UN websites have long neglected security, privacy, legal issues, supervision of outside consultants, says internal audit, May 2012 report

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Per internal auditor's report.

5/16/12, "UN websites and social media have long-neglected security, privacy and legal issues," George Russell, Fox News

"Among the serious risks produced by the U.N.’s haphazard methods of using web-based media were compromised user privacy, possible copyright infringements and potential legal exposures despite U.N. legal immunities, as well as other undefined security concerns.

Many of those problems apparently still have not been fixed, and powerful portions of the U.N. bureaucracy were apparently opposed to getting the U.N.’s lawyers to help fix them.

In an unusual display of bureaucratic defiance, the U.N.’s 700-member Department of Public Information (DPI) rejected as “unrealistic” a formal recommendation from the auditors that the U.N. lawyers be involved in advance before the world body signed any more such media deals....

In a number of cases, the report says, “minimum security requirements for the development of [U.N.] websites were not defined, and risk assessment, security and encryption procedures were not implemented.”

A number of U.N. websites were also apparently developed by external consultants, without proper coordination with the U.N.’s own Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT), which reports directly to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and which lists “social networking and collaboration” as one of the major initiatives of its Orwellian-sounding Knowledge Management Program.

Moreover, the report says, service contracts “were not always in place” for internal U.N. sites hosted by OICT itself, as well as the U.N.’s Department of Field Support, which is the mainstay of peacekeeping operations, as well as those of the U.N.’s $180 million Department of Public Information.

The lurch of the U.N. into the world of social media and the Internet has apparently been so rapid and spontaneous—in contrast to the sluggishness for which it is otherwise notorious-- that Ban’s office could not even say how many websites are operating in its New York based Secretariat, how much money it had spent on them, or the number of staffers involved in producing them."...

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