As Raw Story notes:A Government Accountability Office investigator smuggled live bomb components into a federal building in just 27 seconds, then assembled a bomb in a restroom and ventured throughout the building without being detected, a leaked tape …
Posts Tagged ‘government’
No One Could Have Planted Bombs in the World Trade Center Without Being Detected, Could They?
July 8th, 2009 |
No Comments
Mixed results for green IT goals
July 3rd, 2009 |
No Comments
A majority of public sector employees do not know about environmentally friendly IT targets set out in government’s Greening ICT Strategy.
The strategy calls for government IT to be carbon neutral by 2012, with office carbon emissions down 11.5% by 2011.
One of the commissioners of the report says there are scattered trends toward compliance with the strategy.
However, a survey of IT managers in the public sector showed 60% did not know there were any targets to aim for.
The report, titled "The Path to Green Government", was produced by environmental charity Global Action Plan and commissioned by networking giant Cisco.
It is estimated that information and communication technology (ICT) accounts for one-fifth of the Government’s carbon emissions. The Greening ICT Strategy was intended to put the government in a leadership role in the sustainable use of ICT.
A large proportion of carbon emissions can be blamed on the manufacture of new equipment, so a principal focus of the initiative is to make the best use of existing equipment.
However, there is more to the plan once procurement is slimmed down, according to Cisco’s head of public sector Neil Crockett.
"There is another, much bigger debate about how ICT can enable other things to happen, like building management, travel reduction, flexible working," he said.
‘Pockets of excellence’
The Global Action Plan study was conducted by direct surveys of ICT managers in the public sector – local and national government, education, healthcare and so on – as well as a questionnaire in the magazine Computer Weekly.
Some 60% of respondents said that they were unaware of the Greening ICT Strategy, and among those who were aware, nearly one-third said that they had made no changes to their own ICT usage and procurement, and had no plans to make any such changes.
The problem, according to Global Action Plan director Trewin Restorick, is poor collaboration and knowledge sharing across the sector.
"government electricity usage is continuing to rise, and it is likely that one of the big reasons for this is the proliferation of computers, laptops, chargers, lobby televisions and the air conditioning of server rooms"
Rebecca Willis, Sustainable Development Commission
"What we saw was pockets of excellence, areas where the public sector is making both cash savings and carbon savings through smarter use of ICT," he told BBC News.
"But what we discovered was that those pockets of activity tended not to be part of a wider strategy within the public sector. They were very much piecemeal initiatives, which suggests they were being driven by keen individuals."
One straightforward route to knowledge sharing is that between IT managers and those who pay for the energy that the equipment consumes; more than two-thirds of respondents said that they were neither responsible for paying for the energy, nor did they see the bill.
Less than half had calculated their department’s "carbon footprint".
"For an ICT manager, if they’re not paying the energy bills – which are both volatile and going up – they have no interest in knowing what the long term impact of the product is," he said. "So you get managers buying stuff without thinking about utilising the assets they’ve got."
While the longer term goal to ameliorate the effects of climate change are a driving force for compliancy, in 2010 the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs’ Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme will come into effect.
Under the scheme, each large private sector business and public sector organisation will tally up its carbon emissions, with a price tag of 12 pounds per tonne of emissions. Organisation will be placed into league tables; depending on where they fit, they will or will not get the money back.
The concern is that public sector money can, if the sector performs badly, be siphoned off into the private sector – a loss both in monetary and in ideological terms.
"’Health service money goes to Tesco’s’ is not a great headline," said Mr Restorick.
Groundswell
Catalina McGregor, government deputy champion of the Cabinet Office’s CIO/CTO Council Green ICT Delivery Group, said a report from her office due for release in late August will comprehensively detail how each department is doing in unprecedented detail, from intelligence departments all the way to museums.
While its results are mixed, she told BBC News that signs of progress were widespread and that Mr Restorick’s assessment may be a bit wide of the mark.
"I’m a little gun-shy to say that folk aren’t working well together, because they are," she said. "It’s very rare that something central is taken up by local [offices] to this extent on a voluntary basis. It’s true that there are no ‘big sticks’, no incentives, no budgets; but there is a groundswell of support for the green ICT programme."
Rebecca Willis, vice chair of the government’s green watchdog the Sustainable Development Commission, pointed out that despite commitments from government, signs of overall change were still lacking.
"The Greening ICT Strategy is an encouraging step towards making government IT more sustainable," she told BBC News.
