The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) – which operates within the Defense Department (DoD) to accelerate the military’s adoption of leading commercial technologies – is seeking industry help to develop tools that DoD can use to hunt for cyber threats on Pentagon networks. […]

With growing interest by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in remote sensing data and analytic services offered by commercial providers, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is calling on industry to provide it with information about barriers that have been encountered in procurement processes. […]

The newest Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) mission initiative in “joint information warfare” is making progress, according to Nand Mulchandani, who took over as acting director of the Defense Department AI development center last month. […]

A partial government shutdown was still in effect as of Monday, December 24, 2018, after Congress and the Trump administration could not come to an agreement on a government funding bill over the weekend. […]

Defense Department CIO Dana Deasy said today that DoD is currently sorting through the FY 2019 budget allocation for the new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), and likely will be creating outposts for JAIC to spur outreach to members of academia. […]

Rep Will Hurd, R-Texas, chairman of the House IT subcommittee, questioned today whether Google’s decision in June to not renew a contract with the Defense Department for development of artificial intelligence technologies was influenced by what the congressman characterized as possible “influence operations” by the Chinese government. […]

The Department of Defense in December will wrap up a two-year pilot program using the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) mobile application store–the GEOINT App Store–as the official app store of the entire DoD. […]

Thomas Fanning, chief executive officer of Atlanta-based electric utility holding company Southern Co. and a key player in developing private-sector cybersecurity policy, said today at a Senate subcommittee hearing that he has begun to have interactions with senior Federal government military leaders about capabilities to “hack back” at cyber attackers, but emphasized he believes that those types of retaliatory capabilities need to remain in the hands of the military rather than become a corporate function. […]

Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB), said Sunday in an appearance on Government Matters that his organization has been working with the Defense Department since December 2017 to shift the entirety of its operations over to DoD, long ahead of a coming executive order from President Trump that will make the move official. […]

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 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). […]

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. […]

MITRE, a manager of Federally-funded research and development centers targeting Federal defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity functions, recommended in a new report released today that the Defense Department (DoD) undertake a sweeping menu of actions to improve military supply chain security, and warned that maintaining the status quo of current security policy may have ruinous consequences. […]

The Pentagon is looking to get into the weeds with cyber defense, using artificial intelligence to hunt down attacks that may use the size and complexity of its systems to hide out while waiting to strike. […]

Wayne Belk, director of the National Insider Threat Task Force (NITTF), said today at an event hosted by Nextgov and Equifax that his unit in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now working with the Defense Department to clarify and strengthen the roles of the Federal government’s insider threat staff, beginning with its security analysts. […]

Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB), said today at an event hosted by NextGov and Equifax that he supports a proposal in the President’s government reform and reorganization plan to move NBIB “in its entirety from the Office of Personnel Management into the Department of Defense.” […]

The Department of Defense is getting on board with some critical website and email protections that have been mandated across civilian Federal government agencies, even if it is lagging somewhat behind other departments in applying encryption and anti-phishing measures. […]

By a vote of 87-10, the Senate today approved the FY2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the corresponding conference report that ironed out differences between House and Senate versions of the bill. The legislation to fund the Defense Department (DoD) and U.S. armed forces now moves to President Trump’s desk for his signature. […]

The Pentagon is looking to get on top of the next wave of artificial intelligence technologies through a fast-track contracting program that would bring new concepts from the drawing board to proof-of-concept within 18 months. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today that calls for the Department of Defense (DoD) to use a central location to catalog the data it generates from its use of satellites – a move that GAO said could reduce the billions of dollars that DoD spends on satellite development by instead hosting more payloads on commercial satellites. […]

State-sponsored cyberattacks are the new normal in adversarial international activity, whether on large or small scales. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Defense Department (DoD) today issued its finalized request for proposals (RFP) for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud contract, formally opening the bidding process for a potential $10 billion enterprise cloud infrastructure. […]

As it looks to get new technologies developed and into the field as quickly as possible, the Department of Defense has been making greater use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA), a quick-strike contracting mechanism that has gone in and out of fashion since the 1950s, but is now seeing a resurgence. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) plan to move a key cybersecurity service to the cloud is in keeping with the push toward cloud computing for many of the Department of Defense’s operations, including those involving classified information. The question at the moment is whether the cloud services DISA wants to tap into are secure enough to handle the job. […]

The Department of Defense is taking a more concerted approach to the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) by bringing AI projects under one roof and emphasizing the importance of working with industry and academia. At the same time, DoD is also recognizing that it needs to give ethics a seat at the table. […]

The Defense Department’s (DoD) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is looking to transition the Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO) infrastructure of its Acropolis program to the cloud, according to a Sources Sought Announcement posted Monday. […]

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan last Wednesday issued a memorandum that officially establishes the Defense Department’s (DoD) new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), confirming statements made by Secretary James Mattis and other DoD officials in April that a center to house DoD’s roughly 600 AI projects was forthcoming. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The accelerating cycle of technological advancements is reaching down into even small components that traditionally operated on low power and computational capacity, while performing a narrow, specific function. […]