The National Science and Technology Council calls for more modern science and technology capabilities in national security in its report, titled “A 21st Century Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for America’s National Security.” […]

Politics and blame stand in the way of Federal IT modernization, according to comments made at the House Oversight Committee’s hearing on legacy IT systems. Congressmen said they were disappointed and baffled over the degree of outdated technology in Federal agencies, some in mission critical systems.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced a significant expansion of the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley-based experimental technology unit, including dedicated funding pipelines, a new partnership leadership structure, and plans to stand up a second unit in Boston.

Content management company Box unveiled its Box for Government initiative, which brings together different product suites designed for government and enables agencies to work remotely, collaboratively, and with an assurance of security. Box for Government has already received a FedRAMP Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Defense Information Systems Agency.

There seems to be no middle ground in the Internet surveillance versus privacy dispute. The two sides found little to agree on at a debate hosted by the Hudson Institute. David Rivkin, a constitutional law attorney, said government surveillance “has to be indiscriminate. … We have to surveil more.”

The size of the digital universe will grow to 176 zettabytes by 2025 – leading to a future of machine learning. James Harris, CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Jason Matheny, Director, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, joined Defense One on a live webcast on how the future of digital information will intersect with the future of intelligence collection and analysis.

The Defense Department likes to hit its targets. So you can imagine the frustration that the department’s chief information officer, Terry Halvorsen, must have experienced when he realized that he wasn’t even going to come close to reaching the Federal mandate to close at least 40 percent of the department’s data centers by 2015.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence plans to hire its first chief information officer to take charge of IT programs across the ODNI’s 20 component offices, particularly the effort to retire legacy IT systems and migrate users to the cloud.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is considering recommendations for a major reorganization of the Defense Department that would make U.S. Cyber Command a full combatant command similar to the U.S. European Command or the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Cyber Command’s influence may not be as expansive as some think, according to its commander, Adm. Michael Rogers. “The Department of Defense is not resourced, nor is it tasked with defending every single computer structure in the U.S.,” he said.

Skilled workforce retention is a major problem for the Department of Defense’s IT issues, according to DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen, and salaries are partly to blame.

Microsoft Azure was selected for a FedRAMP pilot program that will establish a high-impact baseline for cloud-computing services. This essentially allows Federal agencies to move more sensitive data onto contracted cloud-computing services, enabling the sensitive data to operate on the more technically advanced level that is already possible for low-impact data.

While he was unable to address the Apple versus FBI case specifically, President Obama said he finds the discussion of encryption vitally important to national dialogue. “I am way on the civil liberties side of this thing,” he said Friday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin.

Both Apple and the FBI are taking extreme stances in the encryption debate, which makes picking a side complicated, according to a panel at the Cybersecurity for New America Conference.

The Defense Department launched its Hack the Pentagon pilot program that will leverage commercial crowdsourcing to find trusted cybersecurity professionals to help uncover vulnerabilities in the Pentagon’s public Web pages.

The Department of Defense continues to push forward with efforts to bolster its IT system. The Army awarded a $5 billion Information Technology Enterprise Solutions 3 Hardware contract for IT hardware, software, and other services, to 17 companies.

The Defense Department has made two high-profile IT moves — in the same week President Obama announced he would dedicate more than $19 billion to secure Federal IT systems — showing its dedication to cybersecurity and infrastructure.

The Department of Defense is ready to upgrade all Windows-based legacy systems to Windows 10 by January 2017. Nearly three months after Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen issued a new policy requiring the upgrade, a verbal execution order has gone out that puts the unprecedented migration effort into motion.

The National Security Agency announced Monday it is moving ahead with a massive reorganization plan that will consolidate offensive and defensive hacking operations under one command—a move that privacy and civil liberties groups, as well as a presidential review board, have warned would create potential conflicts of interest.

Ashkan Soltani, the former CTO at the Federal Trade Commission who joined the White House in December to advise U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith, is stepping down after being denied a security clearance. Soltani played an active role in the Washington Post’s reporting on the National Security Agency surveillance programs leaked to the media by Edward Snowden.