The strategy, released Wednesday in a report that was the subject of a White House meeting, raised the prospect of stepped-up U.S. trade restrictions on products and services derived from stolen trade secrets. Officials also outlined a series of diplomatic actions to reinforce the administration’s commitment to curbing such thefts.

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The order would create a federal-government led group to work with the private sector to create and implement voluntary standards for companies running critical infrastructure. It would also take additional measures to improve information sharing and bolster cyber security through current regulatory authorities.

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Such a sale would of course be illegal under U.S.-imposed trade sanctions against that country. A report from Reuters says that didn’t appear to stop an executive connected to a Huawei partner company, Hong Kong-based Skycom, from trying anyway.

Reuters says Huawei’s CFO, Cathy Meng, daughter of Huawei’s founding CEO, Ren Zhengfei, sat on Skycom’s board for a little more than a year, ending in 2009. Skycom, which Huawei has previously described as a “major partner,” was apparently the entity through which the proposed sale was to take place, though no deal was ever done. And HP, for its part, was never involved in any of it.

Huawei says Skycom is a “normal business partner,” and requires all its partners to stick to its trade compliance system.

Huawei’s operations in Iran over the years have been part of the litany of complaints leveled against the company in a congressional report earlier this year. The other worry is that Huawei gear might be used in some way to spy on American companies and government agencies. A review of the company ordered by the Obama administration found no evidence of spying, but didn’t exactly allay any of those fears, either.

But, like I said, spectacular:

In an official response to the petition, which has so far gathered more than 34,000 signatures, the White House said that while the creation of a Death Star would likely spur job growth and bolster national defense, it’s generally a bad idea.

“The Administration does not support blowing up planets,” Paul Shawcross, chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote — tongue firmly in cheek. “Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?”

Indeed. Probably would have been better off starting out small and asking for a Millennium Falcon …

Here’s Shawcross’s reply in full:

This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For

By Paul Shawcross

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

However, look carefully (here’s how) and you’ll notice something already floating in the sky — that’s no Moon, it’s a Space Station! Yes, we already have a giant, football field-sized International Space Station in orbit around the Earth that’s helping us learn how humans can live and thrive in space for long durations. The Space Station has six astronauts — American, Russian, and Canadian — living in it right now, conducting research, learning how to live and work in space over long periods of time, routinely welcoming visiting spacecraft and repairing onboard garbage mashers, etc. We’ve also got two robot science labs — one wielding a laser — roving around Mars, looking at whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Keep in mind, space is no longer just government-only. Private American companies, through NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO), are ferrying cargo — and soon, crew — to space for NASA, and are pursuing human missions to the Moon this decade.

Even though the United States doesn’t have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we’ve got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we’re building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun. We are discovering hundreds of new planets in other star systems and building a much more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that will see back to the early days of the universe.

We don’t have a Death Star, but we do have floating robot assistants on the Space Station, a President who knows his way around a light saber and advanced (marshmallow) cannon, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is supporting research on building Luke’s arm, floating droids, and quadruped walkers.

We are living in the future! Enjoy it. Or better yet, help build it by pursuing a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field. The President has held the first-ever White House science fairs and Astronomy Night on the South Lawn because he knows these domains are critical to our country’s future, and to ensuring the United States continues leading the world in doing big things.

If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

A little more than a week after the House Intelligence Committee issued a stinging report that fanned the flames of official worry about Huawei and another company, ZTE, it emerged today that the White House ordered a separate review that found no evidence that equipment produced by either company had been used to spy for China. Reuters moved a story on the report a few hours ago.

Rather than spying, it turns out that Huawei’s gear suffers from the same kind of arguably unintended security vulnerabilities that occasionally crop up and that could in theory be exploited by hackers with the proper knowledge. The trick question — which is sort of an indicator of the multi-layered gray areas that make these questions so hard to answer — is whether or not someone put those vulnerabilities there on purpose.

