Yesterday, we covered four issues that you should keep in mind before voting in the primaries, covering Intellectual Property Laws, Broadband Penetration/Infrastructure, Spectrum Regulation/Allocation, and Network Neutrality.

We conclude our list of issues below.

Whether or not it is justified, we know that it has been the policy of the current government to intercept communications without warrants, and that there have been major telecommunications players that have helped the government to do so. As one can imagine, this has got a number of people very upset. At the core, the two questions are: "How much data should the government be able to collect?" and "How well can data the government collects be kept secure?"

Regardless of the supposed value in "fighting terrorism," or any "unreasonable search and seizure" or "due process" issues, these warrantless wiretaps create a third party privy to any confidential data that travels along the wire. While some may trust the government with keeping data confidential to the best of its ability, that may not be very reassuring to yourself or whichever department is in charge of things like Non-Disclosure Agreements and company secrets if they don't have much faith in the government's ability to keep confidential data confidential.

Additionally, the government collects alarming amount of data through more traditional methods - social security records, tax records, and the like - which need to also remain confidential. Computer security policies that are effective and followed are crucial.

6) Open Government Initiatives

One of the ways to increase transparency in government is to make information that the government collects available to the public in an easily computer-parseable, standard format - some candidates have made this a priority, other candidates have ignored it. The idea is that if the government data is online and both easily searched and easily crossed referenced, citizens can use that information effectively.

There are, however privacy concerns that accompany an open government. Additionally, any move to standards begs the question of "which standards" and whether your IT department will need to conform to those standards in order to interoperate with governmental computers.

7) Energy Policy

While energy policy will be a key part of the campaign this year, most people won't be thinking about energy policy as it affects IT departments. Energy costs directly affect the operating budgets of major enterprise IT departments, which need to power, and cool, racks and racks of servers, switches, and routers - not to mention the end-user PCs distributed throughout the enterprise. If one candidate proposes a carbon-tax, that could raise energy costs. Then again, if another candidate develops no oil alternatives, energy costs could increase naturally.

By encouraging and perhaps subsidizing the invention of computer processors that consume less energy, the government can have an additional impact on IT departments. Additionally, a more subtle effect can be found from the military-industrial complex - that is, technologies which get their start in the military often eventually find their ways into the private sector. A military demand for low-power consuming technology - such as chips and routers to be used in small, autonomous devices, may eventually result in low-power consuming data centers.

8) Immigration and Education

Immigration is a double-edged sword when it comes to IT, and nowhere is this clearer than with the H1B visa program. The H1B visa allows the best and brightest of the world's technological geniuses to work for companies within the United States. Too few, and companies are starved for brain power, too many and domestic IT workers begin to feel the pressure of competing against immigrated labor. Where the H1B quota is set has a large impact on both the IT job market and the U.S. technology industry as a whole.

One of the concerns is that the demand for H1B visa-granted immigrants is the idea that we do not graduate enough competent technology professionals in the United States to fill the demand of large companies since computer science and computer engineering went from the "guaranteed good career" major in the late 1990s to a career to be avoided in the post-Dotcom era. Through grants, scholarships, and loans, the federal government has a great deal of influence in what people choose to study.

There have been some interesting proposals around training those with Associate's Degrees from junior colleges to prepare IT "operators" with training less than a full four-year degree in computer science to stem this tied. As hiring and retention are always important concerns for CIOs, this is a major area of concern.