General Paul Nakasone, head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (CyberCom), recommended keeping the agencies under the same leader for the next two years, according to a report by the Washington Post […]

We’re sitting at a critical inflection point in Federal IT.  Cloud wars are raging, AI’s bubbling, and IoT’s, well, almost literally, everywhere.  And, as in any conflict, the first casualty is all too often the truth.  […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking to significantly overhaul its online presence, and on Wednesday opened bidding on a contract to develop a content management system for VA.gov–the agency’s primary website. […]

A collection of tech-sector trade groups including the Internet Association and Digital Europe is urging leaders from the world’s top 20 economic powers to focus on policies that encourage broadband deployment and adoption, and job skills training for the digital workforce when the G20’s Digital Economy Task Force meets next week in Argentina. […]

The Department of Homeland Security today released a request for information (RFI) calling on the private sector to provide DHS with information on strategies and tools to augment its cyber supply chain risk management program. […]

The Defense Department is pushing full speed ahead on modernization efforts, with recent strides made on a $28 billion R&D project, a $10 billion cloud infrastructure proposed contract, efforts to move cyber defense infrastructure to the cloud, along with myriad advanced research and futuristic projects. They’re even working to overhaul their travel planning system. Call it AirDoD, perhaps? […]

The Secure Elections Act, S. 2593, which is expected to be marked up by the Senate Rules Committee later this month, has been freshly amended to require states to have a cyber response and communication plan in place as a precondition to receiving Federal grants to support election security and election technology modernization. […]

A new report from The Century Foundation, a progressive think-tank, urges state law enforcement officials to take action on data privacy regulations in the absence of any substantial movement in that direction by the Federal government. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) has hired Michael Conlin as its first chief data officer (CDO). According to his LinkedIn profile, Conlin started in his new position in July. […]

Bill Zielinski has been tapped to replace Kay Ely and will serve as the acting assistant commissioner of the IT Category (ITC) for the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), a GSA official confirmed to MeriTalk today. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) announced the selection of SAP Concur for a $9.3 million contract to develop a new system to replace the current Defense Travel System. […]

Pamela Wise-Martinez, chief cloud and enterprise data architect at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, discussed the opportunities for Federal agencies to shift from disparate multi-cloud environments to effective use of hybrid cloud – marrying together on-prem, private, and public cloud use. […]

The Government Accountability Office released a report Wednesday that says the Federal government needs to provide more reliable data on employee misconduct, and suggested that Federal managers need better training to ensure that inappropriate employee behavior is dealt with appropriately. […]

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai today defended his year-long public insistence that the FCC was the victim of a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which impacted its electronic comment filing system during the agency’s net neutrality rulemaking proceeding last year, but admitted to having his own doubts about the cause of the system problem. […]

While members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today appeared to be generally positive toward the nomination of Lane Genatowski to be the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy, they also had some sharp questions for the nominee over his stated support for President Trumps’ plan to get rid of the organization.   […]

The Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) organization announced it has rolled out facial recognition technology at Mineta San José International Airport (SJC). […]

The Reform Government Surveillance (RGS) coalition, whose members include tech-sector bellwethers such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, called on the Senate to take prompt action to confirm nominees to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), which has only one member currently. […]

Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., has requested that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigate “whether the uses of facial recognition technology – as currently utilized – by law enforcement agencies are in violation of civil rights protections.”  In a letter to assistant attorney general John Gore yesterday, Cleaver noted the potential benefits of facial […]

The Department of Homeland Security on Aug. 13-15 hosted “Tabletop the Vote 2018: DHS’ National Election Cyber Exercise,” which invited vendors and Federal, state and local election officials to participate in election security preparation. […]

The Defense Department announced Tuesday that it awarded 15 companies the right to compete for task orders in a potential nine-year, $28 billion technology research and development contract for its Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC). […]

Cybersecurity solutions provider Cylance today announced that it is offering free artificial intelligence-based antivirus software “to support all 2018 U.S. political campaigns” in the wake of pervasive election security concerns across the Federal government. […]

The Army needs help from academia and the private sector to modernize its workflow, explained Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee, acting deputy CIO for the U.S. Army, during an Avaya webinar today. Yee specifically stressed an interest in industry helping to make the Army’s workflows interoperable and said that “workflows at the installation level must be scalable” to achieve true modernization. […]

The Pentagon is moving to protect its personnel from unintentionally advertising when they’re in an operational, and possibly secret, location. The new policy is a response to the revelation in January that a global heat map posted by fitness tracking company Strava could be used to identify the locations and activities of military personnel, even down to individuals, at military outposts around the world or in high-security areas such as the National Security Agency. […]

Kay Ely, assistant commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category in the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) with the General Services Administration (GSA), will move to a task force to merge OPM and GSA operations and will subsequently retire, a GSA official confirmed to MeriTalk. Ely has served across the Federal government with the Office […]

The information security market will grow 8.7 percent, to $124 billion, in 2019, according to a forecast released today by research firm Gartner. […]

Robert Bohn, cloud computing program manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), said today that NIST is collaborating with IEEE to create standards that would allow for interoperability between different cloud environments that currently do not exchange data freely. […]

In advance of his appearance before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee scheduled for tomorrow, four House Democrats hammered Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai over statements he made in 2017 that the FCC was a victim of a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack which impacted its electronic comment filing system during the agency’s net neutrality rulemaking proceeding last year. […]

Uber has appointed Matt Olsen, formerly general counsel at the National Security Agency, chief trust and security officer. […]

The White House said President Trump has signed into law the NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act, S. 770, which directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide resources to small businesses to help them implement NIST’s voluntary cybersecurity framework. […]

Stacey Dixon will be the next director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). […]