To think that government agencies that are already overburdened by humpty-zillion processes and procedures, have antiquated equipment and network infrastructure, etc. will ever be able to start encrypting all the data on their laptops and deploy two-factor authentication is a pipe dream.
How do I know? I'm at the bottom of the food chain of a goverment land managment agency. I am unaware of any encryption that is being used on any of our laptops. There is no clear direction on what "sensitive" is, so I agree that we should just encrypt everything. I've heard that keeping a list of your co-workers birthdays with their consent is sensitive due to the Privacy Act. The laptops we have are used daily in the for collecting resouce data about everything from trees to streams to bugs. The are not state of the art and take 10 minutes to boot with all the background processes we have loaded (antivirus scanning, cisco security agent,etc.). They will be migrating us from Windows 2k to Windows XP in mid 2007 (no sense rushing things).
Notice the memorandum didn't come with a check attached. I'm not whining because I know that there is a war to pay for and Katrina was expensive too but at some level these initatives take dollars in addition to memorandums. In the dozen years I've been with the outfit we have had flat or decreasing budgets every year. We have downsized from 45,000 to 32,000 employees. It will be interesting. So it goes.
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To think that government agencies that are already overburdened by humpty-zillion processes and procedures, have antiquated equipment and network infrastructure, etc. will ever be able to start encrypting all the data on their laptops and deploy two-factor authentication is a pipe dream. How do I know? I'm at the bottom of the food chain of a goverment land managment agency. I am unaware of any encryption that is being used on any of our laptops. There is no clear direction on what "sensitive" is, so I agree that we should just encrypt everything. I've heard that keeping a list of your co-workers birthdays with their consent is sensitive due to the Privacy Act. The laptops we have are used daily in the for collecting resouce data about everything from trees to streams to bugs. The are not state of the art and take 10 minutes to boot with all the background processes we have loaded (antivirus scanning, cisco security agent,etc.). They will be migrating us from Windows 2k to Windows XP in mid 2007 (no sense rushing things). Notice the memorandum didn't come with a check attached. I'm not whining because I know that there is a war to pay for and Katrina was expensive too but at some level these initatives take dollars in addition to memorandums. In the dozen years I've been with the outfit we have had flat or decreasing budgets every year. We have downsized from 45,000 to 32,000 employees. It will be interesting. So it goes.