Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced the Protecting Data at the Border Act on May 22. The legislation would ban the Federal government from conducting warrantless searches of Americans’ phones and laptops when crossing the U.S. border. […]
For the first time, Moody’s has downgraded a company’s credit rating because of a cyberattack. […]
The House Oversight and Reform Committee held a hearing May 22 examining the impact of facial recognition technology on citizens’ civil rights and right to privacy. […]
The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee held a hearing Wednesday, May 22, on pending legislation – including bills related to electronic health records, and to make the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) website more accessible to disabled veterans – but took no votes on those measures. […]
Members of two House Veterans Affairs subcommittees sharply criticized Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials at a hearing on Wednesday, May 23 for the agency’s failure to keep up with expanding IT requirements for VA’s popular Caregivers program, which provides a range of services for post-9/11 wounded veterans. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program expects to announce the award of a new contract this week for dashboard ecosystem technology that will better integrate at both the Federal agency and DHS level security data generated through the CDM program. […]
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its cost estimate for the Small Business Administration (SBA) Cyber Awareness Act, H.R. 2331 and S. 772, on May 20, and said the bill would cost nothing to implement. […]
A new memo released Tuesday, May 22, by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) updates the Federal identity, credentials, and access management (ICAM) policy, encouraging the use of more flexible solutions, supporting pilots for new authenticators, and requiring agencies to create an ICAM team. […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a list of best practices for securing election systems on May 21. […]
The Defense Security Service has awarded a $75 million contract to Perspecta through an other transaction agreement (OTA) that will work to add advanced AI to backend systems and modernize the vetting processes of security clearance personnel for the National Background Investigation Service (NBIS). […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking to standardize a national crowdsourced tool in the department after it reported having success in driving efficiency across VA healthcare centers. […]
Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee regarding President Trump’s 2020 fiscal year budget, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan stated that the 2020 budget would continue to assist in building up an innovative tower effort at the U.S.-Mexico border. […]
House members and witnesses from academia and industry on Tuesday discussed the importance of providing academic programs, tools, and pathways to not only help address the cybersecurity workforce shortage in America, but to also diversify the cybersecurity field. […]
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said today he plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit online service providers from collecting data from consumers “any data that is beyond what is necessary for the companies’ online services.” […]
The Trump administration’s plan to reorganize the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) ran squarely into bipartisan concerns expressed by House members over a lack of information about the plan to move the agency’s functions to the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). […]
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a memo today to agency chief human capital officers (CHCOs) encouraging increased workplace flexibilities for employees impacted by the closure of six Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) stations over the summer. […]
Due to poor contract management controls, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been overpaying contractors, and has had inadequate invoice reviews for noncompliant invoices that were undetected, a new EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) report found. […]
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, announced on May 20 that Eric Einhorn will serve as his new Chief of Staff. […]
Use of “shadow IT” – applications, tools, or services that haven’t been approved or secured by an organization’s IT team – has become more ubiquitous across organizations. But rather than banning the practice, enterprises should find a balance in regulating and allowing it, an ISACA primer released this week said. […]
A bipartisan group of Federal legislators wrote Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on May 20 urging “greater scrutiny and regulation of private companies providing highly advanced surveillance capabilities to governments with troubling human rights records.” […]
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) still has hackable vulnerabilities in its computer networks, while the Republican National Committee (RNC) performed slightly better than the DNC, but still has gaps to fill, according to a new report. […]
The government spends 6.4 percent of its funding on IT, nearly double the 3.3 percent spent on average by industry, leading to billions spent instead of adopting commercial systems, according to a report by the Alliance for Digital Innovation (ADI) released May 18. […]
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the U.S. Air Force announced an agreement on May 20 to launch a program to advance artificial intelligence (AI) in Air Force operations. […]
The House Appropriations Committee’s Defense Appropriations Subcommittee last week approved an FY2020 defense spending bill that would withhold funding for the Defense Department to move applications to the proposed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud until the DoD CIO reports to Congress on how the department plans to create a multicloud environment. […]
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will call for a Federal investigation that examines the potential national security threat of plans to install New York subway cars designed by a Chinese state-owned company. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Energy, Veterans Affairs (VA), U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy inappropriately awarded 1,849 contracts to businesses that had tax debts in 2015 and 2016. […]
Senior Federal government decision-makers support the government adopting artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and want to accelerate existing efforts to do so, according to a Government Business Council (GBC) report released today. […]
As one of the agencies that has strongly embraced cloud computing, the Small Business Administration (SBA) is using the agility and native capabilities of the cloud to improve data analytics and better share data, said Steve Perry, Enterprise Data Integration Manager at SBA. […]
President Trump was a victim of hacking on May 17 when four false scores were posted to Trump’s United States Golf Association-administered Golf Handicap and Information Network (GHIN) system. The scores were middling by golf standards (101, 100, 108 and 102), and deviated from Trump’s typical reported scores which fall in the 70s and 80s. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has added customer experience (CX) to its Core Values and Characteristics guidelines – a move that indicates that VA will prioritize CX in its mission. […]