Former US GCIO calls for better data management

Sunday, 12 February 2012

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Central Government, Government Data Management

By Diana Jumaat | 12 June 2009

The Obama administration’s push to make government data more easily accessible is driving the need for standardised data classification and information management, a former Government Chief Information Officer has said.

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The caution, from Karen Evans, former de facto Chief Information Officer of the United States Federal Government, comes in the wake of a recent incident where the US’s Government Printing Office (GPO) accidentally published a document containing sensitive but unclassified information on dozens of US civilian nuclear sites on its web site.

The reason it had been published was probably because the GPO had a different process for handling sensitive but unclassified (SBU) documents than the agency that handed it to them, said Evans.

To reverse some of the secrecy and over-classification of data by the previous administration, President Barack Obama has been pushing agencies to make data more accessible to the public. His administration has also been urging agencies to use web 2.0 tools, blogs and social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter for pushing out unfiltered information to the public. However, many agencies have not implemented ways to keep data not meant for public consumption private.

In the memo, the President seeks recommendations on whether it might make sense for federal agencies to treat SBU data in the same way that a separate category of data known as Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is treated. Unlike SBU data, federal agencies have a standardized procedure for handling CUI data.

Data leak prevention tools will be crucial for monitoring outbound traffic to detect if personally identifiable information and other sensitive data are accidentally leaking out.