What tends to happen in the cloak-and-dagger world is that multiple layers exist between the people who would want certain actions taken — poking around a sensitive network — and the people who actually do the work. Some freelance hackers in China — or practically any other country for that matter — just might, the theory goes, be working for China’s People’s Liberation Army but not even really know who’s paying them. And if you read enough spy novels you can probably imagine a bunch of other theoretical scenarios in which a vulnerability that’s there “by mistake” could be put to use by someone with a certain amount of plausible deniability.

The review was pretty detailed and was conducted by asking questions of more than 1,000 people in the telecom industry, people who would have noticed any serious and overt funny business going on with the equipment.

So now two government reviews have expressed reservations about Huawei, but neither has been able to say exactly what makes them so uneasy.

I’ve already expressed my theory: That it’s the U.S. government’s own history in this area and its direct knowledge of what can be done. Examples include malware like Stuxnet, Flame and Gauss, to name but a few.

Huawei maintains that it would never allow its equipment to be misused for the benefit of a third party. And even though it is now the world’s largest manufacturer of telecom equipment, its hopes to expand more widely into the U.S. market just got incrementally more complicated.

Over the past four years, it has become evident that the town hall of American government has moved online and into the social arena. Public officials in every corner of government — not just politicians — are expanding their use of social media to better understand and communicate with today’s digital citizens.

With an estimated 107 million Twitter users in the United States and another 156 million Americans using Facebook, more and more people expect real-time access and authentic engagement with everything from the brands they love to the governments they elect. In fact, according to a survey by Accenture of citizens in seven countries, including the United States, 50 percent believe that being able to interact digitally with government would encourage them to become more engaged and would make government more transparent.

Recognizing the opportunity to engage the digital generation in the democratic process, the state of Washington took the unprecedented step in July of becoming the first U.S. state to allow eligible residents to register to vote in this year’s election through Facebook. The secure registration process Washington developed clearly signals the collapse of the last few barriers to the public acceptance of social media as a critical — and secure — medium for government communications. In addition to increasing voter participation, the new process will require no printing, signing or mailing of forms to a state office — saving both time and state resources. Today, government is using social media to register voters, but soon we may see actual voting via Facebook, and the opportunity to become a truly digital democracy.

While encouraging, the state of Washington is unfortunately not the norm. In the same Accenture study that found a majority of Americans want greater social engagement from their government, fewer than half of the respondents believe their government has effectively leveraged social and digital platforms to ease access to public services. While major consumer brands are busy trying to meet the challenges of the social marketplace, most public-sector efforts lag behind citizen expectations. After Y2K, governments turned to “e-government” to dramatically improve their efficiency and effectiveness, building online portals to dispense important information about public services. However, the fundamental aspiration of Gov. 2.0 — a more personal, convenient and empowering interaction, a social contract with citizens — was not realized.

Even when government agencies decide to engage, most “social” programs are still relegated to one-way information broadcasting and sporadic individual use by officials. But mobility has brought us to a tipping point, and social engagement is the next frontier. The good news is that there are many other good examples to emulate.

In 2011, for example, FEMA officials were able to monitor social media conversations and respond to tornado disaster reports in Joplin, Mo., from citizens on the ground before official reports could be verified. And, in Boulder, Colo., real-time social communications between citizens and government through Facebook and Twitter helped save lives and property as a wildfire raged in 2010.

New York City has re-engineered a tool from the analog era — 311 — into a leading social media support system to facilitate more efficient citizen interaction with city government and reduce public services spending. Leveraging Twitter and Facebook from a mobile device, residents can use NYC 311 to request pothole repair or report graffiti simply by attaching a photo and hitting the send button. The system shortens government response time, reduces costs and deepens the connection between citizens and local government.

The federal government also has begun leveraging the connectivity of social media to streamline government and save taxpayer money. A good example is an innovative program called the SAVE Award (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency), which effectively crowd sources cost-saving ideas from federal employees on how to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. Since introducing the program in 2009, federal employees have submitted more than 56,000 cost-cutting ideas.

