Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Tuesday defended a federal law that mandates nationwide standards for driver's licenses and identification cards. The Washington Times reports that Chertoff told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that he is “pretty adamant” that the so-called REAL ID Act can be implemented properly before a May 2008 deadline. “We don't want to keep kicking the can down the road," he said. Panel ranking Republican Susan Collins of Maine, who last week announced plans to introduce legislation that would give states two extra years to comply with the law, criticized Homeland Security for taking so long to issue guidance to the states for compliance. Chertoff said his department has taken so long largely to address privacy concerns. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he is concerned about the financial burden of the law on states.

Radio-frequency identification tags for tracking immigrants will not be used in the so-called US-VISIT system, which records fingerprints for all foreign visitors. Government Computer News reports. The Homeland Security Department determined through testing that systems to read the RFID tags did not reliably detect them while embedded in I-94 documents during a test. In other news, The Washington Post reports that Maryland Del. Doyle Niemann recently proposed legislation that would tag children with global-positioning chips as part of a truancy-reduction plan. Niemann, a Democrat, said, "It's going to be done unobtrusively. The chips are tiny and can be put into a hospital ID band or a necklace."

The ranking member of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee on Monday said that recent comments by a mid-level Veterans Affairs Department official are a sign of a management culture that still fails to take data security seriously enough. GovExec.com reports that Rep. Steve Buyer, R-Ind., publicized a recording of the comments made at a meeting in early January in response to the VA's latest data breach. Joseph Francis, the acting deputy chief research and development at VA, telling told his staff members that they did not need to "do an A-plus job" in responding to a congressional request for information on where the department keeps sensitive data. "If you want to know what's the real purpose of the data call, read Machiavelli. It's about power; it's about Congress saying, 'VA, you're accountable to us,'" Francis said. "We're not asking people to do an A-plus job on this report."

A former stockholder in a technology company on Tuesday sued Rep. William Jefferson, his wife and a former business associate, claiming that they engaged in a scheme to defraud stockholders by using business funds to pay bribes. CongressDaily reports that the suit alleges that the Lousiana Democrat, his wife Andrea, and Vernon Jackson, the former chief executive of the telecommunications firm iGate, engaged in an illicit scheme to funnel money to Jefferson, his family and foreign officials. IGate stockholder Daniel Cadle filed the suit in U.S. district court in Louisville, Ky., and is seeking unspecified damages on behalf of all iGate stockholders. The allegations mirror those in an ongoing federal investigation of Jefferson and his business dealings. Jackson is serving seven years in federal prison. Jefferson has not been charged and denies any wrongdoing, but court records and the lawsuit indicate that the FBI caught Jefferson on videotape taking a $100,000 cash bribe.

The CIA's former No. 3 official and a defense contractor were charged Tuesday with fraud and other offenses in the corruption investigation that sent former Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham to prison. CongressDaily, The Washington Post, The New York Times and AP report that the indictment named Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the executive director of the CIA until he resigned in May, and his close friend, San Diego defense contractor Brent Wilkes, according to two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because grand-jury proceedings are secret. In a separate indictment, Wilkes was charged with conspiring to bribe Cunningham, R-Calif., in return for government contracts. A man who was described as a co-conspirator in Cunningham's 2005 plea agreement, John Michael, also was charged.

Presidential candidates of both parties have taken their campaigns -- and their advertising war -- to the Internet, The Wall Street Journal reports. Candidates are buying space on search engines, Web logs and other popular Internet sites. On the Democratic side, John Edwards, has been a very aggressive online campaigner. Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, has run ads on conservative sites, including Townhall.com and National Review's "The Corner" blog. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took out ads this week on conservative blogs, including Captain's Quarters and Outside the Beltway. Candidates also are placing ads on Google and campaigning for online support. In other news, The New York Times reports on Intrade, a Web site that lets people bet on presidential campaigns and other current events.

The president of a nonprofit group that focuses on communications law has called on the FTC to increase oversight of telephone and cable companies that offer Internet access, AP reports. Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, said at a workshop assembled by the FTC that her group wants the FTC to ensure that Internet providers are not discriminating against certain providers of video and other Web content. She also said regulators should require more disclosure from telephone and cable companies about the Internet speeds they say they will give consumers. Sohn's points concern the long and heated debate over network neutrality, or the concept that all online traffic should be treated equally by Internet service providers. Robert Pepper, an executive at the networking equipment company Cisco Systems, said "new, detailed ... regulation would be counterproductive and instead the FTC should play a leadership role in protecting consumers and competition by exercising its authority ... on a case-by-case basis."

