RIM’s BlackBerry devices have long been seen as the mobile device for professionals which has kept the company somewhat competitive in the global mobile landscape. The ultimate professionals who have relied on a BlackBerry are members of the US Government workforce, which is a pretty solid user base to have for RIM. According to a report by Reuters, that cushion from the government is about to deflate.

The US Governement’s General Services Administration, which handles about $500B worth of government assets including telecom and IT, is starting to pilot a project allowing its 17,000 employees to use their own personal devices on its network. While RIM products account for nearly 95% of the devices used by its workforce, the ability to use your own device on a different platform will most certainly take a major cut out of BlackBerry usage.

The GSA’s chief information officer Casey Coleman had this to say about the shift:

We actively seek to be progressive in our adoption of new technologies so that we can learn the lessons which will inform our client and customer agencies as they seek to go down a similar path.

What Coleman means that if his particular agency sees success with its program, it could start being picked up by other parts of the federal government. If that were to happen, RIM would more than certainly lose a large percentage of users within the US Government.

Just last week we reported that massive enterprise company Haliburton started ditching RIM products and giving out Apple devices to its over 4k employees.

If RIM is losing professional clients such as ones from large government agencies, it better start coming up with a better plan to keep up with Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the fight for consumers.

Google’s announcement of new privacy policies yesterday made headlines, with the company introducing a new simplified policy covering the majority of its services. The new policy means users’ privacy will be handled the same across Google’s many products instead of separately for each. Brad McCarty took a generally favorable look at the changes, but not everyone was happy with the way it allows Google to use information from your activities on one service to customize the results or advertising on another.

One important group the new changes could affect: the government. Google offers its suite of clouds services to the government with Google Apps for Government, a program launched in 2010 specifically designed to meet government needs. But Jeff Gould and Karen Evans of SafeGov.org say the new policy, which takes effect on March 1, raises privacy concerns, “warrants further review by the public sector,” and should not apply to Google Apps for Government users. Updated with a statement from Google below.

Gould and Evans lay out their opposition quite clearly:

We recommend that Google immediately suspend the application of its new privacy policy to GAFG users. The default setting for GAFG and all similar services from other vendors should not allow information sharing at all between services. Furthermore, Google should clarify where its consumer product line ends and its enterprise products begin. Government users want to be assured that the cloud services they use are tailored to the unique security and privacy requirements of the public sector. Google could address this concern by issuing Terms of Service for all Google online products and guaranteeing public sector users their data will not be cross-referenced, data mined or otherwise used for purposes not originally collected in support of their public sector missions.

They don’t want this only from Google, however, saying all cloud vendors dealing with the government should “adopt privacy and security policies supporting government information statutes, policies and procedures in the cloud.”

When Google first announced Google Apps for Government, The Next Web wondered why the rest of the us wouldn’t get the same extra security. The same question applies here: if these policies aren’t good enough for the government, should they be good enough for companies and individuals that make use of the same tools? Obviously, the government has unique needs, but so do many companies that entrust large amounts of sensitive and important data to Google.

While the criticism isn’t good for Google, if there’s one party that must be happy, it’s Microsoft. The two companies have been competing for the government’s lucrative use of their suites, with Google peddling its Apps as an alternative to Microsoft Office.

This news comes just one day after Norwegian data protection authorities banned the use of Google Apps in the public sector, citing incompatibility with Norwegian privacy laws due to a lack of transparency around the location of data.

Update: In a statement, Vice President of Google Enterprise Amit Singh says that the main privacy policy does not affect customers like the government, whose use of Google Apps is governed by individual contracts:

Enterprise customers using Google Apps for Government, Business or Education have individual contracts that define how we handle and store their data. As always, Google will maintain our enterprise customers’ data in compliance with the confidentiality and security obligations provided to their domain. The new Privacy Policy does not change our contractual agreements, which have always superseded Google’s Privacy Policy for enterprise customers.

Twitter is getting more involved with politics as it gears up for the 2012 elections. This time, the company has announced an official involvement.

In a tweet today, the official Twitter account dedicated to politics announced that the U.S. Department of State will start answering questions it pulls in from the micro-messaging service:

U.S. @StateDept to answer questions from Twitter at weekly briefings. Use #AskState. RELEASE: state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/20…

— Twitter Government (@gov) January 4, 2012

In an official announcement from the Department, it detailed plans to pull in questions globally that use the #AskState hashtag:

Beginning this week, the Department’s Spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, will take questions from the worldwide public selected from the Department’s 10 official Twitter feeds (Arabic, Chinese, English, Farsi, French, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Urdu) and answer them at the podium during the Daily Press Briefing each Friday afternoon during the month of January.

If you’d like to ask the U.S. Department of State a question, it suggests that you direct them to the following accounts that handle various languages:

@StateDept (English)
@USAbilAraby (Arabic)
@USA_Zhongwen (Chinese)
@USAdarFarsi (Farsi)
@USAenFrancais (French)
@USAHindiMein (Hindi)
@USAemPortugues (Portuguese)
@USApoRusski (Russian)
@USAenEspanol (Spanish)
@USAUrdu (Urdu)

If you can’t catch the live press briefings every Friday, you can check out the YouTube channel that the department has set up, where it will post all of the sessions upon completion. This is a pretty cool initiative, since this type of access has only been granted to members of the press in the past.

This year might just be the year that sites like Twitter and Facebook actually make a difference in the election. Last Caucus night in Iowa yesterday, reports hit Twitter about how close voting was among the candidates, potentially swaying those who hadn’t participated yet in another direction.

According to a report by Ars Technica, Verisign submitted a request yesterday asking for the power to scan sites for malware and to shut them down when it sees fit. It would also like the ability to shut down a domain name at the request of law enforcement.

Verisign of course operates a huge part of the internet networking infrastructure including top-level domain names like: .com, .net, and .name.

Verisign says:

All parts of the internet community are feeling the pressure to be more proactive in dealing with malicious activity

ICANN has recognized this and the new gTLD Applicant Guidebook requires new gTLDs to adopt a clear definition of rapid takedown or suspension systems that will be implemented.

The full request submitted through ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process on October 10th can be viewed below.

It’s not just malware Verisign is worried about. Apparently the company has been piloting a program with cyber security experts to seize domain names that are harboring malicious content or have broken the law in some way. These takedown procedures would include a “protest” capability for those who feel that their domain name was taken in error.

Do you feel like this is a new government way of controlling the internet with Verisign at the lead? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Verisign Com Net Name Request 10oct11 En