President-elect Barack Obama names a chief performance officer? Yawn.

We must add one small caveat, though: Although the site shows that more than 40,000 shares have been traded, it does not reveal how many people are actually taking part. Think of it as the wisdom of an unknown crowd. About 160 Bush-appointed Defense Department officials could stay in place until their replacements actually report for duty. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked them to stay until they are relieved. Political appointees normally resign when a new president takes office, but Gates is staying on indefinitely, and the Obama team let him decide whether to ask others to remain as well, according to media reports. This kind of transition is called point of contact, insiders tell us. It’s sort of a grown-up game of tag. Played in uniform. Everybody knows they should  closely safeguard their Social Security numbers. They are widely used in identity theft, a nine-digit Rosetta Stone that can unlock all your secrets. But is the Social Security Administration itself able to safeguard your information? Ensuring the privacy and security of data that it provides to data exchange partners is one of several areas the Government Accountability Office said SSA needs to improve. According to GAO, SSA performs more than 1 billion data exchange transactions annually to verify Social Security numbers for federal and state agencies. Because there are slightly more than 300 million Americans, it’s a good bet that yours, mine and your annoying cubicle neighbor’s are — or soon will be — among them. The Homeland Security Department is doing a better job than it used to in getting information to state and local fusion centers, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement, according to the DHS inspector general. The fusion centers are supposed to combine information from multiple local, state and federal sources and build comprehensive views of possible terrorism-related or criminal activity. But DHS is still not consistently providing adequate and timely information, according to the IG.DHS had not sent personnel to work in all of the centers either, with only 23 intelligence officers deployed among 58 centers as of April 2008.