Social media applications are used very effectively throughout the private sector to trim costs and improve efficiency. Cisco, for example, says it has been able to reach 90 times the audience for a key router it produces at one-sixth the cost through social channels.

Imagine the potential savings and insights that government could generate by having an ongoing online dialogue with citizens. Getting there would require funding for the tools, training, analytics and measurement needed, but there’s no doubt, in this era of continued belt tightening, that social media could render a positive return on investment.

Government agencies can start now by taking three steps:

• First, they should conduct a bottom-up assessment to determine how best to leverage social media to serve the unique needs of their constituents. Agencies at every government level should review programs and practices built for the offline era to determine how the social marketplace can reshape their service offerings for the next decade.
• Next, government workforces must be given the tools necessary to create two-way integration, especially those under 30 who prefer to communicate through social channels. They must be trained in all relevant digital technology to be ready for the next phase of citizen communication.
• Finally, governments should solicit direct feedback from the public through free tools like Facebook and Twitter. This type of “digital democracy” enables citizens to make recommendations in real time and to play a leading role in shaping everything from public policy to public services.

Increased transparency through social media at all levels of government can deepen the connection with the public, instill a greater sense of trust and drive increased citizen participation. With a majority of Americans seeking more social interaction with their government, and the potential for increased efficiency and cost savings, social engagement will help create the public services for the future that digital citizens demand and deserve.

Stephen J. Rohleder is group chief executive for Accenture’s global Health & Public Service business.

But this was more of a public comment than a formal takedown notice. The White House requested that YouTube review the “Innocence of Muslims” movie trailer for terms-of-use violations, rather than asking that it be taken down. “We cannot and will not squelch freedom of expression in this country,” said White House press secretary Jay Carney, per Politico.

A YouTube spokesman noted today that the site had earlier this week blocked access to the video in India, Indonesia, Libya and Egypt.

YouTube said it did not restrict access to the video as the results of requests from the White House, and added that it will not be re-reviewing anything at the request of the White House because the video has already been determined to comply with YouTube Community Guidelines.

In order to remove illegal content, the site requires a court order or official government notification in the countries where it operates.

In only a few election cycles, political campaigning online has changed dramatically, a fact underscored by President Barack Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on Reddit Wednesday afternoon.

President Obama is not the first well-known name to do an AMA on Reddit, which has hosted guests ranging from Bill Nye the Science Guy to Larry King to (infamously) actor Woody Harrelson.

With apologies to Larry King fans, though, he is easily the most powerful and influential person to do an AMA, and one of only a few American politicians (a group that includes former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner, who stopped by before his little Twitter scandal).

President Obama already has a strong track record with the Web, building a groundbreaking online campaign in 2008 that arguably secured his edge over competitors in both the primaries and the general election.

Only 20 years ago, a political campaigner reaching voters as President Obama did Wednesday would have been completely unusual. In 1992, the University of Southern California harnessed the pre-Web Internet to print out candidates’ speeches and position papers and distribute them to students.

The White House didn’t have a Web site at all then. In 1994, the Clinton-Gore administration debuted this official site, which looked like this by the end of Clinton’s second term.

By 1996, all major presidential candidates had at least some presence on the Web, posting static collections of speeches, position papers and so on.

However, despite a budding audience for news online, researcher Rita Kirk Whillock found that the Internet “did not have a significant impact” on former President Clinton’s re-election, with less than one percent of voters saying they got most of their political information online.

President Clinton won that election with a more than 8 percent lead over Republican candidate Sen. Bob Dole. And as the Senate Web site boasted, his 1997 inauguration was the first to be streamed live online.

With increased political activity online (not to mention an election without an incumbent in the race), the 2000 presidential campaign did not live up to watchers’ expectations for how candidates would use the Internet.

Perhaps the biggest tech story from that year was Sen. John McCain’s supporters contributing $2.2 million online to his Republican primary campaign.

