The Department of Justice (DoJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on Wednesday, May 29, detailing more than 1,000 recommendations from the OIG that that remain outstanding, including significant recommendations related to cybersecurity or IT. […]

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an update on April 17 on the 13 priority recommendations identified in April 2018 for the Department of Justice (DOJ) with facial recognition software still being a key area for required action by the agency. […]

Forging a path in Government IT is more than ruthlessly climbing that hypothetical ladder we hear so much about. […]

Cybercriminals armed with ransomware technologies continued to ramp up their attacks in 2018, most notably those targeting large organizations, according to a report released today by cybersecurity technology provider Crowdstrike. […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) today announced hacking and identity theft charges against two members of the Chinese state-sponsored hacking group APT-10, alleging that the APT-10 members hacked into American organizations and stole personally identifiable information on more than 100,000 Navy personnel. […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced today that Romeo Vasile Chita, a Romanian national, was returned to the United States last Friday to face Federal charges of racketeering, wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to launder money, and conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit services charges. […]

Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., has requested that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigate “whether the uses of facial recognition technology – as currently utilized – by law enforcement agencies are in violation of civil rights protections.”  In a letter to assistant attorney general John Gore yesterday, Cleaver noted the potential benefits of facial […]

The Department of Justice announced the expansion of its Tribal Access Program (TAP), which will allow Tribal governments to access and share more data with the Federal government. […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ) said Thursday it was putting in place a new policy governing disclosure by DoJ and other Federal agencies of “foreign influence operations” being conducted in the United States. The agency said the new policy “provides guideposts for Department action to expose and thereby counter foreign influence threats, consistent with the fundamental principle that the Department always must seek to act in ways that are politically neutral, compliant with the First Amendment and designed to maintain the public trust.” […]

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 Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a new Cyber-Digital Task Force on Tuesday. The group will examine both how DOJ currently combats cyber threats and ways it could improve its cyber threat response. […]

The FBI fell far short of its own goals for fighting cybercrime in 2017, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) audit. The FBI reported disrupting or dismantling 262 high-level criminal operations targeting global U.S. interests, only about half of its goal of 500, and roughly one-tenth of the 2,492 cybercrime operations it broke up in 2014. […]

After years of fits and starts on a much-needed electronic filing system, the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is “poised” to deploy a comprehensive, cloud-based e-file platform next year to help reduce a massive backlog of cases, a top EOIR official said recently. […]

The Federal CIO Council recently released a case study focusing on Technology Business Management (TBM) adoption rates at a single bureau within the Department of Justice (DOJ). The study will be used as part of the council’s commitment to guide agency-wide adoption of TBM. […]

The Justice Department has evidence to charge six Russian government officials for involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee. U.S. authorities are considering charging the Russian officials to make it difficult for them to travel, but they are unlikely to be arrested and prosecuted in the U.S. […]

The FBI needs access to encrypted files in order to protect the nation against cyber crime, according to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “Encryption is essential,” Rosenstein said “It is a foundational element of data security and authentication. It is central to the growth and flourishing of the digital economy. We in law enforcement have no desire to undermine encryption. But ‘warrant-proof’ encryption poses a serious problem.” […]

The Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency launched a website on Oct. 2 that will house all IG reports. Before Oversight.gov was created, the IGs of each agency posted their reports on their own sites. […]

Cloud infrastructure may be the safest place to store an agency’s most sensitive data, department of Justice officials said at an AWS Public Sector Summit. “I’d say it’s a pretty good place to put your crown jewels,” said Karl Mathias, chief information officer for the United States Marshals Service, adding that commercial clouds may end up being safer than an agency’s own data centers. […]

The fact that state actors are forced to use criminal, mercenary hackers in their cyber espionage and attack campaigns is a silver lining to law enforcement looking to identify and catch the perpetrators, according to Adam Hickey, deputy assistant attorney general for national asset protection at the Department of Justice. […]

The Department of Justice today released an indictment of four men involved in the 2016 hack of Yahoo email accounts, two of whom were acting in their capacity as Russian FSB officers. […]

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination for United States attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., could have an impact on government surveillance power because of his full-fledged support of the National Security Agency’s spying authorities. […]

Police departments across the country that received Federal grants for body worn cameras are concerned about sharing information with the agencies responsible for this funding. Some police departments have gone so far to as to say they would not share body camera footage unless Federal agencies compelled them. […]

The White House launched Worker.gov, which explains Federal workforce protections. […]

The Department of Justice appealed the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in favor of Microsoft that said American service providers are not required to honor warrants seeking data outside the United States. In this case, which was decided in July, the data the DOJ was asking for belonged to a non-U.S. citizen and was stored in a data center in Ireland. […]

The White House Office of Management and Budget collected initial data from agencies to gauge the impact of the Generation Indigenous Initiative. The initiative seeks to improve educational outcomes for native students, increase access to quality teacher housing, increase Internet access, support the Indian Child Welfare Act, reduce teen suicide, and grow tribal control of criminal justice. […]

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 key to data center consolidation success is communicating and committing to an aggressive plan, according to Department of Justice CIO Joseph Klimavicz. […]

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers issued a “planning guide” to help states deal with a cyber disruption. Cyber disruption response planning is essential, the report said: “Ignore at your own peril.” […]