New York City experiences so much cybercrime that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office created its own cyber lab, where staff can conduct investigations and forensics on computers, laptops and smartphones.
The New York Police Department serves five district attorney’s offices as well as other agencies, so the Manhattan office found itself "standing line to get the attention of the NYPD” when it wanted forensic help with electronic devices, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said at a recent Route Fifty event. “We built our own cyber lab using forfeiture dollars, which we brought in from investigations and prosecutions of foreign banks.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office also built mobile units so it could investigate devices in the field. In addition to the work being done in New York City, Vance said he also connects with local governments around the world through the Global Cyber Alliance, an organization his office helped found.
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 09/10/2018
The sky’s the limit as the city of Calgary opens what it believes is the first testing area in Canada for drones, autonomous vehicles and other technologies.
The city has set aside a 50-hectare site in its industrial southeast to offer airspace for an increasing demand from companies and educational institutions wanting to do mass tryouts of commercial drones.
A downturn in the energy industry when oil prices took a free fall in 2014-15 spurred the development of geospatial sciences, said Patti Dunlop of Calgary Economic Development.
Read full story at The Star Calgary…
first published week of: 10/22/2018
The San Jose, Calif. city hall.
( Wikimeida Commons)
San Jose, California officials discovered that the city’s pension plan has overpaid hundreds of public safety employees for the past 20 years. Now, the city is asking for its money back.
A 2009 audit found that the city had been overpaying 300 firefighter and police officer pensions since 1998, NBC Bay Area reports. However, the city took seven additional years to confirm the numbers.
“It’s taken us several years to replace the incorrect data with a complete set of new data so the calculations could be completely accurate,” San Jose Spokesman David Vossbrink told San Francisco TV station KPIX 5.
City officials have now begun contacting the retirees to pay the money back, although no deadline has been given, the San Jose Mercury News reports. IRS rules mandate that retirement trust funds must recover money if it is mistakenly paid.
"The goal is to have a process that is fair and equitable and will cause as little discomfort to the retirees, recognizing this is an error on the part of several city departments that happened long ago," Vossbrink told NBC Bay Area.
The overpayments range from a few hundred dollars to $30,000, while some city employees were reportedly underpaid, according to NBC Bay Area. The employees were overpaid about $1 million in total, the Mercury News reports.
Read full story at American City & County…
first published week of: 01/01/2018
The compromise still requires legislative approval, but would bar internet service providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down websites and video, as well as charging websites fees for fast lanes.
Ending a dispute over a proposed net neutrality bill, California Democratic legislators said Thursday they have agreed on a proposal that would provide the strongest protections of open access to the internet in the country in response to last month’s federal repeal of similar rules.
The compromise measures, which still require legislative approval, would bar internet service providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down websites and video, as well as charging websites fees for fast lanes, said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), an author of one of the two proposed bills.
Last month, Wiener accused fellow lawmakers of eviscerating his legislation in committee and said he no longer could support the main bill.
But Wiener and Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) appeared together at a news conference Thursday to announce a compromise proposal.
“Collectively this will be the most comprehensive and the strongest net neutrality protection in the United States,” Wiener said at a Capitol news conference. The new legislation, Wiener said, “will protect California consumers and set the standard for pro-internet efforts throughout the country.”
California is one of 29 states that have proposed legislation on net neutrality, including Hawaii, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, while action has been taken on bills in Oregon and Washington, officials said.
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 07/09/2018
Self-driving cars need high-quality digital maps to function properly. They not only use digital maps to find their general location, but also in some cases to locate landmarks that aid maneuvering in low-viability situations, or when a GPS link isn't available. Consequently, accruing map data has become a major priority for automakers and tech companies. But the world's largest new-car market is throwing up a major roadblock to these efforts.
The Chinese government is blocking foreign companies from mapping its roads in great detail, according to a Financial Times report. The restrictions, which reportedly do not apply to Chinese firms, are being instituted in the name of national security. China is concerned about spying.
Read full story at The Drive…
first published week of: 01/01/2018
Sallie Wright, CIO of Fulton County, GA
( tagonline.org)
Sallie Wright, chief information officer of Fulton County, has stepped down "to pursue other opportunities," in one of two recent C-suite changes.
Georgia’s most populous county finds itself without a permanent IT leader, after its CIO stepped down earlier this month.