(In 2008, in contrast, President Obama raised more than 200 times as much — or $500 million — from his online backers.)

Later that year, former President George W. Bush coined the term “Internets,” and there was much rejoicing. While he was in office, though, Bush’s footprint online was much smaller than that of potential rival politicians such as Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who raised twice as much early campaign money online as the Democrats’ eventual 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry.

Dean’s not-quite-successful use of Meetup.com to rally voters around his candidacy in 2004 foreshadowed President Obama’s more fruitful run at the White House in 2008.

By then, the social Web had come into its own, and his campaign used my.BarackObama.com to drive not just donations and rallies, but also online word-of-mouth buzz that propagated through supporters’ social networks.

It wasn’t until after President Bush left office in 2009 that his online profile went up slightly. Although he has kept fairly quiet in his time out of the Oval Office, he went on YouTube in 2010 to thank viewers with an “inaugural address” for his Facebook page.

At the same time, The Wall Street Journal also reported that Bush had joined Twitter. But even though Twitter rolled out the ability to verify celebrity accounts as authentic the year before, @George_WBush was never verified. Not that it matters, though, since Bush has used it just four times and didn’t tweet at all for more than two years.

Today, that sort of Web silence would be irresponsible for a major presidential candidate. As have many Republicans, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has found success on Twitter. But he’s still losing the numbers game, with fewer than 950,000 followers versus more than 19 million for President Obama.

Still, Romney hasn’t shied away from the Web in other arenas, pouncing on Apple’s mobile advertising service iAd, and attempting to announce that Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan would be his vice-presidential nominee via a campaign-branded mobile app.

Images: Obama, Official White House Photo by Pete Souza; Romney, Maria Dryfhout / Shutterstock.com

However, President Obama’s AMA — not-so-coincidentally timed during the Republican National Convention in Tampa — puts him out in front of the Internet popularity contest. As with his oft-derided online petition platform for the White House, what he said on Reddit doesn’t really matter. The act alone of reaching out to potential voters on Reddit (which served more than two billion page views in December) and other online communities is now imperative.

That’s because the Internet, for better or for worse, has become the new town hall for politics that many over-eager futurists said it would be in the ’90s. At long last, it’s now a place where current and future candidates have to stop, even if they don’t want to.

So the question is not if Romney should fire back at his rival’s Reddit stunt, but rather how he should do it. Control of the now-crucial online conversation is President Obama’s to lose.

The latest version of the Twitter Political Index, a daily measurement of the population’s sentiment toward the two White House contenders showed Romney doing something he hasn’t done since mid-July, which is to pull ahead of Obama. Romney scored a 39 for the day, meaning, as AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac explained earlier this month, that tweets containing Romney’s name or account name, @MittRomney, are on average more positive than 39 percent of all of the 400 million tweets on all subjects, not just politics. That score amounted to an improvement of 25 points from the prior day, and can easily be attributed to chatter about the pros and cons of Ryan’s winning of the Veepstakes.

President Obama saw his score surge by eight points, to 32. His score has been falling from a recent spike of 74 earlier in the week.

And while it’s not exactly scientific like, say, a Gallup opinion poll, in which a segment of the population is formally asked about its opinions and attitudes toward a candidate on specific issues, Twitter does like to brag that its scores have, at least in President Obama’s case, tended to closely parallel the patterns of his approval ratings.

I’m no polling expert, but I’ve lived through enough presidential elections to know that candidates always get a bump in the national polls after they pick their running mate. And Gallup’s historical data, going back to 1996, bears this out. The bounce in sentiment on Twitter appears to be more or less consistent with that tradition, though we’ll know more about it after a few national polls hit the streets. (Hat tip to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times for the Gallup link.)

Gallup’s data on the subject doesn’t go further back than 1996. But its data shows that the biggest post-Veepstakes surge in the polls occurred that year, when Sen. Bob Dole, then running against Bill Clinton, named Jack Kemp as his running mate. History lesson for the youngsters: Kemp had been an NFL quarterback and played for the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills before getting elected to the House of Representatives. He later served as Housing Secretary to the first President Bush.

