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Senator Accuses Court System of Hiding Attack and National Security ConsequencesPrajeet Nair (@prajeetspeaks) • July 29, 2022

The U.S. federal judicial court system experienced in 2020 a cyber incident of “startling breadth and scope,” a member of Congress disclosed. 

See Also: OnDemand | Zero Tolerance: Controlling The Landscape Where You’ll Meet Your Adversaries

It was perpetuated by three foreign state actors, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler said during a Thursday hearing. 

“Perhaps even more concerning is the disturbing impact the security breach had and on pending civil and criminal litigation, as well as an ongoing national security or intelligence matters,” Nadler said.

The Department of Justice is investigating, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen told the New York Democrat. 

“While I can’t speak directly to the nature of the ongoing investigation of the type of threats that you’ve mentioned regarding the effort to compromise public judicial dockets, this is of course a significant concern for us given the nature of the information that’s often held by the courts,” Olsen said.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts disclosed in early 2021 an “apparent compromise” in the confidentiality of its digital docketing system. The incident came to light as a result of a security audit taken in the wake of the Russian nation-state hack of ubiquitous network management tool maker SolarWinds. 

But the attack against the court system was not a result of the SolarWinds, said Nadler.

Little is publicly known about the incident, other than the court system announced it would no longer accept highly sensitive court documents through its digital docket system, known as CM/ECF. Attorneys instead must file those documents through paper or secure thumb drive for storage on a computer system not connected to the internet, the court administrative office said at the time. 

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote the judicial administrative office in a Thursday letterexpressing “serious concerns that the federal judiciary has hidden” the national security consequences of the incident. 

“The federal judiciary has yet to publicly explain what happened,” Wyden added. He said the court system faces “unmanageable security risks” since responsibility for cybersecurity risks is delegated to the 94 district and 12 appellate court chief judges.

Article link: https://www.govinfosecurity.com/justice-department-probing-2020-federal-court-system-breach-a-19665

by California Institute of Technology

Engineers at Caltech have developed a switch—one of the most fundamental components of computing—using optical, rather than electronic, components. The development could aid efforts to achieve ultrafast all-optical signal processing and computing.

Optical devices have the capacity to transmit signals far faster than electrical devices by using pulses of light rather than electrical signals. That is why modern devices often employ optics to send data; for example, think of the fiberoptic cables that provide much faster internet speeds than conventional Ethernet cables.

The field of optics has the potential to revolutionize computing by doing more, at faster speeds, and with less power. However, one of the major limitations of optics-based systems at present is that, at a certain point, they still need to have electronics-based transistors to efficiently process the data.

Now, using the power of optical nonlinearity (more on that later), a team led by Alireza Marandi, assistant professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Caltech, has created an all-optical switch. Such a switch could eventually enable data processing using photons. The research was published in the journal Nature Photonics on July 28.

Switches are among the simplest components of a computer. A signal comes into the switch and, depending on certain conditions, the switch either allows the signal to move forward or halts it. That on/off property is the foundation of logic gates and binary computation, and is what digital transistors were designed to accomplish. However, until this new work, achieving the same function with light has proved difficult. Unlike electrons in transistors, which can strongly affect each other’s flow and thereby cause “switching,” photons usually do not easily interact with each other.

Two things made the breakthrough possible: the material Marandi’s team used, and the way in which they used it. First, they chose a crystalline material known as lithium niobate, a combination of niobium, lithium, and oxygen that does not occur in nature but has, over the past 50 years, proven essential to the field of optics. The material is inherently nonlinear: Because of the special way the atoms are arranged in the crystal, the optical signals that it produces as outputs are not proportional to the input signals.

While lithium niobate crystals have been used in optics for decades, more recently, advances in nanofabrication techniques have enabled Marandi and his team to create lithium niobate-based integrated photonic devices that allow for the confinement of light in a tiny space. The smaller the space, the greater the intensity of light with the same amount of power. As a result, the pulses of light carrying information through such an optical system could provide a stronger nonlinear response than would otherwise be possible.

Marandi and his colleagues also confined the light temporally. Essentially, they decreased the duration of light pulses, and used a specific design that would keep the pulses short as they propagate through the device, which resulted in each pulse having higher peak power.

The combined effect of these two tactics—the spatiotemporal confinement of light—is to substantially enhance the strength of nonlinearity for a given pulseenergy, which means the photons now affect each other much more strongly.

