Why did Bush revoke Executive Order 13011 today?

Why did Bush revoke Executive Order 13011 today?
by exmearden
Fri May 12, 2006 at 08:27:46 PM PDT

In scanning the whitehouse.gov site today, I noticed the following Executive Order:

Executive Order: Amendments to Executive Orders 11030, 13279, 13339, 13381, and 13389, and Revocation of Executive Order 13011

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Most of the amendments in this Order pertain to existing orders and seem fairly innocuous. One item that caught my eye was the Revocation of Executive Order 13011.
I'm passing familiar with 13011, hanging around the technology industry as I have for a few years.

Executive Order 13011 is an Executive Order signed by President Clinton in 1996 and, in effect, goes hand in hand with the Clinger/Cohen Act of 1996. I'm oversimplifying here, but one of the reasons that the Clinger/Cohen Act was put into place was to enforce standards of information technology across the federal landscape, a mishmash at the time and sorely in need of some kind of structure.

There have been, and still are, other more dastardly motives implied in the passage of the Act, and by association implied in the creation of Clinton's Executive Order. At the time, liberals and conservatives alike saw the passage of the Act and the signing of the Executive Order as a step taken toward a 1984 world (sound familiar?). The Executive Order loosely advocates sharing of information and technology structure across agencies and with nongovernmental entities. It could be implied that sharing of such information and structure across country borders when necessary was also supported in the Executive Order 13011.

Debate about Executive Order 13011 has never been resolved completely. It created an environment in which a massive information technology bureaucracy could be allowed to thrive, if only the government were so efficient/inefficient, depending on your individual point of view. There are many that argue that the Executive Order, in typical Executive Order elliptical phrasing, sets the stage for the kind of far-reaching and extensive gathering of intelligence data that the NSA is doing and that the Order further establishes the original "technical" mandate for secretive use of such gargantuan amounts of data.

Granted, my explanation and background is a bit brief given the overall text of the Executive Order and considering all the possible analyses of why the order was executed in the first place.

But why did Bush revoke Executive Order 13011 today? What items are in the Executive Order (or perhaps not in the Order) that might cause said order to no longer be valid? It was amended a couple of times in 2003 to include the Department of Homeland Security in the list of agencies and departments covered by the umbrella of the Executive Order.

I find it very strange that, of all days or weeks in this administration and in the midst of a storm over the possible information abuse of private ciitizens, today would be the day Bush would mess with a previous Executive Order on information technology management. Will Bush push a broader information technology mandate for the federal government in the form of a new Executive Order? Is there something lethal to the administration in 13011, perhaps something that calls for oversight or review and that possibly places the legality of the NSA's phone number database in question?

Am I paranoid? Is there something in this Order that stands in the way of the administration's next steps in gathering information?