Visitors Beware: Accenture's US-Visit Venture

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The Department of Homeland Security awarded Accenture a contract --
estimated to total $15 billion -- for US-Visit, a program for
"virtual borders" tracking entries and exits of all visitors to the
United States. . . .

Apparently, the fact that Accenture -- formerly Andersen Consulting
of the Enron scandal notoriety -- is incorporated in Bermuda to avoid
taxes did not prove an obstacle for the Department of Homeland
Security . . . In fact, Accenture is an industry leader in the art of
finagling federal contracts even while dodging federal taxes . . .

Nevertheless, it is odd to award a bigger and more complex project to
a company that failed to make a smaller and simpler one work less
than four months ago. Accenture was given a contract to build "a $22
million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote
via the Internet" -- the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting
Experiment [SERVE] -- but a panel of computer security experts warned
that SERVE "has numerous other fundamental security problems that
leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyberattacks, any one
of which could be catastrophic," leading the Pentagon to reluctantly
scrap the program.

Will US-Visit be any less vulnerable than SERVE? According to Valerie
Alberto and Dominique Bogatz, "the federal government's record on
computer security is poor" . . .  Last year, the Subcommittee on
Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the
Census gave the Department of Homeland Security an F in computer
security ("Federal Computer Security Report Card," December 9, 2003).
. . .

The full posting at
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/06/visitors-beware-accentures-us-visit.html>.
--
Yoshie

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