The net result is the creation of a nonlinear splitter in which the light pulses are routed to two different outputs based on their energies, which enables switching to occur in less than 50 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second). By comparison, state-of-the-art electronic switches take tens of picoseconds (a picosecond is a trillionth of a second), a difference of many orders of magnitude.

The paper is titled “Femtojoule femtosecond all-optical switching in lithium niobate nanophotonics.”

Article link: https://phys-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/phys.org/news/2022-08-optical-ultrafast-all-optical.amp

Jan 21, 2022

Marcus Lu

Financial Writer, Visual Capitalist

This article is part of:Shaping the Future of Technology Governance: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

• Visual Capitalist has taken the world’s top 5 supercomputers and compared their performance and computing power, measured by teraflops.
• The most advanced consumer devices do not come close to supercomputing power.
• Supercomputer Fugaku is officially the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
• China is set to reveal an even more powerful supercomputer.

A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel.

A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is flops, or floating point operations per second.

In this visualization, we’ve used November 2021 data from TOP500 to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison.

Ranking by Teraflops

Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used teraflops as our comparison metric.

1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops.

Table ranks supercomputers by teraflops. Image: Visual Capitalist

Supercomputer Fugaku was completed in March 2021, and is officially the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It’s used for various applications, including weather simulations and innovative drug discovery.

Sunway Taihulight is officially China’s top supercomputer and fourth most powerful in the world. That said, some experts believe that the country is already operating two much more powerful systems, based on data from anonymous sources.

As you can see, the most advanced consumer devices do not come close to supercomputing power. For example, it would take the combined power of 4,000 Nvidia Titan RTX graphics cards (the most powerful consumer card available) to measure up to the Fugaku.

Upcoming Supercomputers

One of China’s unrevealed supercomputers is supposedly named Oceanlite, and is a successor to Sunway Taihulight. It’s believed to have reached 1.3 exaflops, or 1.3 quintillion flops. The following table makes it easier to follow all of these big numbers.

Table shows a list of upcoming supercomputers.Image: Visual Capitalist

In the U.S., rival chipmakers AMD and Intel have both won contracts from the U.S. Department of Energy to build exascale supercomputers. On the AMD side, there’s Frontier and El Capitan, while on the Intel side, there’s Aurora.

Have you read?

• These are the world’s most powerful supercomputers
• The 8 most powerful supercomputers and where to find them
• The world’s supercomputers joined forces against COVID-19 – why such collaborations are critical for tackling future emergencies

Also involved in the EL Capitan project is Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which claims the supercomputer will be able to reach 2 exaflops upon its completion in 2023. All of this power will be used to support several exciting endeavors:

Enable advanced simulation and modeling to support the U.S. nuclear stockpile and ensure its reliability and security.

Accelerate cancer drug discovery from six years to one year through a partnership with pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline.

Understand the dynamic and mutations of RAS proteins that are linked to 30% of human cancers.

Altogether, exascale computing represents the ability to conduct complex analysis in a matter of seconds, rather than hours. This could unlock an even faster pace of innovation.

Understand the dynamic and mutations of RAS proteins that are linked to 30% of human cancers.

Altogether, exascale computing represents the ability to conduct complex analysis in a matter of seconds, rather than hours. This could unlock an even faster pace of innovation.

Article link: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/01/visualizing-power-supercomputers-teraflops-technology/?

By Matthew Rosenberg

• Oct. 6, 2016

WASHINGTON — In the six weeks since federal agents raided a suburban Maryland home and arrested Harold T. Martin III on suspicion of stealing classified information from the National Security Agency, another organization has quietly prepared to face the fallout: Booz Allen Hamilton, Mr. Martin’s employer.

Booz Allen, a consulting firm that earns billions of dollars by working for American intelligence agencies, has been called the world’s most profitable spy organization. News this week of Mr. Martin’s arrest in August could renew scrutiny of the firm’s operations and, more broadly, the lucrative contracting business that American intelligence now relies on to run its vast, global surveillance operations.

Mr. Martin’s arrest is the second time in three years that a Booz Allen contractor has been accused of stealing potentially damaging material from the N.S.A. The company also employed Edward J. Snowden, who spirited out a cache of documents that, in 2013, exposed the extent of American surveillance programs in the United States and around the world.

Booz Allen is one of a handful of defense and intelligence contractors that blur the line between the government’s intelligence work and private enterprise.

