Elbowing for Obama influence between new CTO, new cyber czar

Today’s Friday – usually a big news day in Washington, whether by design (bury bad news late in a deep weekend news hole) or by human error (bureaucrats tried all week to get something done and slipped it in at the deadline).  There should be Obama cabinet announcements today, and meanwhile tech luminaries across the country are sitting by their phones, drumming their fingers and hoping for a call offering them the position of the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer. Norm Lorentz, who was OMB’s first-ever CTO, told C-SPAN this week that “If I were asked, I would serve in a heartbeat.”

But now, just this morning, there’s fresh speculation in a Forbes piece “Seeking Obama’s Cyber Czar” that the CTO post could be overshadowed in influence and presidential access by a less-flashy but more influential nation’s first cybersecurity chief. Andy Greenberg writing this morning reminds us of how that particular post was introduced:

“As president, I’ll make cyber security the top priority that it should be in the 21st century,” Obama said in a rare mention of the issue in a speech at Purdue University last July. “I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset and appoint a National Cyber Adviser who will report directly to me.”

Greenberg even reports that “the likeliest candidate for the cyber czar job may have been seated on stage a few feet away from the presidential frontrunner at his Purdue speech. Paul Kurtz, currently a security consultant with Arlington, Va.-based Good Harbor Consulting, may have already been informally offered the post, according to several sources within Washington’s cybersecurity community, although he has privately told colleagues that he is reluctant to accept it.”

After what happened to John Brennan and the CIA position last month, I’m not sure how reliable it is to be “informally offered the post” … Don’t quit the day job.

Meanwhile, regarding the CTO position, I noticed the interesting tidbit buried in an updated Washington Post story last night about President-elect Obama’s likely choice for FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, whom I’ve met at various DC-area tech activities over the past few years – he’s a super-active former FCC official and now venture capitalist.

Sources close to transition officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Genachowski had been recently meeting with key Democratic lawmakers to see if the role of CTO would have policy-making authority and decided against taking the job when he realized the definition of CTO would not include a strong regulatory role. Instead, Genachowski expressed interest in the FCC post. He previously served as chief counsel to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.

I’m not a huge fan of government regulation, so I took that as a good sign.  But one can also take it as a n indicator that key Washington players may know what the the CTO position shouldn’t be – but they still don’t know exactly what it should be. And inside the Beltway, that’s usually a formula for inaction.

Congressional Quarterly reported this week that the reason the CTO post hasn’t been filled yet is because the Obama team hasn’t yet decided exactly what the job will do: “Because the nation has never had a CTO, Obama either has to work out a job description before he can attract a candidate, or he has to select a candidate and then negotiate the CTO’s duties with his new hire… Washington communications insiders tuned into the CTO show say the extra decision-making appears to be slowing things down.”

 The good news is that outside the Beltway, government CTO’s continue their work without the hoopla. I’ve been following the State of Utah’s CTO, David Fletcher, as he writes a good blog which describes his innovative uses of live web services and tech practices to deliver better information to the citizens of his state about their government’s activities.  Bigtime user of RSS for delivery of government news!  For a good quick summary of his work, check out last week’s blogpost on the past year’s “top-10 e-government / technology accomplishments for the state of Utah.” 

Dave’s also an active twitterer and as you read his microblogging there, you’ll pick up non-obtrusive mentions of his fluent use of technologies like iPhone, Flickr, Windows Live, Twitter, GoogleTranslate, CrunchBase, youTube, and, this week, Microsoft’s Live Mesh.

Bottom line: The cynic in me wonders whether all the backroom politicking going on over the federal post is a harbinger of something very different from Utah’s CTO and those in other cities and states: a position instead mired in congressional reports, Hill testimony, and bureaucratic torpor. Not the kind of role that will attract, or certainly keep, a top-notch visionary.

Whoever the new federal CTO is, one immediate sign will be if she or he follows in Dave Fletcher’s path of openly and frequently communicating with the citizenry and the tech community, by blogging (and microblogging!) about the promise, importance, and fun of new technology. 

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