The White House is planning to nominate a former intelligence agency chairman and a high-ranking Commerce Department official to shape the way information technology is used in the fight against terrorism, according to government and technology industry sources. . .
The White House is planning to nominate a former intelligence agency chairman and a high-ranking Commerce Department official to shape the way information technology is used in the fight against terrorism, according to government and technology industry sources.

The nominees will be key players in the new Department of Homeland Security and would be profoundly influential on a range of technology issues, including protecting the nation's online infrastructure, directing the development of new surveillance and defense technologies and preserving the privacy rights of ordinary citizens.

James Clapper, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, will be nominated to lead the department's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP) division. He would be responsible not only for IT security, but also for getting often competing intelligence agencies to pool their data. Inter-agency rivalries contributed to a lack of awareness of terrorist activity that presaged the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to a number of studies after the fact.

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