The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mistakenly shared with an unnamed contractor sensitive personal data on 2.3 million victims of several recent hurricanes and California wildfires, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said in a March 15 report. […]

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Raffi Krikorian is resigning from his position after holding it for two years, during which he helped the party reform and modernize its data practices and digital security in light of DNC hacks during the 2016 presidential election, according to a published report. […]

Artificial intelligence (AI), following on the heels of its older sibling RPA (robotic process automation), is no longer waiting to be born, but remains more of a toddler on the Federal IT scene–still learning to walk before trying to run, but bulking up from an appetite for serious Federal government tech interest and investment. […]

A bipartisan group of senators reintroduced legislation on March 1 intended to ensure that public companies are prioritizing cybersecurity and data privacy. […]

The Senate may actively take up national data privacy legislation someday, but one key senator in the process indicated today that there is currently little institutional urgency to hurry toward that goal. […]

Privacy was the topic du jour on the Hill today. In its first hearing in the new Congress, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce heard testimony from privacy rights activists and technology industry groups on how to protect consumer privacy in the era of big data. All witnesses before the Subcommittee agreed that the Federal government needs to enact Federal data privacy legislation, though witnesses disagreed on what exactly the legislation should cover. […]

It turns out a little knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing.

That’s something the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) discovered when testing the value of artificial intelligence (AI) as an aid to battlefield decision-making. Researchers from ARL and the University of California, Santa Barbara, found in a series of test scenarios that people trust their own judgement more than they trust an AI’s advice. This was true even when an AI agent provided perfect guidance,  and when ignoring that advice led to negative results. People might trust an AI personal assistant to recommend a movie or the best way to drive to the theater, but not so much when they have skin–or their own skin–in the game. […]

With the 2020 national election cycle on the horizon, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., convened a hearing Wednesday to examine the how the United States was working to secure its elections. The hearing, broken into two panels, heard from senior Federal election officials, as well as state and local election officials. […]

A new report from the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) at the University of California-Berkeley recommends that national governments use their own spending on development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to shape best practices that will help govern activity in the AI arena as use of the technology becomes widespread. […]

Government and policy-makers shouldn’t put up unnecessary barriers to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) over concern of any perceived risks associated with the technology. […]

Cameron Bahar is the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Veritas, where he leads the technical vision and strategy for the company. With more than 17 years’ experience, Cameron has held CTO positions at several leading technology companies, including Hitachi Data Systems, Teradata and ParaScale. At the start of his career, Cameron was […]

Even anonymity doesn’t guarantee privacy. Not even in a crowd of millions. That’s the finding of a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers who found that anonymized mobility data can still result in privacy risks when that data is combined with data from other sources. Data–lots of it–is widely seen as the key to better planning for cities, transportation lines, and any kind of mobility services. But collecting all that data has an unintended privacy risk, even when taking pains to protect people’s identities. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs admitted this month that its 10-year, $10 billion-plus project to create an interoperable electronic health record system incurred a $350 million cost overrun right out of the gate–a potential red flag in the latest effort to develop an integrated records system that also works with the Department of Defense’s system. […]

How do you get 1,000 folks out of bed in Las Vegas before 7:00 a.m.? […]

Federal agencies are using the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework to manage their agencies’ cybersecurity risk, a year after the White House issued an executive order directing the heads of executive agencies and departments to use the NIST framework, according to an agency official. […]

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) on Friday announced that S&T and the Dutch government are each putting up $1.25 million to fund “collaborative cybersecurity research and development” across five U.S.-Dutch research teams. […]

Speaking at an event organized by Bloomberg Government, Rep. Eshoo indicated that her concerns are rooted in the impact of social media and other content that inspires or leads to violence such as the Oct. 27 murders at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced today that it issued $1,272,320 of funding awards to develop new solutions to “improve the capability of organizations to understand and improve their cybersecurity control investment decisions.” The funding will be split between University of California, San Diego and University of Illinois, Chicago. […]

The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has declined to hear a case regarding the legality of Obama-era Net Neutrality rules–putting an end to a lengthy legal battle by declining to hear USTelecom’s appeal. The telecommunication industry group originally sued the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) under the belief that the FCC lacked the authority to impose public-utility, common-carrier obligations on broadband internet access service. Under the Obama-era rules, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were barred from blocking or throttling web content or creating the so-called internet “fast lanes.” […]

Brian D. Griffith is the Section Chief of the Information Technology Management Section (ITMS) in the FBI’s Science and Technology (S&T) Branch, Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia. In his current position, Griffith manages the systems and IT infrastructure that enable the FBI’s support to state, local, tribal, and federal law […]

Five telecommunication industry groups–American Cable Association; CTIA – The Wireless Association; NCTA – The Internet & Television Association; USTelecom – The Broadband Association and the New England Cable & Telecommunications Association–filed suit against the state of Vermont on Thursday over the state’s net neutrality law. The law in question seeks to prevent companies that do not abide by the state’s net neutrality rules from receiving state contracts. […]

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee heard testimony today detailing the workings of data privacy laws in Europe and California–specifically the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)–amid a growing groundswell for Congress to work on a national data privacy law for the U.S. […]

A new report from a group of Federal government and private sector experts details how “precision agriculture,” or agriculture that uses connected technology to improve efficiency, faces new cybersecurity threats and a low degree of awareness in the industry to combat them. […]

California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown on Sunday signed S.B. 822 , which restores in the state Obama-era Federal net neutrality laws that were gutted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year. […]

A gaggle of tech and communications sector bellwethers presented a united front today at a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on data privacy and protection issues, saying they support a bill to address those issues but sharing strong preferences for federal legislation that would preempt state law and appoint the Federal Trade Commission as the chief watchdog. […]

According to a survey from ProPublica, more than one-third of 27 counties situated in House districts rated as toss-ups in the 2018 mid-term election are not using multi-factor authentication, leaving their systems vulnerable to attack. […]

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) today announced awards to five research organizations as part of a new program aimed at identifying network and internet disruptions that could “significantly impact critical infrastructure systems” and “other essential systems on which society is dependent.” […]

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and 12 other members of Congress asked Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons in an Aug. 24 letter to investigate whether Verizon Communications violated Federal law when it allegedly “throttled” the data service speeds of the Santa Clara, Calif., Fire Department earlier this month […]

A new report from The Century Foundation, a progressive think-tank, urges state law enforcement officials to take action on data privacy regulations in the absence of any substantial movement in that direction by the Federal government. […]

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. […]