Here’s another interesting bit of related trivia, which, naturally, I learned via Twitter: When the running mate comes from the House of Representatives, the ticket tends not to win. The last time a running mate on a winning presidential ticket came from the House was in 1908.

Not that you asked, but that was the year that William Howard Taft, who had been Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president, picked James S. Sherman from New York. Roosevelt and Taft are both well-remembered in history, and Roosevelt biographies remain bestsellers even today. Sherman — who is remembered mostly for dying while running with Taft in a reelection bid that ultimately failed — I had to look up.

Also on the rise today? Tweets about obscure political trivia. That’s just a hunch.

It is a big package of software that apparently offers an attacker something like a Swiss Army knife, because it can do a lot of things that might be called for. It can monitor a computer’s network traffic, including tracking which Web sites are visited, and log and copy email coming in and going out. It can turn on a computer’s internal microphone and record conversations in the room and presumably send audio files of those recorded conversations to someone who will listen to them. Ditto with a machine’s internal Web cam. It can record what characters are typed on the keyboard, thereby capturing sensitive information like passwords and other user credentials that can be used later. It can capture shots of what is being displayed on a computer’s screen.

Seen in the wild some weeks back, the Washington Post, citing Western intelligence officials, reported today that Flame was created by the combined efforts and resources of the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. The story matches and fills in some details on reporting by the New York Times on the same subject.

Work on Flame, the Post says, predated and later led to the creation of the Stuxnet worm, which is newer but was seen first in 2010. In that case, an Israeli-created worm that targeted industrial control computers in Iran is thought to have caused some centrifuges used to enrich uranium to spin too fast and explode.

Allow me to stitch this thread together with another: It was about a year ago that the Obama Administration made some broad pronouncements on treating cyberspace — the Internet and other scattered parts of the digital stage — as a new theater of warfare, equal, for military purposes, to land, sea, sky and space. An attack in one place warrants a military response or retaliation in another.

At the time, I wondered what a cyberwar might look like. Now we have an idea. The governments of the United States and Israel have been conducting a not-so-covert war against Iran without having to disclose it to their people.

Knowing this leaves me with two questions, one perhaps a legal technicality, the other more practical.

First, if the U.S. views attacks in cyberspace the same as other attacks, then how is a country being attacked supposed to see that? If the U.S. reserves the right to respond to a cyber attack with an air strike, does that not mean that Iran can do the same thing? And if the U.S. is launching attacks, shouldn’t there be some overt public acknowledgement of that fact? Yes, I’ll grant, fighting with bits is preferable to fighting with bullets and bombs, but if it’s the Obama Administration’s position that fighting with one is legally equal to fighting with another, shouldn’t one be done as readily in the open as the other? Warfare requires a degree of public approval. Espionage doesn’t.

Second, I have longer-term concerns about blowback and unintended consequences. Stuxnet and Flame were hard to make, and they were never intended to be discovered, let alone pulled apart and studied as closely as they have been. The fact that they’ve been studied in detail by both the good guys and the bad guys makes me wonder who might be learning from Stuxnet and Flame in order to adapt them for such things as, say, corporate espionage.

If Flame amounts to an early example of a new type of malware that can both easily evade detection and record everything happening both on and around a computer, then companies will have to respond accordingly. Imagine a world where anytime anyone holds a meeting where sensitive information is discussed, it takes place in a secure room with no electronics present. And that’s just for openers.

The order authorizes sanctions and visa bans against people using information technology who commit or facilitate grave human-rights abuses related to “Syrian and Iranian regime brutality,” the White House said. The order would also allow the U.S. to target companies that enable human-rights abuses with technology.

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A great deal of this campaigning takes place in the traditional media forums: TV, radio, local newspapers, and voters occasionally get to meet the candidates in person.

