Public Administration: Major Concepts - Essay Example

Public Administration: Major Concepts al Affiliation: Public Administration: Major Concepts American law enforcement and intelligence investigators have established that they may not know the status and motive of what Edward J. Snowden, the previous National Security Agency contractor extracted from highly protected government database prior departure from leaving the United States. This is as stated by senior government officials (Mazzetti & Schmidt, 2013). Investigators are in the dark of the extent to which the data breach was due to the N.S.A.

facility located in Hawaii where he worked (and not in other N.S.A. facilities) was not as equipped with updated software which allows spy agencies to monitor the corners of its heavy computer landscape the employees navigate at a given time. This posed a high risk to the portrayal of the accountability levels of the facility. Close to half a year after the investigation started, officials mentioned that Mr. Snowden covered his tracks through logging into the government’s classified systems through the passwords of subsequent security agency employees and by hacking firewalls that were installed for purposed of limiting access to various sections of the system (Milakovich & Gordon, 2009).

The presidential advisory committee examining the operations of the security agency submitted the report to Mr. Obama last week and as a way of outdoing accountability mishaps, the report would remain undisclosed to the public up to next month where Mr. Obama will announce the kinds of recommendations to be embraced and which to be rejected. As a way of fueling bueracracy and tension within the public, Mr. Snowden shared his cache of files and documents to small groups of journalists. Some of them from the groups have substantially shared the documents with various news organizations.

This has led to an exposure of elements of spying the friendly governments. On a similar occurrence in 2010, where Chelsea Manning, an Army private, provided thousands of diplomatic cables and military chat logs to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group, the Obama administration assumed steps which were aimed at preventing other government employees from disseminating and downloading large volumes whose material was classified. In the following year, 2011, Mr. Obama also signed executive orders that established task forces with the responsibility of “deterring, mitigating and detecting insider threats, which includes safeguarding classified information from compromise, exploitation as well as other forms of unauthorized disclosure (Mazzetti & Schmidt, 2013).

The task force, led by the attorney general, has the ultimate responsibility to develop new policies and technologies for protecting classified information. However, one of these changes includes updating computer systems for purposes of tracking the digital employees’ meanderings of intelligence agencies which used to occur slowly. A lesson learned for this experience is that in management of public data, it is critical to remove anonymity for the people with access to such classified systems.

For this reason, there are continuing and ongoing State Department’s efforts to reach out to the affected countries telling them of the things which the senior administration officials greatly disapproved such as the spying of foreign leaders to be a “business as usual” trend between nations (Milakovich & Gordon, 2009). The fact that the N.S.A. is uncertain of exactly the content that Mr. Snowden had access to, government officials first learn of the specific documents from the reporters who prepare their articles prior public publication.

This does not allow much time for the State Department to make relevant notifications to the foreign leaders on coming disclosures. ReferencesMazzetti, M., Schmidt, M., (2013) Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden’s Leaks. Retrived on 15th December 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/us/officials-say-us-may-never-know-extent-of-snowdens-leaks.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0 Milakovich, M.E. & Gordon, G.J (2009) Public Administration in America. New York: Cengage Learning