As reported by Amy Schatz in the Wall Street Journal recently, an advisory board to the Commerce Department issued a new report confirming a need for tighter online privacy – i.e. to adopt new practices and update current privacy laws.  At about the same time, our government rolled out a new Web site — data.gov – which provides large amounts of raw data for consumers, researchers and interest groups to play with and pair up with other databases.

 As you can imagine, many questions and concerns about online privacy were immediately raised upon the release of this report and the launching of this new website. 

As the Obama administration continues to push for more information available online, privacy advocates continue trying to convince the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and Congress to update our government’s current federal privacy rules, regulations and policies – which they claim “do not reflect the realities of current technologies and do not protect against many important threats to privacy.”

Click here to read Amy Schatz’s article.

M.E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP has written an article in Network World that summarizes some of the more important research that has been done for security metrics.  In trying to address the question of what should be measured to better understand and manage security issues, Mr. Kabay cites some useful research papers to assist each of us tasked with the responsibility to place controls around security issues affecting business continuity planning, information security or other areas of response to regulatory requirements and compliance management.

Putting the appropriate security control measurements in place within an organization remains an ongoing process requiring periodic review, evaluation and improvement by managment.   

Read this article to help you do just that….    

By JACKIE CALMES - New York Times | Published: October 13, 2008

An expansion of the government’s role in financial markets is certain: on Friday the Treasury Department updated its recommended reforms of the existing regulatory structure, which it will leave to the next president and Congress.

Congressional leaders and both presidential candidates already have their own, more far-reaching ideas, from further restricting executives’ pay to remaking the entire regulatory structure so that it better supervises both traditional activities and newer ones like credit-default swaps that are unregulated.

But the pro-regulation climate will probably spill over into other sectors. That seems especially likely now that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are pumping money into corporations of all types to shore up their capital and to finance day-to-day operations until credit markets recover, and with the auto industry separately getting billions in government assistance.

That will give impetus to those who seek new emission curbs and energy limits to address climate change; or who want health care mandates to expand insurance coverage and restrain costs; or who are calling for new safeguards for food, prescription drugs and toys from China and other less-regulated trading partners.

“We now have a collective anger, disgust, over our whole financial system and it’s obvious we’re going to get a regulatory backlash,” said Robert E. Litan, an economist at the Brookings Institution who has studied financial and regulatory issues for decades. “And we know it’s going to come in a big way in 2009.”

READ MORE about History of Regulations and what’s expected to come in the next 2 years from Congress to the Small, Medium and Large Enterprise Businesses…