But even more of this takes place on the Web. Practically every political ad that runs on a television screen anywhere in the country is also placed on YouTube and promoted on Twitter and Facebook. So are speeches and debates. This is good for voters who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can go back and evaluate what candidates says and make a judgement about them on their own time.

That is, if you can get to them. For most Americans, access to a solid broadband Internet connection is as readily available as an electrical connection, and only a phone call away. But for roughly a third of the country, it’s not so easy. That means that about a third of the nation’s population is less able to participate in the democratic process the way the rest of us do.

That, to me, is a troubling thought, when I consider the nation’s broadband-adoption problem. It basically comes down to this: Lower-populated rural areas and some inner-city areas don’t have the same access to the Internet that most Americans take almost for granted. Cable and phone companies often opt not to build the infrastructure needed in certain lightly populated areas, because they can’t justify the investment.

When he came into office in 2009, one cornerstone of President Obama’s technology policy concerned correcting this via grants included in the economic stimulus package. In 2010, Obama delivered the National Broadband Plan. And last year, the president talked to Congress about his hopes to bring broadband to 98 percent of the country, and using wireless technology to do it.

Little has worked. A new study, out today from TechNet, a tech-industry lobbying group, says that broadband adoption at the national level has plateaued at 68 percent of the population, only slight higher than the 65 percent it was when Obama became president.

What happened? Lots of people and organizations with great ideas emerged to try and tackle the problem, the report finds. But they all suffer from a severe lack of coordination, and wildly different visions of what the outcome should be. “Stakeholders are flying blind when it comes to understanding best practices to improve broadband adoption …” the report reads. It goes on to say, “To the extent that poor policy coordination hampers efforts to increase broadband adoption, we run the risk of having a less inclusive society, a smaller domestic market for tech goods and services, and a less innovative economy.”

One problem is simple demographics: A 2011 survey by the government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that only 43 percent of households earning $25,000 or less had broadband at home, and that only 46 percent of those with less than a high school diploma have it.

Then there’s the economy. A Pew survey found that 9 percent of people who at one time had broadband had cut their service off during the previous 12 months because of economic concerns. And that figure rose to more than 16 percent of people earning $30,000 a year or less.

There are apparently historical precedents for this sort of thing. During the Great Depression, telephone adoption dropped from 42 percent in 1929 to 31 percent in 1934. Electrical service leveled off at 67 percent during the Depression, and didn’t resume climbing until later.

A lot of people think that this same demographic just uses smartphones instead, but the data in the report shows that’s not the case generally, and if you added “smartphone-only” users to broadband users, you still end up with only a 73 percent adoption rate.

And this cost of “digital exclusion,” TechNet finds, is more than just participation in the election process. Employers increasingly require that applications for jobs be filed online. Healthcare is increasingly tracked online. Even just taking advantage of good deals on Groupon or LivingSocial more or less implies broadband access.

What to do? Get everyone on the same page, for one thing. The report suggests getting the numerous federal and state efforts pulling in one direction on such aspects of the problem as collecting reliable data, and setting an agreed-upon set of best practices.

There’s also the option of leaving well enough alone. Demographics have a way of shifting over time. Old people who don’t bother with broadband will die, and younger people who can’t imagine living without it will either demand it where they live or move to places where they can get it. As I learned in 2008 when I wrote this story for Businessweek, sometimes that can be as easy as moving to the other side of a street. Sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting for the cable company to offer service in your area.

My guess is that this is a problem that’s not going to easily solve itself with a market-based approach, but so far the government-based options aren’t looking so good, either.

The reversal is being announced as part of the White House’s call for Congress to pass a “privacy bill of rights,” that will give people greater control over the personal data collected about them.

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Here is a deeply silly video of NBC late-night show host Jimmy Fallon and First Lady Michelle Obama competing in a potato-sack race.

You read that right. Also a push-up battle, a hula-hoop hip-off and a tug-of-war in the White House, all part of Obama’s “Let’s Move” exercise initiatives aimed at improving children’s health.

It’s got a goofy charm, and the kids will love it (mine did):