News

News Briefings

DoD News Briefing


Thursday, October 8, 1998 - 1:30 p.m.
Presenter: Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. John J. Hamre

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Q: Two policies that seem to contradict each other: the policy on the web that went out last week, and the thrust towards electronic commerce. When the Army took down all its web sites, it took down wholesale electronic commerce sites, and I imagine the vendors are getting a little irritated. How do you balance the two, and is there going to be direction to bring those electronic commerce sites back up?

A: They do not have to be in contradiction with each other. And if you think about it in advance, they're not in tension with each other, either.

What has happened is over the years we have had an explosion of use of Internet-based technology and homepages and web sites across the board. This was never really viewed systematically from a counterintelligence and from a strategic security standpoint. That doesn't mitigate our desire to move to a paper-free acquisition environment, to move to as much as possible to a paper-free publishing environment. We would like very much to go to Internet-based publishing. But it does mean that we have to bring into that a more systematic evaluation of the security dimensions associated with it.

We're going to have a period, months of time, when there are going to be some rough edges as we're working out to harmonize those two policy goals. I absolutely believe that they are compatible. I know you've heard of examples of where we can provide better security using our web sites. For example, not publishing social security numbers on the web sites and things of this nature will help. It makes it a lot harder for bad guys to correlate and track down data. We can do that. It's going to take us just a bit.

The rather abrupt nature of the security issue didn't let us work out as neatly as we probably should have and would like to have in terms of the electronic commerce. But there is no backing away from our interest in or priority for electronic commerce.

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Press: Thank you.