Smarter Gov Tech, Stronger MerITocracy

The complex legislative process needed to bring congressional leaders together to reconcile differences between Senate-passed and House-passed semiconductor and innovation legislation advanced in the Senate this week, and now stands just a few steps from completion, as lawmakers call for cybersecurity-related components of the bills to make the final cut. […]

White House flag at half mast

The U.S. Navy’s Chief Data Officer (CDO) said the service branch is embarking on a data infrastructure transformation to tackle a two-pronged challenge: first, how to deal with the sheer amount of data collected, and second, understanding if the Navy has the correct kinds of data to help leaders make decisions. […]

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., are working together on a bipartisan bill that would provide clarity on the United States’ regulation of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, the pair announced March 24 at an event organized by Politico. […]

GSA General Services Administration

The General Services Administration (GSA) announced today that it boosted its Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 goal for small disadvantaged business (SDB) contracting to 21 percent, more than a four-fold increase from the government-wide statutory goal of five percent in FY2021. […]

New legislation introduced by Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and John Cornyn, R-Texas would codify into Federal law the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, and provide for a pilot program for state and local governments to deploy the cybersecurity technologies that the CDM program offers. […]

Blockchain link

Blockchain technologies face challenges, but a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) offers a range of policy recommendations that could help enhance the benefits and mitigate challenges posed by the use of those technologies.  […]

High-performance sensor architectures are allowing for faster data processing as more data continues to become available and requires processing for analysis and artificial intelligence applications, officials from NVIDIA and Lockheed Martin said on March 24 at the NVIDIA GTC Conference. […]

Bipartisan members of the House of Representatives have introduced legislation that would reauthorize the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI), which is the U.S. Secret Service’s Federally-funded training hub for digital evidence and cybercrime investigations. […]

IT

Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. and John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a bill on March 23 that aims to reduce the Federal government’s reliance on outdated and obsolete information technologies (IT) by requiring agency officials to inventory their “legacy” IT systems and come up with plans to modernize systems. […]

As intense wildfires have become a more serious issue in the last few years worldwide – causing billions of dollars in damage in the western U.S. alone – firefighting teams need a better solution to mitigate and better understand the cause of the spreading conflagrations. […]

ransomware

A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation this week that would require public reporting and notice – eventually – of hundreds of thousands of court-ordered criminal surveillance orders issued  each year that are often kept under seal indefinitely even if the surveillance targets were not accused of any crimes. […]

DoD Pentagon Military

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., today called the Online Privacy Act of 2021 that she introduced in the House last year along with Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., a “good solid piece of legislation” that would regulate the collection, use, and retention of consumers’ online data, but also forecast that the bill has a “long ways to go” in the legislative process before it becomes law. […]

AI

Splunk’s cybersecurity and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) suite can be combined with NVIDIA Morpheus running on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Edgeline GPU-accelerated converged edge platform to provide AI-enabled real-time monitoring and remediation of an edge network, all while saving analysts and data scientists time. […]

As use of artificial intelligence (AI) increases across the public and private sector, companies like Lockheed Martin are using AI advancements to further missions and to even collaborate with NVIDIA to address wildfires. […]

CISA
EPA Environmental Protection Agency

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reached an agreement with the union representing agency employees for policies governing the return of employees to traditional offices in what amounts to a larger hybrid work-location approach. […]

Federal agencies are emerging from a tough season of security vulnerabilities – SolarWinds and Log4j among them – knowing that bad actors are changing their game plans. At the same time, agencies are improving their cyber playbooks with zero trust guidance from the White House, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and others. […]

Federal agencies are showing urgency and pushing hard to meet challenging zero trust security implementation deadlines following rollout of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) zero trust strategy in January, government and industry experts agreed during a March 15 webinar hosted by MeriTalk and Merlin Cyber. […]

Veterans Affairs

The Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) has awarded General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) a $45 million Enterprise Security Architecture (ESA) contract to support the agency’s business and IT modernization initiatives. […]

AI

As the Department of the Air Force deploys AI to maintain a competitive advantage and equip warfighters with the most effective tools to do their job, CIO Lauren Knausenberger said her agency is taking a “human-in-the-loop” approach to maintain strong ethical guidelines. […]

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