The Foreign Service Journal, September 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2014 15 Under a contract process central- ized in Washington since 2008, vetting requirements for every prospective guard include “a police check covering criminal and/or subversive activities, a credit check, proof of successful previous employment with supervisor recommen- dations, and a personal residence check.” Results must be individually approved by the RSO, the head of the embassy security office. The audit found that 173 local guards at one embassy and about 100 at another were placed on duty by contractors before meeting vetting requirements. At a third embassy, 18 guards were placed on duty before being cleared by the embassy’s security office. Many of the guard files were incom- plete. At five of the six embassies, it said, RSOs “frequently could not demonstrate that they had reviewed or approved the local guards employed to protect their posts.” Also, the process for approving guards for duty varied among the embas- sies. In one instance, it said, a local guard was assigned to an embassy “for months before his criminal history and use of multiple false identities was discovered.” At another embassy, the audit deter- mined that a contractor had collected as much as $1.48 million over a three-year period in wages that were not being paid to the guards. OIG visits to the embassies and rel- evant State Department offices were con- ducted between March and September 2013, although all files were reviewed for guards who had worked under contracts at the selected posts since October 2010. In addition to redaction of references to specific embassies, six full pages of the document titled “Outline for Action,” though designated as “unclassified,” are blacked out in their entirety. In its response to OIG recommenda- tions, one of the posts said that checks of financial information about prospective hires were illegal under privacy laws of the country in question, and said that it had “no alternative means to conduct a credit check.” — Steven Alan Honley, Contributing Editor Yes, ICANN Change B ack in March, the U.S. National Tele- communications and Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department, announced that it would end its formal relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in September 2015. ICANN performs many administrative functions, but probably the best known of them is managing Internet domain names, which it does via the Internet Assigned Num- bers Authority. As Grant Gross reports for PC World , ICANN has faced mounting criticism about the influence of the U.S. govern- ment over its operations. However, NTIA maintains that the decision to cut ICANN loose simply reflects an understanding that the partnership, which dates back to 1999, was always intended to be tempo- rary, as well as Washington’s confidence that ICANN is capable of taking over its responsibilities independently. The announcement has set off a scramble to ensure that the transition is as smooth as possible and, above all, that the new governance model will safeguard the openness of the Internet. NTIA’s administrator, Assistant Secre- tary of Commerce for Communications and Information Lawrence E. Strickling, has emphasized that the United States “will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or intergovernmental solution.” For his part, ICANN CEO and Presi-