Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Defense wireless policy due — again

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 13:38:05 -0500

Defense wireless policy due — again

  BY Matthew French
  Feb. 20, 2004

  The Defense Department's long-awaited wireless policy will be released
in a matter of weeks.
  Again.

  DOD has been waiting for well over a year for a new wireless policy to
reflect the rapid
  advances in wireless technology. According to some top IT officials,
the report, which was due
  this time last year, should make its grand debut soon.

  "The wireless policy should be out shortly," said Priscilla Guthrie,
deputy DOD chief
  information officer, speaking at the TeleStrategies Federal Networks
2004 conference. "The
  good news is we believe the policy is much more useful than the draft
that was released last
  year. The bad news is that the policy has spent more than six months
in the coordination cycle."

  A departmentwide policy must often run through a gamut of offices
before it receives final
  approval, including each of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense
Secretary, and, in the case of
  the wireless policy, the Defense CIO's office, as well.

  "In this case, the policy is going to come out better and more thought
out than the initial
  position," Guthrie said. "We had to go back through the coordination
cycle, but it's almost out."

  Dawn Meyerriecks, the chief technology officer for the Defense
Information Systems Agency,
  speaking at the same conference a year ago, said she fully expected
the wireless policy to be
  out late in the winter or early in spring of 2003.

  "Last year [at the TeleStrategies conference,] I said the wireless
policy would be out in a
  couple of weeks," she said. "Here we are a year later, and it's still
going to come out in a couple
  of weeks."

  DOD officials got serious about developing a wireless policy in late
2002 when it hired Ronald
  Jost to head up the wireless policy initiative. Jost, a wireless
veteran who had worked in the
  industry for nearly four decades before landing at the Pentagon, said
when he was hired he
  immediately realized the enormity of the task ahead.

  "We are facing a number of challenges: We have to do more architecture
on the wireless side of
  the [Global Information Grid]; we have to transform communications;
and from a policy side,
  we have to start to generate a policy for [wireless standard] 802.11
and other appliances," Jost
  said in an interview last July.

  DOD officials issued a policy in October 2002 calling for development
of a wireless network
  infrastructure across the Pentagon while prohibiting wireless access
to classified systems. It
  required that wireless devices used within the Pentagon incorporate
technology, including
  authentication and encryption, for securing such communications.

  Since then, drafts of various policies affecting wireless technology
have circulated through the
  halls of the Pentagon, but the overreaching policy that will have the
most impact has yet to
  make its debut.

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