On Aug. 8, 2017, Roma Laster, a Pentagon employee responsible for policing conflicts of interest, emailed an urgent warning to the chief of staff of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Several department employees had arranged for Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, to be sworn into an influential Pentagon advisory board despite the fact that, in the year since he’d been nominated, Bezos had never completed a required background check to obtain a security clearance.
Mattis was about to fly to the West Coast, where he would personally swear Bezos in at Amazon’s headquarters before moving on to meetings with executives from Google and Apple. Soon phone calls and emails began bouncing around the Pentagon. Security clearances are no trivial matter to defense officials; they exist to ensure that people with access to sensitive information aren’t, say, vulnerable to blackmail and don’t have conflicts of interest. Laster also contended that it was a “noteworthy exception” for Mattis to perform the ceremony. Secretaries of defense, she wrote, don’t hold swearing-in events.
Laster’s alarms triggered fear among Pentagon brass that Mattis would be seen as doing a special favor for Bezos, which could put him in hot water with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly proclaimed his antipathy to Bezos, mainly because of his ownership of The Washington Post. The swearing-in was canceled only hours before it was scheduled to occur. (This episode, never previously reported, is based on interviews with six people familiar with the matter. An Amazon spokesperson said the company was told that Bezos did not need a security clearance and that the company provided all requested information.)
Read full story at Government Executive…
first published week of: 08/26/2019
City Wi-Fi projects can help spur smart city development and boost economic activity.
As more cities contemplate smart city plans, they must first must meet a basic demand: internet access. Municipalities are providing free public Wi-Fi as they roll out smart city programs, taking advantage of fiber required to power the Internet of Things to provide public Wi-Fi access.
People want and use free public Wi-Fi: In a 2017 survey, One World Identity Labs found 49 percent of U.S.-based respondents use public Wi-Fi when they can’t get a cellular connection, and 32 percent prefer using free public Wi-Fi even when they do have a cellular connection.
Today, this kind of access is expected. “We assume we have access to high-speed internet, especially kids today. To survive, they need air to start, and the next thing they need is Wi-Fi,” says Naveen Lamba, director of smart communities and infrastructure at advisory firm Grant Thornton.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 11/04/2019
City Wi-Fi projects can help spur smart city development and boost economic activity.
As more cities contemplate smart city plans, they must first must meet a basic demand: internet access. Municipalities are providing free public Wi-Fi as they roll out smart city programs, taking advantage of fiber required to power the Internet of Things to provide public Wi-Fi access.
People want and use free public Wi-Fi: In a 2017 survey, One World Identity Labs found 49 percent of U.S.-based respondents use public Wi-Fi when they can’t get a cellular connection, and 32 percent prefer using free public Wi-Fi even when they do have a cellular connection.
Today, this kind of access is expected. “We assume we have access to high-speed internet, especially kids today. To survive, they need air to start, and the next thing they need is Wi-Fi,” says Naveen Lamba, director of smart communities and infrastructure at advisory firm Grant Thornton.
Citywide Wi-Fi is more than a public convenience. It helps cites run their infrastructure, address income inequality, attract potential customers to business, improve public safety and enable local governments to provide better services for their citizens and visitors to their region.
Read full story at StateTech…
first published week of: 11/11/2019
Better service delivery is changing the way implementers and users view technology.
City of Las Vegas Chief Information Officer Michael Sherwood remembers the early days in his career when public sector IT shops were mainly charged with helping users print documents—he pressed Control+P a lot—and fixing broken computers.
Those days—at least for Sin City’s tech shop and its 2.5 million resident customers—are gone. Instead, tech officials accommodate the kind of service delivery its citizens have come to expect from their everyday-interactions with modern companies and applications.
“The transformation for the city of Las Vegas and IT, in general, is more IT shifting from break-and-fix or keep-the-lights-on mentality to knowledge-based work,” Sherwood said on March 27 at an event hosted by Nextgov. “What we’re actually doing is providing data and results to departments so they can make the best decisions based on actionable information.
What we look at today is not only our IT providing tech solutions and innovation for the city, but more being helpful for economic development.”
People tend to move to—and stay in—areas they’re generally happy with. Sherwood said Las Vegas uses technology to make it a more attractive destination for permanent residents and tourists alike.
Read full story at NextGov…
first published week of: 04/08/2019
State and local government leaders say that for now some collaborative efforts are facing the potential of individual delays, but the effects are likely not to be noticed by most of the general public.
The federal government shut down three days before Christmas after lawmakers and the president failed to agree on an appropriations bill for the 2019 fiscal year.
Nearly a month later, the shutdown continues. The reason stems from President Trump wanting funding to build a wall on the nation’s southern border. Reasons aside, though, the fact remains that all non-essential federal government operations have ceased, raising the natural question of whether state and local gov tech and innovation work — a portion of which relies on federal collaboration — is being affected.
