On March 4, NSGIC launched five state-wide pilot studies across the nation, when state geographic information officers (GIOs) and election directors (EDs) from Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia came together with subject matter experts to develop plans for their respective three-month pilot projects.
It was a historic moment to have so many key stakeholders ... collaborating on how to overcome obstacles to making elections better with GIS Jamie Chesser, geospatial programs manager at NSGIC
Each state is committed to furthering the use of GIS in elections, and the pilot studies are designed to support and record their experience as they tackle select next steps on that path.
Says Jamie Chesser, geospatial programs manager at NSGIC: “It was a historic moment to have so many key stakeholders from five states in the same room laying out plans and collaborating on how to overcome obstacles to making elections better with GIS. All of these states are motivated to take advantage of the increased efficiency and risk reduction that using GIS in elections offers, and are at various stages of implementation. We very much appreciate them participating in this pilot study and then sharing their learnings, for the benefit of other states.”
Read full story at NSGIC …
first published week of: 04/01/2019
The Riviera Beach, FL City Council voted unanimously to pay a $600,000 ransom demand to hackers who had frozen its computer system, according to the Associated Press and other reports.
Cities have increasingly faced cyberattacks, with hackers freezing systems and demanding ransom.
This is the latest in a string of cyberattacks that have frozen city systems. Baltimore recently refused to pay a $76,000 ransom to stop a malware attack, and similar cybercrimes have targeted Atlanta, Allentown, PA and Medford, OR. Hackers have also targeted hospitals and transportation hubs like the Port of San Diego.
According to the Palm Beach Post, the Florida village Palm Springs paid an undisclosed ransom in response to a 2018 attack, but still lost two years of data. The FBI’s website says it "doesn’t support" paying ransom to hackers, despite some cities' decisions to do so.
In Riviera Beach, the city council approved payment of 65 bitcoins, with a value of approximately $592,000, from the city insurer and an additional $25,000 from the city budget. Cryptocurrency is preferred by hackers because it is hard to track.
Read full story at SmartCities Dive…
first published week of: 06/24/2019
(Shutterstock/Sean Pavone)
The state of Florida's IT structure has been fluid for a long time, and the new governor is planning once again to shake things up. But this time, a technology advocate in the state says, it feels different.
Florida’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, wants to shut down the state’s technology agency for the third time since 2005.
But it’s an open question whether the move will mean continuing what has become a status quo of instability, or whether it will finally create a clear direction for Florida’s use of technology.
James Taylor, CEO of the nonprofit Florida Technology Council, was a vocal critic of 2017’s legislative attempt to effectively decentralize the Agency for State Technology (AST). That attempt passed with lots of support from lawmakers, but former Gov. Rick Scott vetoed it.
This time around, Taylor is more hopeful. The details of DeSantis’ plans are unclear; his budget proposal simply calls for dropping the budget of the agency to zero and reallocating them to the Department of Management Services, creating a new Office of the State Chief Information Officer in the process.
Read full story at Government Technology…
first published week of: 02/11/2019
In an expected turn of events, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation to roll the Agency for State Technology into the Department of Management Services. The new iteration will be called the Division of State Technologies.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs a bill May 17.
( State of Florida )
A long-awaited reorganization of Florida’s state IT and technology departments will soon get underway following Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signing of a bill authorizing the changes.
House Bill 5301 was passed by the state Legislature in May and signed by DeSantis this week. It will fold the state’s largest IT agency, the Agency for State Technology (AST), into the Department of Management Services (DMS) — the state’s department concerned with business and workforce activities. The AST will then be merged with the DMS’ telecommunications division, creating the DMS Division of State Technologies.
The merger is expected to increase efficiency by streamlining the state’s technology and telecommunications functions, according to a release associated with the merger. It is not expected to result in any reductions in staff to any affected agencies, instead seeing all of AST’s current functions and services transferred to DMS and merged.
Read full story at Government Technology…
first published week of: 07/08/2019
( FL Agency for State Technology )
Ekaterina Fitos, who was named as the state’s first geographic information officer in December 2017 before transferring to another agency, has left state service to join a civil engineering firm.
Florida’s first-ever geographic information officer (GIO) has returned to the private sector, leaving the state to find a replacement, according to officials.
When Ekaterina Fitos joined the Agency for State Technology (AST) in December of 2017, she brought a wealth of public-sector experience and had been expected to put together a comprehensive, statewide GIS strategy for the agency. She was also tasked with chairing the state’s enterprise GIS working group.
However, Fitos left the position last year, according to officials. It is unclear exactly when she left state service, though her LinkedIn profile suggests she spent 10 months as GIO for the Department of Environmental Protection before taking a position with Michael Baker International, a civil engineering firm.
