The Office of the Public Defender this week requested that the Baltimore Police Department halt its recently disclosed aerial surveillance program immediately and until the public is briefed and defense attorneys are given access to the footage. The program uses technology adapted from surveillance tech used in the Iraq War surge to monitor the residents of Baltimore City. […]

The Department of Transportation hosted a Twitter chat on Monday under the hashtag #OpenDOT to get opinions on the agency’s open data policies. […]

A social media site that aims to embrace privacy asks for either a phone number, credit card information, the last four digits of the user’s Social Security number, or a postal address when signing up for an account. The website, Nextdoor, claims the information is used to ensure the people are who they say they are and that they live at the address that they provided. […]

According to MeriTalk’s report titled “Navigating the Cybersecurity Equation,” government agencies are struggling to derive cybersecurity intelligence from big data. Federal agencies stated that the greatest challenge in data analytics is the overwhelming amount of data agencies have to sift through. […]

Advances in technology affect most industries, and law enforcement is no exception. Technology is allowing for more frequent recordings of police-public encounters, including police body-worn cameras and smartphone apps that allow anyone to record encounters. Some police departments are turning to technology to help reduce crime, and one report examines such an effort in Chicago. MeriTalk looks at law enforcement in the digital era. […]

A RAND Corporation report casts doubts on whether the Chicago Police Department’s algorithm-based, predictive policing program, which generates a Strategic Subjects List of people that the system believes are most likely to kill or be killed, is actually helping police quell violence in the city. […]

Body worn cameras are becoming increasingly popular devices for police officers around the country. However, with a recent scorecard on BWC policy, Upturn suggests that accountability with wearable camera usage may be a widespread problem. […]

Davidson College, a North Carolina school with 2,000 undergraduate students, supports a massive open online course platform of 35,000 high school students and teachers. […]

A recent study by a team of National Institutes of Health researchers showed widespread support for the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program, with more than half indicating they would be willing to participate in the program themselves. […]

The Massachusetts Turnpike is one of the latest roads to begin to feature all-automated toll collection systems, which cause privacy concerns due to the resulting databases of license plate photographs. […]

The National Science Foundation announced a $110 million award supporting the expansion of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). […]

The Heinz Endowments, a philanthropic organization based in Pittsburgh, granted $593,000 for Carnegie Mellon University researchers to team with local teachers and increase technology fluency workshops in their schools. […]

The Department of Transportation has released a smartphone app for the Pocket Guide to Transportation, which includes statistics on the movement of people, the movement of goods, the economy, the environment, and safety. The guide used to be available online and in print form only, but now is available for Apple and Android devices. […]

As the Precision Medicine Initiative continues its work to revolutionize how to improve health and treat disease, Cloudera has announced it will be donating its technologies to researchers and has pledged to train 1,000 of them in the latest big data technologies and data science techniques. […]

A Government Accountability Office study uncovered a huge discrepancy in Federal reporting on sexual violence because the agencies that collect the data don’t record or label incidents the same way. According to data collection efforts from four Federal agencies, between 244,190 and 1,929,000 rapes or sexual assaults occurred in 2011. […]

The Salt Lake City International Airport is setting up Data Comm, a tool that will enable pilots to communicate digitally rather than through voice radio conversations. Data Comm will allow pilots to talk to air traffic controllers through a program that’s similar to text messaging. […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology aims to improve communication with non-Federal systems containing Federal data through updates to its guidelines “Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Information Systems and Organizations,” also referred to as 800-171. […]

Civil liberties groups filed a complaint against the Baltimore Police Department, asking the FCC to investigate the department’s use of cellphone tracking devices, which are used in 24 states and the District of Columbia. The Baltimore police, along with other law enforcement agencies, are using stingrays, which are devices that mimic cellphone towers to track suspects’ locations through their cellphone signals. The civil liberties groups argue that this is a violation of Federal law that requires a license. […]

An Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report argues that price differentiation based on consumers’ choices to allow their Internet service providers to have access to their data should be allowed. […]

To become “Future Ready,” city governments must focus on fostering and leveraging technological innovation in their local area, according to experts at an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation panel. “Cities that are embracing future ready, we notice that they are data-driven,” said Christy McFarland of the National League of Cities. […]

Over the past 10 years, agencies have made minimal use of their special government employees who do not serve on Federal boards, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. However, the report also states that not all of these SGEs’ assignments have been reliably documented. […]

On Aug. 8, the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate announced the 2016 kickoff of its EMERGE 2016: Wearable Technology program. By Aug. 10, TechNexus, the venture collaborative organization tasked with accelerating the program, received about 200 responses from interested companies. […]

As floods sweep through Louisiana, lack of information for emergency response teams can be a matter of life and death. With the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s newly updated app, the agency hopes to improve emergency response data for natural disasters. […]

California is the 16th state to join the U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen Initiative, which encourages educators to use openly licensed educational material. […]

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report that shows that public sector prize competitions for innovative technology in the 2015 fiscal year have increased in capability and impact. […]

Worldwide, 800 million people suffer from starvation every day, according to a blog post from the U. S. Department of Agriculture website. With the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition Summit, USDA plans to address this problem. […]

Purdue University’s Forecast app, which was released in March, uses data analysis to help students do well in school and maintain healthy habits. […]

The United States Digital Service’s second birthday is Thursday and even though it lauds two of its best accomplishments as expanding an administrator’s tie collection and having the most unique décor in the White House, it has improved the usability of several of the Federal government’s online projects. […]

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response created a publicly available interactive map showing the number of Zika virus cases in each state.
The map, which uses GIS software from Esri, will help monitor the spread of the Zika virus across the United States and 34 other countries where cases have been reported. […]

The University of New Hampshire’s Robert McGrath, who spoke on AllAnalytics’s radio broadcast titled “A Look at Tomorrow’s Data Scientist,” said the university’s data science program aims to prepare students for the workforce, where they will either hold positions on the computational IT side of the industry or the business side. […]