Doing HTTPS everywhere in the .gov space

[Juan]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 11:13:41 -0500
Eric Mill <eric at konklone.com> wrote:
> Hey,



	Is it possible for this mailing list to sink any lower? 

	
	




> 
> 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/
>