Tens of thousands of contractors are believed to work for American intelligence agencies (the exact number is not known). They do everything from helping secure the military against cyberattacks and plan intelligence operations, to training spies and running war games for NATO generals.

“What most people don’t realize is just the sheer scale of the intelligence work force that is outsourced,” said Peter W. Singer, a national security expert at New America, a think tank in Washington. “There will be meetings, and less than 10 percent of the people there are official U.S. government employees as opposed to contractors.”

Firms like Booz Allen provide a ready and potentially lucrative option for federal employees who are looking to cash in on their government experience.

Booz Allen, founded in 1914, has done especially well at building its government business. Its clients include every branch of the military and a long list of intelligence organizations, from the N.S.A. to lesser-known outfits, such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is essentially a high-tech mapping operation. Overseas, Booz Allen has helped the United Arab Emirates build its own high-tech spy agency.

The director of national intelligence during the George W. Bush administration, Mike McConnell, was an executive at Booz Allen; President Obama’s director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., worked for the firm before returning to government to oversee the nation’s spy agencies.

In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, Booz Allen earned $3.9 billion — about three quarters of its total revenue — from its defense and intelligence business. Once its work for other parts of the government is factored in, Booz Allen’s government contracting accounted for 97 percent of its revenue.

But as the two thefts have made clear, employing large numbers of contractors brings security risks, though experts point out that there have been many leaks in recent years that came from government employees, as well.

Booz Allen weathered the Snowden leaks, and it was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Air Force. It has so far had little to say about the Martin case, issuing a brief statement on Wednesday saying it had fired Mr. Martin and was cooperating with the investigation.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, some officials have said, Mr. Martin does not appear to have leaked any of the information he is suspected of stealing, which is believed to be highly classified computer code.

But the problem for Booz Allen is that at least some of the documents alleged to have been found in Mr. Martin’s possession date to 2014. That would call into question the effectiveness of reforms aimed at safeguarding the nation’s secrets announced in the wake of the Snowden affair.

“We have been and will continue to assess the proper role of contract employees in the intelligence community, many of whom play a vital role,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “We must be careful not to overcorrect or to draw the wrong lessons. This issue is fundamentally about preventing and detecting insider threats, both from contractors like Edward Snowden and this individual, and from government employees.”

The leak in 2013 of the materials stolen by Mr. Snowden prompted calls from Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, then the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for contractors like Booz Allen to lose their access to highly sensitive intelligence. The Obama administration, meanwhile, tightened security measures at intelligence agencies, and slashed the number of employees with access to classified information by 17 percent.

The role of contractors has grown since the 1990s, when they were seen as a way to save money, and accelerated in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Proponents of using contractors say they allow the government to quickly bring in people with technical expertise, and allow government agencies to get around staffing and budgetary constraints set by Congress.

A glaring example of how contractors are used to get around staffing limits can be seen in Afghanistan. There, the Obama administration has set a hard limit on the number of troops that can be deployed — it currently stands at 9,800. The Defense Department and State Department have, as a result, brought in thousands of contractors to do everything from serve food to analyze secret intelligence. There are currently believed to be about six contractors for every American government employee in Afghanistan.

At the same time, the use of contractors has often failed to deliver on the promised savings. Critics also say that shifting sensitive work into the hands of private businesses, which are not subject to same disclosure rules as federal agencies, often limits the ability of Congress to provide oversight.

---

Jo Becker contributed reporting from New York.

Article link; https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/us/booz-allen-hamilton-nsa.amp.html

By: Rolf Fredheim Sebastian Bay

Related topics: Social Media DisinformationInformation Manipulation

Publication details

ISBN:978-9934-619-16-8Year:2022Format:PDFPages:46Size:1.41 MB

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The ongoing war in Ukraine has shown the importance of being able to defend and influence the information environment in order to win a modern conflict. Coordinated social media manipulation campaigns continue to be an important tool for adversaries. Therefore, assessing the abilities of social media companies to protect their platforms against manipulation continues to be important for understanding how well our societies are able to protect our information environment against antagonistic threats. To further our understanding of platform manipulation, we re-ran our groundbreaking experiment to assess the ability of social media companies to counter platform manipulation. This year, we added a sixth social media platform, VKontakte, to our experiment.

