Grant Gross

The U.S. government is getting better at sharing information between various agencies tasked with protecting the nation against terrorism, but IT can help drive more improvements, two top-ranking antiterrorism officials said Monday.

The FBI has met about 80% of its case management goals, including a case management database, even though it scrapped a four-year IT project in March (see story), the agency's CIO said yesterday. The FBI spent about $104 million on its Virtual Case File (VCF) effort, which was budgeted for $170 million, before the agency identified hundreds of problems with the project and scrapped it.

Companies with compromised data have a duty to report that information to investigators as a way to keep others from being victimized, the director of the U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday. The Secret Service, which has jurisdiction to investigate financial crimes as well as protect the U.S. president, is working hard to prevent Internet-related crimes such as identity theft, but it needs assistance from private companies, said Ralph Basham, Secret Service director, speaking at an event on organized cybercrime in Washington, D.C.

Congress should do away with limits on how many foreign workers technology companies can bring to the U.S. under what's known as the H1-B visa program, Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp. chairman said Wednesday.

Three U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday introduced a bill that would permanently extend a ban on Internet-only taxes, including taxes on Internet access. The legislation would ban three types of taxes that single out the Internet: taxes on Internet access, multiple taxation by two or more states of a product or service bought over the Internet, and taxes that treat Internet purchases differently from other types of sales.

The U.S. government needs to get more serious about cybersecurity, but Congress should look at broader ways to combat security problems than focusing on bills that address specific issues such as spam or spyware, a group of executives from IT security product vendors said this week.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday filed 117 civil lawsuits against alleged phishers trying to scam Microsoft customers out of personal information such as credit card numbers.

MCI Inc. announced Tuesday a major expansion of the number of wireless hotspots available across the globe to its large-business consumers.