Sallie Wright, Fulton County’s chief information officer of nearly three years, left “to pursue other opportunities,” the county’s Department of External Affairs indicated in a news release. Her last day was Aug. 3, county spokesperson Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez confirmed to Government Technology.
Chief Financial Officer Sharon Whitmore will step in to “provide oversight” of the department while a job search for a permanent replacement is conducted, the county said.
Wright, the former deputy CIO at Georgia State University, was hired by Fulton County in September 2015, and was identified by County Manager Dick Anderson in a news release then as being “critical” to helping the county “realize the vision of being first in efficiency, service and impact.”
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 08/20/2018
To help municipalities across Michigan improve their cybersecurity posture, the state last year launched a CISO-as-a-service pilot that helps small and mid-sized government agencies assess their IT security the way a chief information security officer might.
Today, nine communities are participating, and two or three more may join before the pilot ends at the end of September. As the pilot enters the final stages, the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB) will be working with the local communities to make the program permanent.
The program gives a community a scorecard it can use to benchmark its systems, prioritize risks and track progress. The assessment uses controls from the state’s CySAFE program, which was developed based on controls from the Center for Internet Security, the International Organization for Standardization and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Read full story at GCN…
first published week of: 04/30/2018
Technology advances may be enticing, but agencies must upgrade to the 21st century first, says Suzette Kent.
While exciting new advances in technology happen almost daily, Federal CIO Suzette Kent said that government agencies need to stay focused on a more immediate goal: modernization.
“I wish I could stand here and talk only about innovation,” she said at IBM’s Think Gov 2018 on Thursday in Washington, D.C. “But we still have so many things to do to be current in the 21st century.”
The President’s Management Agenda, released by the White House on March 20, provides agencies with a tactical list of what needs to be done to modernize, referred to as Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals. Specifically, the goals are to modernize IT, create transparency and accountability to the public and ensure the federal workforce has the proper skills and mindset to meet an evolving government mission.
Read full story at FedTech…
first published week of: 05/28/2018
Morristown is one of the world’s latest cities to announce a data-sharing partnership with Waze, a Google-owned, free, real-time crowd-sourced traffic and navigation app for smart phones and tablets.
The partnership allows Morristown officials to monitor traffic, and send alerts based on real-time driver observations.
Larry Clark, Morristown assistant city administrator for operations, says most Waze users will be motorists seeking precise directions and those communicating traffic conditions to other drivers. Waze could not function in Morristown without accurate geographic information system data supplied by city government, according to Clark.
“We are excited for partner with Waze to gain a deeper understanding of real-time conditions,” Clark said in a prepared statement. “Road sensors and cameras are cost-prohibitive and can’t scale to every corner of our city. The context of why traffic has occurred, in addition to specific incident reports, is invaluable.”
Communications between Waze users is anonymous.
As time allowed over about a year, Debbie Lee, Morristown GIS coordinator, modified Morristown GIS maps to a format Google could use. Similar to other applications and products, Google uses Waze to sell ads, according to Clark. Google proposed the partnership, which includes tens of millions of users in an ever-expanding number of countries.
Read full story at The Herald News…
first published week of: 02/19/2018
Sharon has an estimated 6,500 dwellings, and an ambitious volunteer effort aims to photograph and compile basic information about their condition all in a single day. Here, brick houses line a block of George Street.
( CORY BYKNISH | Herald)
The city of Sharon plans to make a significant advance in the battle against blight, and to do so, it’s going try something never before done in Pennsylvania.
City leaders, along with county and state officials, collaborated on a plan to survey every house in the city on Sept. 15, said Melissa Lynn Holmes, Sharon’s community and economic development director.
In a single day, officials hope to collect historical and current information on all 6,500 houses in the city, which will be collected with geographic information systems mapping, Holmes said.
GIS mapping lets municipalities create maps by collecting data though Survey123, a mobile app used to create digital indexes and maps. Once the information is collected, the data can be displayed and analyzed to help with historic home inventory, as well as land banking stock.
Holmes said the plan to canvass the city came in large part from the city’s need to collect historical information on the 60 properties involved in Sharon’s 2018 demolition plan.
The city planned to begin demolishing the houses in May, but the Pennsylvania State Historical Preservation Office expressed concern that some of the neighborhoods within the proposed demolition zone might hold historical significance, and therefore be ineligible for the project.
Read full story at The Herald…
first published week of: 08/06/2018