Article link: https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/social-media-manipulation-20212022-assessing-the-ability-of-social-media-companies-to-combat-platform-manipulation/242

As the U.S. Air Force continues its aggressive pursuit of modernization and prepares for the future fight, the head of the service wants to put words into action and get meaningful military capabilities into the hands of warfighters faster than ever before.

“I’m not very interested in experimentations or demos. I’m prepared to accept risk and move towards fielding with engineering and system development programs that lead to production and lead to production at scale,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendalltold an audience at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2022 Air Force Summit in Tysons, VA.

“If the risk appears to be manageable and we have reasonable mitigations, we need to get on with it and get towards production,” said Kendall, a Wash100 Award recipient. “The result of that inevitably would be some cost and schedule hiccups as we go forward, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to pay that price to get to where we need to go.”

This urgency stems in part from what Kendall has seen as a decline in the Air Force’s dominance since the Cold War. Speaking from his breadth of experience in government, military and industry, Kendall acknowledged that the Air Force’s analytical, science and engineering capabilities have atrophied in the past few decades. Now, as the head of the Air Force, Kendall hopes to reestablish that dominance.

Kendall was sworn in as Air Force secretary in July 2021, and in his remarks during the event, he reflected on the strides the service has made — as well as the ways in which the threat landscape has changed — throughout his first year in the role.

“I came into office with two fundamental roles. One was to put us in a better position relative to our principal competitor, and that is of course, China,” Kendall reiterated.

Priority Number One: China

China’s military modernization program is something Kendall has expressed deep concern about since his return to the public sector in 2010, when he took on the role of principal deputy under secretary and acting under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics at the Department of Defense.

At that time, Kendall said he could already see that China was on a path to field systems that were intended to defeat the United States’ ability to project power. “We had to respond to that,” he remembered. In the 12 years since that point, however, the systems that China had in development have been fielded, and now the country is working on even newer systems.

“So this is an ongoing quest for technological military superiority that we have got to move quickly in, but we also have to make the right choices about what we invest in,” Kendall said.

Looking at the risk profile the U.S. faces today, Kendall noted that it will not lessen over time. Instead, the nation’s adversaries will be looking ahead to our capabilities in the pipeline for the future and building systems to defeat them.

“We have got to be thinking ahead of that and moving ahead of that. That risk is going to go up over time, and you’re seeing increasing aggressive behaviors on the part of China,” he warned.

Priority Number Two: Reestablishing Air Force’s Operational Power

The second objective Kendall had coming into the Air Force was to leave the Air Force better than he found it. This objective, he admitted, “covers an enormously wide swath of things” including, importantly, strengthening the institution’s technological capability.

Kendall’s second objective also led to the creation of his seven Operational Imperatives — an effort which he describes as a “list of seven things that I felt that we had to do better at to be successful operationally in conventional power projection.”

These imperatives cover top programs and mission areas including space, the Advanced Battle Management System, Next Generation Air Dominance and Air Force readiness in the future battlespace. In the seven months since Kendall revealed his Operational Imperatives, he has put together teams — led by operators, technologists and acquisition executives — to see the imperatives to fruition.

Reflecting on this progress, Kendall said, “The teams have done great work at pulling together what we need to do. The problem now, for me, is to resource it.”

Budget

Fortunately, Kendall expects the Air Force’s top priority programs to be well-funded. “Congress is likely to provide a significant increase in [2023] from what we asked for. This would reset our baseline for [2024],” he projected.

The Air Force’s most recent Program Objective Memorandum, or POM, is just a starting point for the budget and funding conversations Kendall expects to have in the next few months. However, until budgets are finalized, the Air Force won’t know for sure which resources will be allocated to which programs.

“We don’t really know where we’re going to end up in terms of resources, but I think we’ve positioned the Department of the Air Force very well to compete for those resources, because we have identified the specific things that we need to do.”

Though Kendall could not share details about the latest POM, he did say, “I will tell you that I made tradeoffs in the POM to fund as much of the Operational Imperatives as I could.”

DOD-Wide Cultural Shifts Necessary

Ultimately, Kendall acknowledged that the Air Force won’t overcome the myriad of threats it faces if the Department of Defense doesn’t integrate and operate as a cohesive joint force.

“There’s an enormous amount of parochialism, turfism, etc. that I have seen in the Department of Defense, and we’ve got to get beyond that,” Kendall urged. “We’ve got to think about what our mission is and how we contribute to that mission and make sure that what we’re doing contributes as much as possible and not spend our time just trying to take care of our little part of the budget.”