The Senate is planning to move legislation to implement unfulfilled recommendations of the commission that investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks, but with provisions that appear to put the chamber on a collision course with the House, CongressDaily reports. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was scheduled to debate its sweeping bill Wednesday, but Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., on Tuesday night delayed the vote until Thursday. Although Lieberman blamed inclement weather for forcing the delay, aides are likely to use the extra time to fine-tune the draft. The bill addresses homeland security intelligence and information-sharing, grant funding for emergency responders, and efforts to create emergency communications equipment that works across jurisdictions.

A legal setback suffered by Google in Europe this week may influence courts in other countries examining similar cases, according to copyright experts. News.com reports that some legal analysts expect Tuesday's ruling in Belgium that Google cannot display snippets from certain newspapers on its news and search sites could affect the company’s legal standing in other countries. "Google has a very aggressive approach toward copyright law. ... The ruling should be a serious message to Google to rethink that approach,” said Lee Bromberg, a copyright and trademark attorney at of Bromberg & Sunstein. However, legal experts agreed that the ruling is not likely to affect Google’s operations in the United States, where caching of articles is permissible under copyright law.

The FBI is now using a new system to track requests for wiretaps to be reviewed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, Government Computer News reports. Surveillance requests come from the bureau’s 56 field offices at different classification levels. In order to streamline the vetting process, the new system created by High Performance Technologies lets users access different levels of information based on their security clearances and decreases the processing time from 120 days to 60. An FBI official said of the previous system, "To give you an idea of their idea of connectivity, it was called Oasis [and wasn’t connected to anything]."

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered that confidential marketing documents of a best-selling schizophrenia drug that were leaked to a reporter and posted online be returned to the manufacturer. The Washington Post reports that U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein demanded that internal documents on Eli Lilly’s drug Zyprexa, which were leaked to a reporter at The New York Times, be returned to the firm. A court last week refused a request by Eli Lilly to ban Internet sites that had obtained the internal documents from publishing them. Eli Lilly has agreed to pay $1.2 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by 26,000 of the drug’s users.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed using electronic health records, or EHRs, as a way to help keep costs down and to provide more preventive care, Government Health IT reports. This plan would extend beyond the city and state of New York, as he wants every hospital in the country that accepts Medicaid and Medicare to have EHRs, which could cost as much as $20 billion. He said he wants the records to be used to track patients’ health trends and treatments, as well as doctors’ performances. Bloomberg said using IT "gives you the right prescription for our ailing health care system." New York City is currently spending $43 million toward establishing EHR systems for doctors who treat New Yorkers at public expense.

The risk of identity theft has increased in major U.S. cities such as Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, according to ID Analytics, a company that provides fraud intelligence services to businesses. News.com reports that people in Vermont, Montana and Wyoming have the lowest risk of identity fraud. "Moving is a very dramatic way to reduce your identity risk," Stephen Coggeshall, ID Analytics' chief technology officer, said in an interview. "It is more appropriate for people to understand the risk of their area and to take the appropriate precautions." Coggeshall said his company's research, which is slated to be published Wednesday, seeks to provide information for law enforcement. Complaints of ID theft accounted for 36 percent of the total 674,354 complaints submitted to the FTC and its external data contributors last year.

Thousands of firms belonging to the Better Business Bureau network were hit by an e-mail "spoofing" scam Tuesday. The Washington Post reports that thousands of businesses received e-mails encouraging them to download a malicious computer program. The firms received e-mails that were doctored to look as if they were coming from the Better Business Bureau in order to notify them of a consumer complaint. Council of Better Business Bureaus spokesman Steve Cox said the program accessed the address books of the computers it infected and distributed the e-mail to more recipients. "It is the first time in recent memory where we've had an attack on this scale," Cox said. The e-mails were traced to a marketing firm in Georgia that had no prior affiliation with the organization.

A senior Cuban official has defended his country's Internet restrictions, AP reports. Cuban Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes called Cuba's Internet policies, which include putting computers in schools but restricting anti-government material, both rational and efficient. He voiced concern about U.S. security measures and news reports that technology firms like Google and Microsoft have cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. Valdes also said Washington is hurting Cuba's access to the Internet while U.S. military and intelligence services use it to attempt to undermine Cuba's government. Internet technologies "constitute one of the tools for global extermination," he argued. However, the technologies "are also necessary to continue to advance down the path of development."