Supreme Court ruling on contractor background checks includes internal debate on privacy rights

The United States Supreme Court ruled yesterday that background checks conducted on government contractors — which included questions on prior drug use and treatment — by government agencies (in this case, NASA) are reasonable and did…

Mistaken assumptions about authorized users constrains the trustworthiness of information systems

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released an updated guide to its Risk Management Framework (RMF) in December when it published the final public draft of Special Publication 800-39. Among several areas where the…

More lessons to be learned from WikiLeaks on information sharing, access control, and trust

There is no shortage of post-hoc analysis on how a quarter million State Department cables and other documents were acquired and sent to WikiLeaks, how a recurrence of such an incident might be avoided, or on…