“One team, one fight” is a mantra that guides Kendall in his role as he hopes to drive out the “dysfunctional” behavior in the Pentagon and enact the same mentality across the entire DOD enterprise.

The 2022 Air Force Summit is part of the Potomac Officers Club’s annual military service-focused program of events. The next installment of the series will be the 2022 7th Annual Army Summit on Aug. 24 at the McLean Hilton.

Hon. Gabe Camarillo, undersecretary of the Army and chief management officer for the U.S. Department of the Army, is slated to keynote this highly-anticipated in-person event. Click here to register.

Article link: https://www.govconwire.com/2022/07/air-force-secretary-frank-kendall-prepared-to-accept-risk-to-field-capabilities/

By EDWARD GRAHAMJULY 21, 2022

The message to staff said that “more could be done” to streamline planned deployment of new health record software at Boise VA Medical Center.

The Veterans Affairs Department has indefinitely postponed its planned rollout of the Oracle Cerner Millennium electronic health record system at the Boise VA Medical Center as technical issues and critical reports from the VA’s Office of Inspector General continue to stymie the implementation of the software.

In an internal VA email to staff distributed on Wednesday and obtained by Nextgov, VA Deputy Under Secretary for Health Steven Lieberman called the postponement “not a setback, but rather part of the process.” 

The VA announced last month that all of its originally planned software deployments for the year, with the exception of Boise, would be delayed until 2023, following a series of outages and logistical issues that have highlighted serious flaws in the EHR system. The deployment at Boise VA Medical Center was originally scheduled for June 25, before being pushed back to July 23. The most recent delay indefinitely postpones the software’s go-live date.

“At this time, VA has not scheduled a new launch date for the electronic health record system at the Boise VA Medical Center,” VA spokesman Randal Noller said.

“Many thanks go to our Boise VAMC and [Electronic Health Record Modernization Integration Office] staff, who worked tirelessly to get us to this point,” the email said. “There are positive improvements in many areas because of their hard work. However, in assessing Boise’s readiness for deployment this weekend, VA made the decision that more could be done to ensure a safe and successful deployment. VA continues to work with Oracle Cerner to implement important system enhancements and make the necessary improvements to ensure system stability.”

VA Secretary Denis McDonough confirmed the delayed software rollout at the Boise VA Medical Center during a press conference on Wednesday, but said “we’ve learned from these issues around patient safety” when asked about the long-term viability of the EHR system.

The next EHR system deployments are currently scheduled for January 28, 2023, in Michigan’s Aleda E. Lutz VA Medical Center and the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. According to EHRM’s online deployment schedule, the tentative go-live date for both facilities—as of June—was the second quarter of 2023. 

News of the postponement came the same day that VA leaders overseeing the agency’s software deployment were grilled by members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee about outages, cost overruns and patient care concerns that have impacted the five VA medical sites where the system is currently live. Committee Chairman Jon Tester, D-Mont., said during the hearing that a third-party estimate of the EHR software project presented to Congress found that it would cost more than $50 billion over 20-plus years.

Idaho’s entire congressional delegation said in a joint press release that it raised concerns with the VA about the software’s deployment at the Boise VA Medical Center following a series of critical OIG reports about the EHR system. One of the recent watchdog reports found that the software implemented at the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Eastern Washington—the first commercial rollout of the EHR system—had a critical flaw that improperly routed more than 11,000 clinical orders to an “unknown queue” without the knowledge of clinicians. 

While Idaho’s lawmakers said that some of these deficiencies had been addressed, their release noted that “numerous outstanding issues remain.”

“As the VA works to determine a viable path forward for the new EHR system, we once again call on VA and Oracle Cerner leadership to put veterans first by fixing the long-identified issues with the program that pose a threat to patient care,” Republican Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, along with Republican Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher, said. “Before the system is rolled out at any additional sites, it must be made safe, reliable and user-friendly.”

Article link: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2022/07/internal-va-email-calls-postponement-ehr-rollout-boise-part-process/374772/

The service is expected to issue a memorandum regarding policies that will support the cyber ready concept and continue to grow the use of DevSecOps. 

Nikki Henderson Fri, 07/22/2022 – 12:04

The Department of the Navy is shifting its IT development priorities toward cyber readiness and DevSecOps as it prepares to more fully implement zero trust.

