Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee sparred today over competing bills that would address online data privacy generally and protection of customer proprietary network information (CPNI) specifically, but appeared to make little headway toward consensus on how to proceed on legislative measures that have languished in the committee since being introduced last year. […]

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. […]

Artificial Intelligence systems are known for getting results with compute-intensive analytics involving huge data sets and a lot of processing power. But it turns out they also can help users do more with less. […]

Tim Bock currently leads the Data Center Solutions Sales team supporting the US Navy and DOD OCONUS customers as part of Dell Federal’s business unit. Prior to his current role, Tim held a variety of positions across the Dell Technologies family, including the Virtustream business unit as well Dell’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer […]

In another example of how far the cyber domain is pervading every aspect of warfare, military units are beginning to add cyber protection testing to vehicles before they hit the road. […]

In times of emergency, state governors have regularly called in the National Guard, for reasons such as assisting the recovery after natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or to suppress protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014. If voting systems are under siege, should they do the same? […]

Rather than focusing on technology, Compuware’s CEO Chris O’Malley believes Federal CIOs need to focus on people. A little strange coming from a tech CEO, but Chris seems to be on to something. Compuware is a reinvigorated 40-something mainframe software company based in Detroit in a tech space populated with young Californian cloud/agile upstarts–but O’Malley […]

We tend to think of international cyber attacks as a new phenomenon: threats only created by recent mass digitalization. But, in reality, they have been around since the Cold War. Back in 1982, the CIA accessed the control system for a Soviet gas pipeline and triggered a massive explosion. At the time, such events were known as ‘logic bombs’. […]

The Army’s work on the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is more than just a way to carve out a catchy name for the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, wearable devices, cameras and embedded devices that take the field with military forces. It also underscores the most important element of having those connected devices–the data collection and automated analytics capabilities required to make good use of the information they provide. […]

A lot of the Army’s most high-profile modernization projects concern complex, expensive weapons systems that emerge from research and development, budgeting, and procurement process inside the halls of the Pentagon and other facilities and outside of the experience of most people. But some key elements of the Army’s efforts to keep pace with the demands of a changing world are so familiar to people at home, at work, or in a coffee shop that they take them for granted. An example of this is good, reliable Wi-Fi. […]

The Intelligence Community wants to develop a kind of universal translator that will search documents across a full range of media and make sense of them for English-speaking analysts. […]

With the Internet for transportation, a lie can get all the way around the world before truth can blink itself awake. And that’s a challenge for those who seek to stem the proliferation of false information, be it accidentally misattributed quotes, political propaganda, or malicious “fake news.” Artificial intelligence can help combat the problem, by using machine learning algorithms to detect the patterns used in phony stories and ads designed to stir up fear or outrage, or, in the case of Russian disinformation, unsettle people’s faith in American institutions. […]

The Defense Department (DoD) is leading the brain-computer interface charge within government, recently investing $65 million across six projects. Each of these projects will work to develop high-resolution neural interfaces and working systems that could help in sensory restoration, specifically in these projects with regard to sight and speech. The contractors–five research organizations and one private company–will work under the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program, which was launched in 2016 with the goal of developing an implantable neural interface able to deliver high-bandwidth data transfers between the brain and electronics systems. […]

President Donald Trump nominated Michael Griffin to be principal deputy under secretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics on Oct. 27. […]

The Department of Transportation announced the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration Pilot Program on Oct. 25, which is an initiative to safely test and validate advanced operations for drones in partnership with state and local governments. […]

Department of Homeland Security officials told 21 states on Sept. 22 that their election systems were breached by Russian hackers. This is the first instance that the Federal government told states whether they were targeted. […]

MeriTalk compiles a weekly roundup of contracts and other industry activity. Here’s what happened this week in the Federal Information Technology community. […]

MeriTalk compiles a weekly roundup of contracts and other industry activity. Here’s what happened this week in the Federal Information Technology community. […]

Kiersten Todt is currently the President and Managing Partner of Liberty Group Ventures, LLC (LGV).  She develops risk and crisis management solutions for cybersecurity, infrastructure, homeland security, emergency management, and higher education clients in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.  Ms. Todt advises senior executives and Boards on cyber risk management, including the development and […]

Justice officials arrested Yu Pingan of Shanghai on Monday for supplying malware that has been connected to the 2015 Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach in 2015. […]

The number of reported Internet crimes and the costs incurred by those crimes are on the rise, according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s recently released 2016 Internet Threat Report. The “hottest” Internet crimes of 2016 were business email compromise, ransomware, tech support fraud, and extortion. […]

Sharon currently serves as the Policy and Response Unit Chief at the ICE/Student and Exchange Visitor Program returning from a multi year detail at the DHS Office of Academic Engagement where she served as the Senior Advisor for International Education to the National Academic Advisory Council, a 22-member deliberative body selected by the Secretary of […]

The Department of Labor gave the NOVA Workforce Board $1,660,430 to continue its effort to provide re-employment and training services to workers affected by layoffs and closures at 70 companies in Silicon Valley. […]

Dr. Davis is nationally recognized for her leadership in the development and implementation of significant and sustainable programs that successfully support the full spectrum of quality of life support and services for military personnel, veterans, their families, caregivers and survivors. A former Army Signal Officer and the mother of a veteran, Dr. Davis serves as […]

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency needs to attract new tech talent with new ideas and a desire to work on something bigger and more important than the next popular dating app. One of the ways the agency hopes to do that is by continuing to work with the government’s own in-house innovation shop, 18F. […]

The vote last week by House and Senate Republicans to repeal privacy regulations governing Internet service providers’ use of customer data has forced some states to consider new laws and has ISPs scrambling to clarify their privacy policies. […]

James Madison University students are working with the Hacking for Defense (H4D) program, funded by the Department of Defense, in order to build the technologies that the military needs. […]

Chief information officers, especially those in the health care sector, should be aware of a shift in spending when they move to the cloud, advised Tom Andriola, CIO of the University of California school system. […]

The Department of Transportation on Thursday designated 10 new testing sites for autonomous vehicles. […]

The Federal Trade Commission filed charges against the computer networking equipment company D-Link for providing inadequate security for its consumers. […]