In conversations with a half dozen state and local government leaders and innovation experts, a consensus emerged that small effects are starting to trickle down to technologists at other levels of government.
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 01/21/2019
At GovSummit, emerging technology showcased how governments and organizations can more efficiently communicate and keep track of resources, saving money and lives.
As cities and states deal with the increase in regularity and intensity of natural disasters and other emergencies, mapping software could hold the key to improving responses and saving lives.
The way that we were doing things 50-60 years ago doesn't need to be the same now Nate Mook, executive director of World Central Kitchen
Speakers at GovSummit, a one-day event in Washington, DC hosted by mapping platform Mapbox, said technology is now capable of providing information on routing for emergency vehicles, where the needs for relief are, and how any weather or aftershocks will affect people on the ground. It marks a sea change from emergency response systems dogged by poor communication and uncertainty about where to deploy resources.
"It's time for a new model," Nate Mook, executive director of World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that provides meals in the wake of natural disasters, said during a speech. "The way that we were doing things 50-60 years ago doesn't need to be the same now. We have the capabilities, we have the technology, we have the expertise to be able to apply to these challenges."
Read full story at SmartCities Dive…
first published week of: 04/01/2019
Edge solutions can process data where it is collected, delivering insights to cities faster.
In cities across the country, more computing and data processing happen at the network edge, where devices and users are located. Smart cities are starting to embrace edge computing, which enables faster data analysis and thus delivers insights in a more timely and relevant way.
Gartner reported in 2018 that around 10 percent of enterprise-generated data was created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. Gartner projected by 2025 this figure is expected to jump to 75 percent.
Edge computing allows agencies to take the power of the cloud all the way to the network edge, especially to areas where they have not been able to use it before. Agencies can perform data analytics and processing and gain insights at the edge before routing that data back to centralized data centers for further analysis.
first published week of: 12/02/2019
Interview with Adam S. Hickey, Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the US Department of Justice.
In recent years, the US government has prosecuted three espionage cases against former US intelligence officers, all at the same time, says Adam Hickey, Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the US Department of Justice. They were accused of “being co-opted by a foreign power”.
Hickey notes how the US government is seeing a “concerted effort to target US government officials”. And increasingly, the private sector is also a target of foreign intelligence for nefarious reasons, he tells GovInsider at a recent media briefing in Singapore.
“To put it colloquially, it’s no longer spy versus spy,” he says. “Particularly with corporations – it’s spy versus you”.
Read full story at GovInsider…
first published week of: 10/14/2019
City tech leaders and cybersecurity experts confront the tension between elected officials beholden to the public and IT bosses whose primary concern is limiting the information available to bad actors.
Atlanta was one of the first major cities hit, waylaid by a costly ransomware attack. As headlines about what happened continued in the months to come, similar incidents besieged other government agencies across the country. There was Baltimore. There was the Colorado Department of Transportation, twice. There were half a dozen small cities in Massachusetts. There was Albany, N.Y.
In the past 18 months or so, cyberattacks on government have accelerated. Experts say this is an evolution wherein bad actors have moved from targeting individuals at random, to going after governments, school districts, companies, and other institutions, which often have more to lose and are thereby more lucrative. Another factor in the recent acceleration is that many of these entities have been traditionally underfunded in the realm of cybersecurity.
As such, public-sector IT leaders have begun to view a successful cyberattack as a matter of when, not if. Essentially, regardless of how well-prepared government is, a breach is still coming, and so a larger onus is now being placed on response, specifically on best practices for the aftermath of a cyberattack. Within this conversation, however, a major point of tension has arisen — transparency.
Read full story at Governmentj Technology…
first published week of: 11/11/2019
Three of Google’s planned submarine cables are on indefinite hold while Team Telecom investigates
Team Telecom, a shadowy US national security unit tasked with protecting America’s telecommunications systems, is delaying plans by Google, Facebook and other tech companies for the next generation of international fiber optic cables.
Team Telecom comprises representatives from the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice (including the FBI), who assess foreign investments in American telecom infrastructure, with a focus on cybersecurity and surveillance vulnerabilities.
Team Telecom works at a notoriously sluggish pace, taking over seven years to decide that letting China Mobile operate in the US would “raise substantial and serious national security and law enforcement risks,” for instance. And while Team Telecom is working, applications are stalled at the FCC.
The on-going delays to submarine cable projects, which can cost nearly half a billion dollars each, come with significant financial impacts. They also cede advantage to connectivity projects that have not attracted Team Telecom’s attention – such as the nascent internet satellite mega-constellations from SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon .
Read full story at TechCrunch…
first published week of: 07/22/2019