"However, government electricity usage is continuing to rise, and it is likely that one of the big reasons for this is the proliferation of computers, laptops, chargers, lobby televisions and the air conditioning of server rooms. It’s clear that ambition levels need to be raised."</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Costly electricity
June 22nd, 2009 |
No Comments
Prospects for plug-in electrics and hybrids continue to provoke much discussion in the industry. Last week, we heard that Daimler’s electric Smart has been formally given the go-ahead to enter commercial production next year. The Smart Fortwo (sorry Daimler, but I have to capitalise brand and model names) is a curious one. It’s perhaps an example of a car that was ahead of its time. In the looks department, it is much more acceptable now than it was back in the late 1990s. And a plug-in electric version seems to make good sense.
But the batteries are not going to be cheap. And that’s a problem: who pays? Will the customer pay for that? The vehicle manufacturer? Will governments tinker with regulatory frameworks to encourage take-up? There seems to be a consensus in the industry that governments will have to play a part in helping electric cars develop significant market penetration. And, the argument goes, the government needs to do that as part of a broader energy policy that addresses overall CO2 generation, renewable power and economic or energy security issues. There’s a lot to consider.
At some point though, the consumer is going to be asked to make a contribution to the additional costs associated with a battery pack and electric drive. Early adopters at initial low volumes may be fine with that. The interesting thing though will be the speed with which plug-in electric vehicles can become cheaper on a cost-per-unit basis as volumes become bigger. It will be something of a chicken and egg situation – which is why the regulatory framework is particularly important in terms of the fossil fuel relativities.
But would you pay almost GBP400 (USD650) a month to lease a Smart with electric drive? That’s some premium to ask the customer to pay. How quickly can that sort of figure come down and to what extent will the government subsidise these vehicles? One point that should not be lost: in Britain the government takes plenty of tax from motorists at the petrol pump, way more than is required for investment in roads. And Her Majesty’s Government needs every penny it can get, even if politicians like the sound of a greener electric future.
I apologise for Berlusconi
I’m sorry for our prime minister’s predictable reaction to a story about G8 summit preparations, please keep the spotlight on Italy
As a member of the Italian parliament and former magistrate who ensured that many corrupt politicians and businessmen were brought to justice in the 1990s, I wish to apologise to the editor and staff of the Guardian newspaper for the utterly predictable reaction of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and our foreign minister, Franco Frattini.
The Guardian does its best to keep the public informed. In Italy this government is not accustomed to free debate, or to hearing the truth being told. While sections of the article dealing with preparations for the G8 summit may be debatable, the rest of it contains little that can be refuted.
However, there is one classification missing from the list in the article, one published by Freedom House, which puts Italy 73rd place for freedom of the press. The real problem in our country is that information is firmly in the grip of one individual, namely our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi – which must be one of the worst cases of conflict of interest ever recorded in any country in the western world.
Berlusconi’s control over the media is exercised via his ownership of the largest Italian publishing house, Mondadori, as well as via the country’s six television networks: three private Mediaset channels owned by Berlusconi himself and three channels of the public broadcaster RAI which Berlusconi indirectly controls and influences, with very rare exceptions I might add, through managerial staff appointments.
His virtually total control of the media allows him to maintain a dominant position and provides an endless source of revenue that helps to consolidate his position within the institutions via a wide-ranging system of patronage. In the past, these revenues were made possible by the tacit approval of previous governments that refused to address the issue of obvious conflicts of interest. Currently Berlusconi pays the Italian government a mere 1% of turnover in return for the television broadcasting frequencies conceded to him and now used for Mediaset transmissions. Since the centre-right coalition government came to power, a number of major parastatal companies have diverted their advertising expenditure from the RAI public television networks to the private networks belonging to the prime minister.
In addition to the media issue, there is now also another, namely the scourge of the “unconstitutional” government reforms. The first of these was a law known as the Alfano bill, which was ordered by Silvio Berlusconi himself as his first act after coming to power, which prohibits the prosecution of himself and the incumbents in three other senior government posts.
The provisions of this law mean Berlusconi did not have to appear in a trial in which he was facing charges of bribing a witness. David Mills, his lawyer and former husband of Blair government minister Tessa Jowell, has been sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment for accepting a bribe. On 6 October, the constitutional court is due to issue a ruling regarding the constitutionality of the Alfano bill and, should the court rule that it is indeed unconstitutional, then Berlusconi will be obliged to stand trial for allegedly bribing Mills.
I would like to conclude by appealing to the Guardian and the other foreign press not to allow the spotlight to move away from Italy and to continue to perform the same vitally important task that they have always performed in the past, namely the task of informing the public, a role that most of our media have abdicated from because they are no longer being allowed to do their job.