Doing HTTPS everywhere in the .gov space

[Georgi Guninski]

Didn't know .gov dudes _openly_ post here.

For a discussion, let me make some conjectures about *us.gov.

Conjecture 1. USA is a pyramid, AKA Ponzi scheme
Conjecture 2. USA will die in its present form in at most 5
years (possibly causing troubles to other nations too).
Conjecture 3. USA will be bought by the People's Republic 
of China (PRC) in at most 5 years (possibly with other
investors). [This already happened to some USA corporations].

Best of luck,
-- 
gg


On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 11:13:41AM -0500, Eric Mill wrote:
> 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:
> 
> https://18f.gsa.gov/2014/11/13/why-we-use-https-in-every-gov-website-we-make/
> 
> 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
> 
> [1] https://18f.gsa.gov/
> [2] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/
> [3]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_government
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Innovation_Fellows
> [5] https://sunlightfoundation.com/
> 
> -- 
> konklone.com | @konklone <https://twitter.com/konklone>