Read full story at Government Technology…
first published week of: 06/03/2019
As they grapple with security and data access, Utah, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Indiana explain how they are leveraging identity and access management to achieve their single sign-on goals for both staff and citizens.
When it comes to identity and access management (IAM), state IT executives want to emulate the solutions developed by retail giants such as Amazon. “Think about how citizens access their favorite retail website,” said Erik Avakian, chief information security officer of Pennsylvania. “They can go to different areas of the site and buy what they need with one unified credential.”
Modeling itself on today’s digital retail world, the Keystone State is integrating identity proofing, social media log-ins and password strength meters. “These are things people expect when they go to other major websites, so we are trying to bring that type of experience to government,” he added. “Regardless of the agency they are doing business with, citizens will have a unified credential they can use across multiple applications.”
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 03/25/2019
Accela, Esri, Google, Microsoft and five others will be giving marketing advice, business development resources and mentorship to the 22 startups currently involved with STiR’s 16-week cohort, which concludes in May.
The Startup in Residence (STiR) program, which matches tech startups with local governments who could use their solutions, has enlisted the help of nine major tech companies to coach projects to the finish line.
Last week, those companies — Accela, Cubic, Esri, Google, Mexichem, Microsoft, Oracle, Panasonic and Visa — started deciding which startups to partner with for the remainder of this year’s 16-week program, according to Kamran Saddique, co-executive director of City Innovate, STiR’s parent organization. He said STiR recruited those major companies to form a technology advisory board in September 2018, and over months of planning and interviewing, they’ve chosen who among STiR’s 2019 cohort would most benefit from their respective expertise, marketing experience and other resources, starting now through the end of May.
Originally launched as a San Francisco-based regional endeavor in 2014, STiR grew to include nine cities in 2018 and now involves 22 cities or government agencies, with 39 startups working on 43 challenges, according to Saddique. He said those numbers have been in flux, because some cities dropped out when their challenges didn’t match with available startups, and a handful of startups are tackling more than one challenge. Challenges run the gamut from mobility issues to civic engagement, the Internet of Things, resiliency and process improvement, among other things.
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 04/08/2019
The public sector has been notoriously slow to embrace technology. Is that finally changing?
Over the course of three decades, I’ve written extensively about government technology. While the technologies themselves have gotten faster, and cheaper, leading to some remarkable innovations and disrupting entire industries, change has been a lot slower in state and local government. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: One of government’s essential roles is to enable entrepreneurship and let the private sector develop best practices. Indeed, the three biggest evolutions in government technology over the past 30 years bear that out.
When Governing started publishing in 1987, the era of decentralized computing was about to begin. That year, state and local governments were still firmly in the mainframe computing camp, using big iron primarily to collect, sort and file data for the big government programs of the day, including Medicaid and unemployment insurance. But in the private sector, mainframes were on the way out.
Read full story at Governing…
first published week of: 11/11/2019
After nearly nine months of interim tech leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services has a new permanent CIO.
Jose Arrieta, who has been the agency's associate deputy assistant secretary for acquisition since January 2018, has accepted the CIO job. The change was announced at AFFIRM's May 23 Leadership Awards event. Arrieta confirmed his new job to FCW that evening.
Arrieta has been one of government's strongest advocates for blockchain, and won a 2019 Federal 100 Award for his leadership on HHS' Accelerate project -- the first distributed-ledger-powered system to receive an authority to operate. He has also been critical at times of the ways centralized IT authority can hinder innovation in an agency, but told FCW he was excited to show that CIOs can also be a catalyst for those efforts.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 06/10/2019
Open source intelligence isn't just for spies.
Over the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with the latest form of spycraft, though it was hardly what I was expecting. Sometime around the 1980s, the military and intelligence organizations started to allocate at least some of their covert resources away from traditional spying activities like embedding agents and trying to hack into classified networks. Instead, some resources were devoted to scanning public sources of information like newspapers and official documents. This kind of spycraft was dubbed open source intelligence gathering, or OSINT for short.
OSINT efforts got a big boost with the rise of the internet and then another huge one when social media went mainstream. Skilled intelligence agents no longer have to always cultivate sources in rival governments or perform dangerous operations in unfriendly territory. Instead, they can sometimes get just as valuable information by connecting the dots and linking several publicly available information snippets into a much larger picture. It’s still a lot of work, but mostly conducted from the safety of a computer terminal sitting at their office.
To speed up the data collection process, OSINT automation tools were created. They could be directed to collect general information about a topic or even tasked with answering specific questions using publicly accessible information.
Read full story at NextGov…
first published week of: 12/02/2019