House press office announced today that Vivek Kundra, the current chief technology officer of Washington DC, will be assuming the position of Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House.

The appointment of a top CIO is another first: the position did not exist in any previous administrations. Kundra will also have final say on government technology purchases , and will have the authority to overrule his peers at subordinate agencies.

[pankot]

What a job! Just think of all the kickbacks,bribes,and hush money in such a position! Wow! That guy will retire rich!

[pankot]

Boy,the ability to speak Swahili will really come in handy when he has to testify to Congress. That ought to dazzle the Senators with bullshit,especially since many of them (Senators) can’t even speak decent English much less Swahili!

[Golden Eagle]

If you're going to pick someone to be in charge of ALL federal government IT systems it should be someone like this, Obama's selection is an outrage:

HONORABLE JOHN G. GRIMES

Department of Defense Chief Information Officer (CIO)

Mr. Grimes was nominated by President Bush on June 17, 2005 and sworn in as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (ASD NII) / Department of Defense Chief Information Officer (CIO) on November 14, 2005. Mr. Grimes has extensive technical and policy experience in telecommunications, information systems and the command and control fields. His public service includes five years on the White House National Security Council Staff as Director for National Security Telecommunications Policy, Director of Defense Command, Control and Communications Programs, and Senior Director White House Situation Support Staff from 1984 to 1990. Mr. Grimes served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Defense-wide Command, Control and Communications and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counterintelligence and Security Countermeasures from 1990 to 1994. As a member of the DoD senior executive service (SES), he held senior technical and staff positions with the National Communications System, Defense Communications Agency(predecessor to DISA), and the U.S. Army Communications Command following his military service in the U.S. Air Force.

Mr. Grimes joined Raytheon Company in 1994 where he served as Vice President of Intelligence and Information Systems, Washington Operations, prior to retiring in November 2005. Mr. Grimes has served on four Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Forces. He was a member of the Industry Executive Subcommittee of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC).

A native of Fredrick, Maryland, Mr. Grimes is a graduate of the University of Arizona and also holds a Master of Science Degree from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; the Federal Executive Institute, Charlottesville, Virginia; and Harvard University’s National and International Security Policy Program. He is the recipient of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence(C3I) Award among other public, military and Federal civil service awards to include two Presidential Rank awards.

[jimfree]

Remember the IRS computer “Rewrite Redesign” of the 80’s ?

10 years and 3 Billion ...and nothing delivered. Vaporware. The Bureaucrats tried and Failed.

And the FAA project - Loral Federal Systems spent 2 billion for shelfware.

[grey_whiskers]

Compared to Bambi, he *is* experienced.

He's done more than just campaign, you see...

Cheers!

[Golden Eagle]

Compared to Bambi, he *is* experienced

You may be right, but they're both such terrible selections I'd call them equally horrible.

[Golden Eagle]

The One Worlders definitely hit the jackpot with this guy, here’s some more from his press conference:

“We need to make sure that all that data thats not private can be made public”, Kundra said. “What we should be thinking about is how do we begin with the assumption that the default be that we put information out into the public domain, and the second question is, what needs to be private and not the other way around”, he said.

[ShadowAce]

[N3WBI3]

I don’t know anything about this guy but if Obama picked him he is probably screw up regardless of what software he pushes. I would think a 34yo is hardly old enough to qualify for such a position. but he does have some serious reputation behind him (from wiki)

“He has been recognized by InfoWorld among the top 25 CTO’s in the country[7] and as the 2008 IT Executive of the Year[8] for his pioneering work to drive transparency, engage citizens and lower the cost of government operations. In 2007 he assembled the largest United States trade delegation ever to visit India, comprised of over one hundred business leaders, which resulted in a $99 million investment for the state.”

—

“We need to make sure that all that data thats not private can be made public” -

Okay, if we are talking public data why should it not be open to the public so long as its not secretive in nature..

“What we should be thinking about is how do we begin with the assumption that the default be that we put information out into the public domain, and the second question is, what needs to be private and not the other way around”

Obviously a guy with little serious security background. *anything* with personal information of *any* American citizen needs to be private by default

—

Now 2 thoughts for you GE:

1) The guy has lived in the US for about 75% of his life (came her legally at the age of 11. I as the grandson of an immigrant who came much later in life and love this nation deeply have to say... Stop with the place of birth crap. It may very well be this guy is anti American but I can go to most metro ares in the US and not throw a stick without hitting a home grown anti-American.

2) The article makes not *one* mention of code only data, this is not (as of yet) an issue which is even tangential to open source unless that is you can find a history of him taking closed source government code and making it opensource (as the CIO of a state he had the opportunity)

[NCjim]

As an American-born white male he does not stand a chance in this administration.

