Smarter Gov Tech, Stronger MerITocracy
Capitol Washington DC Federal

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and John Thune, R-S.D., introduced new legislation Monday to address the cybersecurity workforce shortage plaguing the Federal government. The legislation, called the Cyber Security Exchange Act, would establish a public-private cybersecurity worker exchange program. […]

quantum computing chip ai -min

President Trump’s executive order on artificial intelligence (AI) announced by the White House today focuses on prioritizing Federal government investments in AI-driven projects, and development by Federal agencies of research and development budgets for AI that will support their core missions. […]

military healthcare, veterans healthcare
Air Force

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan announced on Feb. 8 that he was nominating Lt. Gen. VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson to serve as Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and cyber effects operations. […]

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Cybersecurity flag

Yesterday, legislation was reintroduced to make it easier for cyber specialists to lend their expertise to other Federal agencies. […]

data privacy, people, personal data, binary
CDM RSA

Less than two weeks after the end of the partial Federal government shutdown and with the looming threat of another such disruption coming on Feb. 15, will Federal government IT officials in large numbers be making the trip out west to the U.S.’s preeminent cybersecurity conference next month? […]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) shared its support for calls for a national legislative framework when it comes to regulating facial recognition software in a blog post written today by VP of Global Public Policy Michael Punke. […]

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dan Sullivan, R-Ark., reintroduced legislation on Tuesday that would “establish an international information sharing program on election administration and security at the State Department.” The Global Electoral Exchange Act, which had been introduced in the last Congress, would enable the United States to work with its international allies to strengthen election security by sharing best practices on audits, disinformation campaigns, and voter database protections–among other pertinent issues. […]

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) announced that Benjamin Hovland and Donald Palmer were sworn in as commissioners on Wednesday, granting the commission a full quorum for the first time in over a decade. […]

5G Broadband rural broadband FCC-min

Top officials from communications industry trade groups told members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee today what few, if any, in the hearing room would disagree with:  the United States needs to win the global race to leadership in 5G communications services and technologies. […]

DoD Pentagon Military

The call last week by the Pentagon’s top tester to temporarily halt deployment of the Department of Defense’s Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) wasn’t exactly out of the blue. The DoD’s independent Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) said the same thing in its annual report last year, while citing some of the same problems, such as staffing shortages, difficulty in integrating disparate commercial technologies, and the lack of mature standard operating processes. […]

Federal Cloud Flag

The Department of Defense Cloud Strategy released this week emphasizes the importance of the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) cloud contract in the computing environment of the Pentagon. […]

Army DoD military Defense AI

In a report released yesterday by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), missions and systems remain at risk from adversarial cyber operations with operational testing discovering vulnerabilities that are considered mission critical. […]

Military Data Center

The Defense Department’s newly published cloud strategy leans heavily on several core concepts including maximizing competition among cloud service providers, sticking to a single cloud strategy, leveraging commercial-sector best practices, creating a culture for better technology evolution, and above all else supporting warfighters and increasing their lethality. […]

Department of Defense (DoD) and private sector leaders gathered to discuss the state of cybersecurity in the U.S. military during a Tuesday Federal Executive Forum webinar. […]

Cyber Security Brainstorm
FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has tapped John Brown for a promotion, according to a report from The Hill. […]

Census 2020 image-min

In a letter on Friday, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., questioned Steven Dillingham, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, over how nearly $5 billion in IT costs are being managed by the Bureau. His concerns come as IT costs grew by $1.56 billion between October 2015 and December 2017. […]

Federal Cloud Flag

If recent events are any indication, we could be seeing big changes to agency cloud migration plans in 2019. The Federal government could be rethinking its role in owning and operating its own data centers, strongly questioning whether that is a job best left to government employees. […]

Google HQ
Pentagon Military Defense DoD

The Department of Defense and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) today released a draft request for quotations (RFQ) for the $7.8 billion Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract. The deadline for responses is February 15. […]

Maria Roat, chief information officer at the Small Business Administration, provided a run-down of her office’s extensive to-do list during a keynote address on Thursday at the Veritas Public Sector Vision Day event, and emphasized the importance of laying the proper data-management policy groundwork before embarking on cloud deployments and forays into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]

The Bank Policy Institute, a nonpartisan public policy, research, and advocacy group, announced Thursday that it has hired Kenice Middleton to be its new senior vice president of cybersecurity risk management. […]

big data

The chief data officer role has morphed quickly at Federal agencies, as agencies shift their focus from open data to supporting data-driven strategies, said two Federal CDOs during Veritas’ Public Sector Vision Day event on Thursday. […]

DoD Pentagon Military

According to an internal evaluation report, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) program is behind schedule, undermanned, full of cybersecurity issues, and should be discontinued until the system demonstrates that it can assist network defenders in detecting and responding to cyberattacks. […]

email security DMARC

Valimail said in a report issued Friday that use of the Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance protocol (DMARC) is growing in both the public and private sectors, likely helped by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mandating its adoption across Federal agencies. DMARC is an email authentication protocol that verifies the authenticity of an email’s sender in order to prevent spoofing and phishing. […]

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