The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act , a rule passed in 1998 dictating that parents must grant consent before allowing their children under 13 to access certain websites, must adapt as technology develops, the FTC said. […]

Members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology disagreed on Wednesday on whether the Cybersecurity Responsibility and Accountability Act of 2016 acted as a partisan dig against former Secretary of State and current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server. […]

MeriTalk is running a series taken from a book-length work authored by a senior Federal IT official currently working in government. This is one part of an extensive, firsthand account of how IT decisions are made, the obstacles standing in the way of real change in government technology management, and what one career Federal IT employee really thinks about the way government does IT. […]

When Richard McKinney started his job as chief information officer of the Department of Transportation, he didn’t know what its network looked like. “Our network was the child of many hands,” McKinney said. “There was no overarching architectural approach to our network.” […]

Certain types of “warrant-proof” encryption could pose significant danger to law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute crimes, according to Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell. […]

FedRAMP needs to adopt a modular approach, according to many of the 41 chief information officers and IT officials that responded to the Professional Services Council’s 2016 Federal CIO Survey. […]

The White House Office of Management and Budget issued updated guidance for the jurisdiction and duties of Senior Agency Officials for Privacy (SAOP), giving them more authority. […]

MeriTalk is running a series taken from a book-length work authored by a senior Federal IT official currently working in government. This is one part of an extensive, firsthand account of how IT decisions are made, the obstacles standing in the way of real change in government technology management, and what one career Federal IT employee really thinks about the way government does IT. […]

The Department of Commerce uses a system to encourage employees to report on the tools they’re using outside of the information security boundaries. […]

Facing criticism over the awkward nature of the FedRAMP process and the use of $150,000 to create a FedRAMP Dashboard that already exists in the private sector, the GSA was told on Tuesday that it needed to clean up the program or have Congress step in. […]

Facing criticism that $150,000 was spent to create a FedRAMP dashboard virtually identical to the existing FedRAMP OnRamp dashboard, the General Services Administration said that the new dashboard performs unique functions and that it has processes in place to ensure that systems are not unnecessarily duplicated. […]

Members of Congress are working to pass the Kelsey Smith Act, which would give law enforcement access to phone location data in some emergency situations, despite claims from privacy groups that the law could be abused. […]

MeriTalk is running a series taken from a book-length work authored by a senior Federal IT official currently working in government. This is one part of an extensive, firsthand account of how IT decisions are made, the obstacles standing in the way of real change in government technology management, and what one career Federal IT employee really thinks about the way government does IT. […]

Due to the breadth and depth of cyberattacks and breaches in the Federal government, most especially the Office of Personnel Management, agencies should be implementing a policy of zero trust when it comes to who is accessing their data, according to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. His committee released a report titled “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More than a Generation.” […]

Access Now, an organization that advocates for open digital communication, called for the prohibition of government hacking in its report “A Human Rights Response to Government Hacking.” […]

Industry leaders and government officials disagree about whether encryption is causing the digital space to “go dark” or makes Internet users safer. […]

Jane Holl Lute, the former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, is scheduled to provide a Tech Talk at the Symantec Government Symposium on Aug. 30 in Washington, D.C. MeriTalk caught up with Lute, who agreed to offer her thoughts on the evolving struggle between privacy and security, and a preview of her presentation. […]

In the five years since the government has encouraged agencies to transition to the cloud, spending on cloud-based technologies has increased to about 9 percent, which is a good pace, according to Tom Ruff, vice president of Public Sector America at Akamai. […]

Nuala O’Connor is one of the nation’s leading authorities on technology, security, and privacy. MeriTalk caught up with O’Connor as she prepares to give a Tech Talk at the upcoming Symantec Government Symposium on Aug. 30 in Washington, D.C. […]

The Delta power outage worried many chief information officers about the stability of their own data center power chains. Data center power outages happen frequently and many cause damage, according to Mark Gaydos of Nlyte. […]

In the Defense Department’s new strategy document outlining the department’s vision for its future IT environment, CIO Terry Halvorsen argues the complex enterprise network is too difficult to defend, too costly to operate and maintain, and hampers effective information sharing between the military services and the nation’s allies. The strategy outlines eight major goals. […]

Unified Communications company collab9 is seeking to give Federal agencies both flexibility and security in communication systems through its recent FedRAMP authorization, the first of a Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) provider. […]

MeriTalk sat down with GSA CIO David Shive to ask some substantial questions about FedRAMP and TTS ahead of MeriTalk’s GSA Forum on FedRAMP and TTS/18F on Sept. 13 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. […]

The General Services Administration on Tuesday released the FedRAMP Readiness Assessment Report, a template that allows cloud service providers to quickly determine whether they are ready to pursue FedRAMP authorization. […]

The Office of Personnel Management announced today that it has hired Dave DeVries, the principal deputy chief information officer at the Defense Department, to become the agency’s next permanent CIO. […]

Since 2003, the Office for Civil Rights has settled HIPAA violations to the tune of $36 million, with the two most recent settlements coming from Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. […]

he White House released the Data Center Optimization Initiative, which requires agencies to consolidate inefficient infrastructure, update existing facilities, boost security, save money, and transition to cloud services or inter-agency shared services. […]

Transparency is key in demonstrating the value of money spent on information technology, according to the Federal Commission on IT Cost, Opportunity, Strategy, and Transparency. […]

MeriTalk is running a series taken from a book-length work authored by a senior Federal IT official currently working in government. This is one part of an extensive, firsthand account of how IT decisions are made, the obstacles standing in the way of real change in government technology management, and what one career Federal IT employee really thinks about the way government does IT. […]

APIs, known as application program interfaces, and their use with apps might just hold the key to achieving interoperability between electronic health records, or so the Federal government is hoping. […]