[antiRepublicrat]

Get ready for Obama's plan to force the use of "open source" software throughout the government

Forcing would be bad. Software choice shouldn't be a political decision, whether you're Stallman pushing open source, or GE pushing closed source. Buying software according to quality, security and functional criteria regardless of the development model would be good. Why government standardizes on the worst, slowest browser on the market is beyond me when the open source Firefox is free and much better, and the code can be freely examined for security purposes.

such as the Beowulf clustering software NASA developed and released under an open source license years ago which is now used free of charge by everyone in the world who wants their own supercomputer

From the original Beowulf documentation:

Beowulf also uses commodity software like the Linux operating system, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface (MPI). ... Beowulf is not a special software package, new network topology or the latest kernel hack. Beowulf is a technology of clustering Linux computers to form a parallel, virtual supercomputer. Although there are many software packages such as kernel modifications, PVM and MPI libraries, and configuration tools which make the Beowulf architecture faster, easier to configure, and much more usable, one can build a Beowulf class machine using standard Linux distribution without any additional software. If you have two networked Linux computers which share at least the /home file system via NFS, and trust each other to execute remote shells (rsh), then it could be argued that you have a simple, two node Beowulf machine.

Beowulf was built off the contributions of foreigners, and has since then been much improved by foreigners. Also don't forget that the core of large Beowulf installations, PVM and MPI, were written mostly by universities, which tend to publish and share their research anyway. One of the founders of the reference implementation of MPI, Open MPI, is a German university.

[antiRepublicrat]

directs the policy and strategic planning of federal information technology investments and is responsible for oversight of federal technology spending

That does sound like the level of post that needs to be confirmed. I also heard this guy is in love with Google, and even pimps for them, so we can't expect much of a neutral policy. Obama might have to write up yet another ethics policy waiver for this guy.

BTW, do you have any idea what percentage of Obama's picks required waivers from his supposed ethics policy? I'd love to know that number.

[antiRepublicrat]

Now the Military is another Issue...They have good Sofware....written by Contractors

GE, here's an aspect you might be interested in. FYI, there is no requirement under any open source license to release such software to the public. Even dingbat Stallman doesn't have a problem with custom-written software remaining closed.

[N3WBI3]

I would be really interested in seeing that..

[JerseyHighlander]

This is not about open source. If you work in Federal IT you’d know that.

The biggest problem is the graft and fiefdoms in the procurement procedures. Some agencies are running with 80+ different database and software systems. Projects are started and stopped on a whim, and less than 40% of projects that actually are completed, are completed with the same management team that started the project.

One of the UnitedBusinessMedia publications had an extensive series of articles on the problem written and published in early 2008.

[JerseyHighlander]

two perspectives:

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=715&doc_id=170587&piddl_msgid=175412

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/05-06-2008/0004807499&EDATE=

President Bush had made similar appointments, his three appointments all quit in disgust after very short tenures.

[Golden Eagle]

The guy has lived in the US for about 75% of his life

Wrong, 66% is much more like it, and we're still talking only ~20 years in the US since he's not even 35 yet.

this is not (as of yet) an issue which is even tangential to open source

Get real, like Obama he's a big open source proponent or he would have never gotten this job. It's time you face the facts and either defend this philosophy or begin to admit it's dangers, but claiming it's not central to this appointment is bogus. A search of "Vivek Kundra" and "open source" combined returned 15,000 results.

[Golden Eagle]

As an American-born white male he does not stand a chance in this administration.

Good point, Mr. Grimes would have never even made the list of consideration. But there still has to be many minority candidates out there with better education and experience than Kundra. He knows nothing about Federal IT, but with the wave of Obama's hand is now completely in charge of all of it, supposedly.

[Golden Eagle]

Forcing would be bad...Buying software according to quality, security and functional criteria regardless of the development model would be good.

Exactly, unfortunately many democrats (and a few republicans) have already tried to legislate a requirement to use open source, just like they've done in China, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. Obama and his new wonderboy will soon be doing it through official internal government policy, this kid has not only been selected as the first official CIO of the US government, according to other articles I've seen he's got another title set aside for him over at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) where huge sweeping decisions are often made.

[Golden Eagle]

That does sound like the level of post that needs to be confirmed.

Yes obviously it NEEDS to be confirmed, but there's no evidence yet it's actually going to be required that I've seen.

I also heard this guy is in love with Google, and even pimps for them, so we can't expect much of a neutral policy.

That's one of his supposed claims to fame, he moved a lot of government data up to Google's servers "in the cloud" to save money, as if Google servers are a safe place for government data. Considering how much Google invested in Obama's campaign they probably plan on moving a whole lot more.