Hey,
I wrote a piece today for my organization, 18F, about our HTTPS-everywhere policy for the .gov websites we build inside the US government:
I wanted to give this list some extra context, since I understand the US government is a big, complicated, freighted topic. Below is my *personal* attempt to describe my workplace and is not anything close to an official description or the voice of the government.
18F[1] is a team of ~70 people working as full time employees inside the US federal government. (The name comes from the street intersection -- 18th St & F St -- that its HQ is at in DC.) 18F as a unit was created around a year ago to be a competent, top class in-house technology team for the US federal government.
A driving idea here is that the government shouldn't need to outsource its *entire* technical brain to contractors, and that government services can be simple and even beautiful. If you've noticed what's happened over the last few years in the UK at
https://www.gov.uk by the Government Digital Service[2], 18F takes a lot of inspiration from them.
18F is housed inside the General Services Administration, an independent federal agency[3] that does as many different things as its name implies, from running all the buildings to housing the nation's data catalog at Data.gov. It's an "independent" federal agency in that it's not subject to the same level of direct executive and White House control that cabinet agencies are. It's the same kind of "independent" that lets the FCC potentially disagree with the President on net neutrality, for example.
The team has people all over the country (it has a big SF office, for example), many of which have either never been in government before, or who came in after doing the Presidential Innovation Fellows[4] program.
I joined 18F after working for 5 years on open data apps, infrastructure, and policy at the Sunlight Foundation[5], a non-profit in DC that pushes for open government. I had also done a fair amount of work around privacy, HTTPS, and ongoing judicial activity around surveillance. I get to continue doing all of that work in my personal capacity.
I say this just to try to communicate that the 18F team has some very sincere people trying to make the US government work better for people all over the world, and to do right by technology in the process. We have substantial support and autonomy to make that happen.
When it comes to HTTPS, the .gov surface area is absolutely enormous, and moving it helps move the whole Internet forward. Bringing the government in line with the rest of the web/security community (and being loud about it) is one of my big priorities at 18F, and so I wanted to share this here with you all.
-- Eric
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