Five telecommunication industry groups–American Cable Association; CTIA – The Wireless Association; NCTA – The Internet & Television Association; USTelecom – The Broadband Association and the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association–filed suit against the state of Vermont on Thursday over the state’s net neutrality law. The law in question seeks to prevent companies that do not abide by the state’s net neutrality rules from receiving state contracts. […]
With critical infrastructure emerging as a major concern for the U.S. government, cybersecurity efforts must account for critical infrastructure’s interdependent and connected nature, and make sure to address the linkages between industries, said experts from the private and public sector at a Wednesday event hosted by the Atlantic Council. […]
Retired Adm. Mike Rogers, who stepped down earlier this year as head of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, has joined the board of advisors of Team8, an Israel-based cybersecurity think tank and company-creation platform. […]
The U.S. Navy released its final request for proposals for the Service, Management, Integration and Transport portion of the service’s Next Generation Recompete (NGEN-R) contract on Thursday, building on the current $3.5 billion Next Generation Enterprise Networks (NGEN) contract. […]
As fake news threatens to eat the world, a number of government, academic, and private organizations have launched a range of projects to combat its spread, including artificial intelligence systems that can flag fake news by calling out its content. […]
On Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai announced an investigation into how wireless services providers responded to Hurricane Michael, which devastated the Florida Panhandle and surrounding areas–along with service provider infrastructure–last week. […]
Current and retired Defense Department IT officials today discussed cost and opportunity implications of further cloud adoption by the military and potential payoffs including acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]
Yesterday two academics proposed creating an international organization modeled after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that would “provide assistance and relief to vulnerable citizens and enterprises affected by serious cyberattacks.” […]
Data from the Federal government’s IT Dashboard website appear to indicate that Federal CFO Act agencies have made some progress but are still more than 1,000 data centers short of their intended closure goals for 2020 under the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI). […]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new draft guidance for the cybersecurity of medical devices on Wednesday, with a focus on risk management and applying the cybersecurity framework from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). […]
For agencies looking to score a touchdown with their customer experience, the General Services Administration (GSA) released its Customer Experience Playbook today, offering “a synthesis of ideas gathered from interviewing several subject matter experts and leaders in CX and Human Centered Design in government.” […]
Apple announced on Wednesday that the company will allow users in the United States to download the data that Apple has collected about them–a feature previously only available to citizens of the European Union. […]
President Trump said today that the administration would be asking cabinet-level secretaries to cut their budgets. […]
Two prominent tech-sector trade groups said Tuesday that planned trade agreement talks between the U.S. and the European Union, United Kingdom, and Japan should prioritize easing cross-border data flows and barring requirements to compel the transfer of technology, source code, and encryption keys. […]
In a report released today, the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, (ISC)², a nonprofit association of certified cybersecurity professionals, found a global cybersecurity workforce shortage of 2.93 million people as of August 2018. […]
Three members of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) board and Federal Deputy CIO Margie Graves spoke today about fund’s ongoing efforts including the transferable effect of some of the board’s decision principles and how they tie into the larger IT modernization ecosystem. […]
Federal CIO Suzette Kent provided a demonstration this morning at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s (ACT-IAC) Imagine Nation ELC Conference to help envision a future for government services that may not be that far away. […]
A new draft of the Federal Data Strategy is out, and Federal IT leaders are looking for feedback on the proposed practices and objectives that will further advance the President’s Management Agenda (PMA). […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) machines can out-think humans when it comes to a lot of complex, fine-grained tasks, such as detecting signs of cancer more accurately than doctors can, or finding exoplanets based on “dimming effect” data from distant solar systems. But what they don’t have is good old common sense, the ability to apply its knowledge, and the experience to various tasks humans can do from childhood. […]
The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University released a new study yesterday examining the 24 million comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding net neutrality between April and August of 2017. […]
Two Federal government officials speaking today at an event organized by the Consortium for IT Software Quality expressed concern about what they see as an increasingly high turnover rate in recent years among Federal agency chief information officers and chief information security officers. […]
Emily Murphy, administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), delivered a keynote address today that provided a glimpse of her vision as the head of GSA, along with recent government IT wins and the path she sees ahead for the agency serving as the Federal facilitator for IT acquisition and modernization. […]
At the request of several Federal agencies, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) has created and released a framework for organizations to better share indications and warnings (I&W) of cyberattacks and deconstruct that data into indicators that can be monitored. […]
Federal Deputy CIO Margie Graves said today that the forthcoming update to the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative is coming “extraordinarily soon.” With the update, there seems to be an acknowledgment that the former ways of TIC–now over a decade old–will be yielding, including the TIC architecture often seen as expensive and inflexible to cloud technologies. […]
Christopher Krebs, under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), said DHS is not seeing an increased number of cyberattacks on election systems, but “a consistent and persistent level of activity” in that arena. […]
Health insurance provider Anthem has agreed to pay the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights (OCR) $16 million to settle what HHS called “potential violations” of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in connection with an Anthem data breach in late 2014 and early 2015 in which cyber criminals stole data on nearly 79 million individuals including names, Social Security numbers, medical identification numbers, and email addresses, among others. […]
Following the fifth EU-U.S. Cyber Dialogue last month in Brussels, the United States and the European Union today released a statement reaffirming their “strong partnership in favour of a global, open, stable and secure cyberspace where the rule of law fully applies, where the same rights that individuals have offline are protected online, and where the security, economic growth, prosperity, and integrity of free and democratic societies is promoted and preserved.” […]
Today marks the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) deadline for Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 18-01, which requires Federal agencies to adopt the Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance protocol (DMARC) for email authentication. […]
As Federal agencies continue to amass vast amounts of data, it’s inevitable that some portion of it won’t hold a ton of value to an agency’s mission. It could be a simple email to schedule your next meeting, or it could be notes scribbled on a Word document and stashed on an agency server. Outside of its immediate use at that point in time, there’s not a strong need to store it in perpetuity. […]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released an update for the agency’s $5 billion Information Technology Supplies and Support Services (ITSSS) contract, announcing that the agency would opt for vendors under the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70 and thus changing the agency’s initial strategy of an open and full recompete. […]