The Navy is currently working on recommendations that focus on instating Continuous Authorization To Operate (cATO) procedures needed to streamline development cycles and safeguard network security.     

Tony Plater, CISO at the Navy, said being cyber ready is the service’s top priority. Plater described the ultimate goal as a more responsive and iterative approach to security.

“The right to operate is earned and managed every day because we need to be looking at cybersecurity every day.  Including how our shift to cyber ready is going to shift us to an active cyber ready state, how it’s going to enable acquisition speed and how it’s going to better defend our information,” Plater said during Federal News Network’s The Connection Between Zero Trust and DevSecOps webinar.   

The Navy views cybersecurity as a compliance problem and has identified cybersecurity requirements as well as audits to evaluate these processes. However, internal review has shown that Navy’s current compliance model is not providing the cybersecurity posture needed.  

“The Navy needs to fundamentally shift our cybersecurity from a compliance approach to an active cyber ready state,” Plater said. “Cybersecurity needs to be an enabler and it can’t be seen as a check at the end or as a barrier.  We also think this active cyber state will help us better defend our information.”   

Plater outlined that in order to be cyber ready, the Navy should follow key principles such as measuring cybersecurity more holistically through a risk and readiness framework that stays ahead of an evolving threat landscape.    

“It’s not just patching and trying to keep up with every cyber vulnerability. It means understanding what the risks are, where the threat is, prioritize and then go at it,” Plater said.   

Two other key factors that will support cyber readiness include accelerating the authorization process while avoiding risk, and fostering a culture of change needed to incorporate these new operating principles.  

Plater stated that Navy plans to launch the first of these new cybersecurity pilot programs within the next 60 to 90 days.  

“We will release a strategic intent memo which will outline our expectations for the services. Following that, those pilots will be used to help us guide actual policy. We will continue to work closely with DOD to share what we’re learning and then distribute that knowledge where it makes sense across the department,” Plater said.        

According to Plater, guidance will soon be coming from the Navy and Marine Corps CISOs on how to make better and more comprehensive use of DevSecOps. 

“The Navy has launched a new platform called Black Pearl. We have teams that meet on weekly basis who are working to establish the guidance, policy and processes it takes to certify pipelines that will produce securely coded products,” Plater said.   

“By putting all this code through a DevSecOps process we can understand how the software is developed, the pipeline is developed and establish the correct security posture,” Plater added.  

During the event Plater also gave an update on the Navy’s zero trust journey.  

“We’re conducting gap analysis. Identifying routes to and from authorized users, looking at maturity within each pillar and formulating internal roadmaps to prioritize risks that are found,” Plater said. “We will continue to emphasize that you should not automatically trust traffic inside the perimeter and to authenticate, validate and verify every request.”

Article link: https://governmentciomedia.com/navy-release-cyber-readiness-devsecops-guidelines-ahead-zero-trust

By ALEXANDRA KELLEYJULY 19, 2022 04:32 PM ET

A new report from the White House points to advanced cloud technologies to help bolster artificial intelligence R&D at the federal level.

Federal agencies that want to successfully scale and implement cloud computing systems into existing infrastructure can do so through several key practices, including designating expert teams, two-factor authentication, and enhanced education opportunities among users. 

Outlined in a White House report published earlier this month, officials documented how cloud computing systems can support further federal research and development in artificial intelligence, a goal within the broader Biden administration.

Authored by the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Subcommittee within the National Science and Technology Council, the report notes that leveraging cloud computing technology can enable better on-demand resources for researchers working with AI technologies. It went on to highlight opportunities for public agencies looking to bolster AI research efforts with advanced computing systems.

“Agencies that have undertaken early efforts to leverage commercial cloud computing resources to advance AI R&D have commonly experienced benefits to their investments in terms of providing internal and external researchers persistent, on-demand access to cutting-edge capabilities, accelerating experimentation and the use of AI in new domains, and enabling reproducibility and scalability of the research activities and results,” the report explains. 

Four best practices emerged from a survey of federal agencies adopting cloud computing for R&D purposes, the first being the designation of administrative teams to manage the implementation of cloud systems into existing infrastructure. These teams will also focus on providing training to other federal employees engaging with cloud computing to facilitate individual research goals.

The subcommittee recommended improving security features, namely two-factor authentication, as a baseline security measure and the second best practice. Further training assistance for employees and pre-computed workflows were also recommended among best practices to help employee access and prevent duplicate work.

The report also outlined common challenges agencies faced in adopting cloud computing technologies, particularly related to a lack of funding and staffing across departments. 

“Agencies have also encountered challenges relating to (1) the costs of data storage and access, complicating the ability for multiple teams to access shared data, and (2) ensuring that the users of a given cloud computing platform can locate and maintain awareness of data, experiments and results relevant to their work and interests,” the report stated. 

The report ultimately emphasized the need for a more specialized workforce, a common challenge many agencies face when working with emerging technologies. It suggested more federal investments in training resources for professionals at every level of cloud computing systems, including end users, cloud architects and data scientists.

“Workforce development has remained a critical limiting factor in the ability to adopt and scale cloud computing-based research efforts. Many federal employees have limited familiarity with cloud computing technologies, and few have industry certification on cloud computing systems,” the report said. “These limitations challenge both internal research efforts and the ability to provide guidance and resources to external researchers.”

Article link: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2022/07/white-house-advocates-cloud-investment-path-artificial-intelligence/374663/

By WILLIAM D. EGGERSJULY 20, 2022 08:00 AM ET

President Biden wants to make it easier and more efficient to access critical government services. Here’s some ways to make that happen.

Organizing government services around life events has become increasingly popular worldwide. Late last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to bring life-event service delivery to citizens across the United States. 

The president’s directive reorganizes the delivery of government services around five specific life events for citizens, including retirement, having children, leaving the military, surviving natural disasters and navigating financial shocks. It represents a transformational and highly impactful mindset shift for government agencies who provide critical services to Americans.

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Today, accessing federal resources around any significant life event requires American citizens to navigate a time-consuming and complex obstacle course of bureaucracy. The president’s executive order aims to make it easier and more efficient to access critical government services by streamlining digital entry points, improving the quality of information about vital programs and investing meaningful resources in federal technology modernization. It can significantly strengthen the way that government agencies do business and enhance the citizen experience. 

To achieve the goals outlined in the president’s directive, federal agencies will need to cooperate, share information and get their technology to better communicate – all while putting citizens, not agency convenience, at the center of their missions. Agencies can get there by embracing six key strategies:

1. Put users at the heart of service integration: The citizen must remain at the center of every design choice. Agency leaders should test each new digital service improvement by conducting interviews with citizens and identifying major pain points and sources of friction. Listening to feedback from everyday Americans will help agencies fine tune their services and enhance the citizen experience. 
2. Design a governance model that’s right for each agency: A multi-agency project must assign accountability and determine authority. The ideal governance model for a life-event-centered service model will allow government leaders to give different agencies responsibility for different segments of the citizen experience.
3. Incentivize agencies to work together through shared funding: To overworked federal staff, a whole-of-government approach can feel like an added responsibility. As one worker put it, “We’re going to be measured on our own performance, and not on cross-agency performance.” Funding mechanisms for shared responsibilities should provide appropriate incentives and give agencies more flexibility. 
4. Determine the right data-sharing and technology model: Sharing data makes it imperative for government computers to speak the same language. Shared Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and shared data formats can help agencies collaborate. 
5. Prioritize privacy and data security: Seamless API integration can make data sharing easy. It must also make data sharing secure. Offering citizens an opportunity manage their information on one central and secure platform can provide more security than requiring citizens to enter their personal information on a dozen different applications. 
6. Prioritize user trust: Citizens won’t try new approaches unless they trust them. And secure data protections can help strengthen citizen trust in life-event service delivery. 

Each of these six strategies is mutually reinforcing. Focusing on the individual user informs an effective governance model. An effective governance model can efficaciously and efficiently distribute interagency funding. A safe API and data-sharing model ensures citizen privacy and data security. Citizens with a secure experience accessing government services will have more trust in government. And with more trust in government, agencies can continue to successfully serve the American people and fulfill their missions. 

The transformation to life-event service delivery won’t be easy. It requires behind-the-scenes wrangling – from getting different agency computer systems to better share data, to aligning funding models that incentivize collaboration. But these six strategies can help advance the shift.

Article link: https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2022/07/six-strategies-transforming-citizen-service-delivery/374631/

William D. Eggers serves as the executive director of the Deloitte Center for Government Insights. A noted expert on government reform, he has authored numerous books, including: “Delivering on Digital,” “The Solution Revolution,” “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon” and “Governing by Network.” He recently testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on CX and life events-based service delivery.