Government Executive - Authors - Bob Brewin

Executive at Center of VA Patient Scheduling Debacle Resigns

Bob Brewin — Fri, 16 May 2014 15:13:34 -0400

This story has been updated.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said Friday afternoon that he had accepted the resignation of Dr. Robert Petzel, the department’s undersecretary for health, amid a growing scandal over the deaths of patients awaiting treatment at VA facilities.

Petzel, who has worked for the VA for four decades, is at the center of a patient scheduling debacle alleged to have played a role in the deaths of 40 or more veterans at the Phoenix VA hospital.

“As we know from the veteran community, most veterans are satisfied with the quality of their VA health care, but we must do more to improve timely access to that care,” Shinseki said in a statement. “I am committed to strengthening veterans’ trust and confidence in their VA health care system.”

Petzel’s resignation followed a grueling three-hour Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing Thursday, where he sat mostly mute next to Shinseki, who said he was “mad as hell” over the patient scheduling scandal and vowed to fix the problem.

But in a statement Friday, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, called the announcement of Petzel's resignation "the pinnacle of disingenuous political doublespeak." Petzel had already said he planned to retire this year, Miller noted, and President Obama has already announced his intention to name a replacement. "Characterizing this as a ‘resignation’ just doesn’t pass the smell test," Miller said.

Earlier this month the American Legion, the largest veterans organization in the country, demanded that Shinseki resign. He told the hearing Thursday that he intended to continue working until he meets his goal of improving care or is “told by my commander in chief that my time has been served."

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Game On

Building an educational game for a smartphone or tablet is a pretty tall order for federal agencies. It has to be sufficiently engaging so it doesn’t wilt when compared with apps from private sector leaders such as Zynga. But you can’t ramp up the fun by compromising the app’s educational value or you’ll shortchange young learners and fail to fulfill the agency’s mission.

One app that crosses both these high bars is Solve the Outbreak, an iPad game developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The reviewers in Nextgov’s apps rating project gave it 4.5 points out of 5, making it one of the highest scoring apps in the project’s two-year history.

The app presents players with real-world disease outbreaks and teaches them about epidemiology and data analysis as they make decisions about how to respond. Along the way, players earn points until they reach the rank “disease detective.”

Our reviewers thought the app was educational enough to be used in a classroom and fun enough to hold high school students’ interest—a high bar as anyone who’s spent much time with adolescents knows.

“This is the type of learning I love for kids to have,” says Ted Chan, founder of Practicequiz.com and chief technology officer of Cook123.com. “It teaches that a lot of the math, biology, science and statistics concepts they are learning have meaningful applications.”

The reviewers’ only criticism of the app was that it’s only available on the iPad.

For more information, check out Nextgov’s Building Better Apps project at www.nextgov.com.

Joseph Marks

Glass Half Empty

Federal agencies for 15 years have been unable to move cybersecurity off a list of the government’s most imperiled initiatives, with a new audit revealing a declining number of agencies—half—do not annually train employees on security.

Perennial weaknesses in network security endanger national security because of the pervasiveness of the Internet and sophisticated cyber threats, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in September.

In fiscal 2012, 12 of the 24 major federal agencies provided annual security awareness training to at least 90 percent of their network users, compared with 22 agencies the prior year.

These and other “weaknesses show that information security continues to be a major challenge for federal agencies,” the audit states. “Until steps are taken to address these persistent challenges, overall progress in improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture is likely to remain limited.”

Aliya Sternstein

Testing 1,2,3

Contractors that helped develop the Obama administration’s troubled online health insurance marketplace say the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversaw the project, performed only two weeks of testing before going live on Oct. 1.

That’s significantly less testing time than usual for major Web applications, representatives from HealthCare.gov contractors CGI Federal and QSSI say. They declined to say how much time should have been allocated.

CGI played a major role in building Medicare.gov, for which it had several months of testing, says senior vice president Cheryl Campbell.

Joseph Marks

NSA Needs a 12-Step Program

Since Edward Snowden started leaking details on how the National Security Agency gobbles up exabytes of data worldwide, it has become increasingly clear that it has an unhealthy addiction.

NSA chief Keith Alexander has said the agency needs to collect “haystacks” of data in order to detect terrorist needles, an effort The Washington Post says “occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with ‘emergency detasking’ orders.”

Those are real signs of addiction. The explanation for this spying—everyone does it—is an excuse used by alcoholics on the 10th beer of the evening while everyone else at the bar slowly sips their second.

I’m not suggesting NSA go cold turkey, but it might try tapering off—a terabyte at a time.

Bob Brewin

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True Blue: VA’s Gift To the Country

Bob Brewin — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In August 2010, President Obama told veterans they soon would be able to go to the Veterans Affairs Department website, “click a simple blue button, download or print your personal health records so you have them when you need them and can share them with your doctors.” It was a radical notion: Doctors controlled, and sometimes only reluctantly shared, health records with patients.

Blue Button access on VA’s website My HealtheVet went live within weeks and a full national rollout two months later. Peter Levin, the department’s chief technology officer at the time, estimated 20,000 veterans would use the tool in the first year—a milestone Blue Button hit in its first month, Levin says.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched Blue Button on its MyMedicare.gov website in September 2010, and the Defense Department signed on that year as well.

The tool proved so useful that in December 2011 the Office of Personnel Management directed all federal employee health benefit plans to add the Blue Button function to their patient portals—that’s more than 200 carriers covering 8 million federal employees.

Since its launch at VA, Blue Button has fueled a national movement to give patients access to their health care information. More than 500 carriers and health care providers have pledged to adopt it, says Levin, who is considered the father of Blue Button. He left VA in March to start his own data security company, Amida Technology Solutions.

Empowering Patients

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, which is in the Health and Human Services Department, has embraced Blue Button as a way to empower patients by giving them an easy way to access to their health information and share it with clinicians, says Ellen Makar, a nurse who serves as the consumer e-health advisor at ONC.

Informed patients involved in their care are healthier, Makar says. For a nation facing spiraling health costs, such engagement could lead to significant savings over time. Asked who would end up using Blue Button, Makar says “everyone.”

Defense TRICARE beneficiaries—active-duty and retired military personnel and their families—have become heavy users of Blue Button. Since January 2010, they’ve used it to schedule more than 1.5 million appointments. In addition, more than 330,000 people have accessed it to refill prescriptions and download personal health data.

Aetna and UnitedHealth Group were early private sector adopters. Aetna added Blue Button to its patient portal in September 2011 and UnitedHealth Group followed in July 2012, predicting that 26 million beneficiaries would be able to download information using Blue Button by mid-2013.

Craig Newmark, founder of the classified ad site craigslist and a veterans advocate, told Government Executive: “Your medical history is vital for your health at any time, and that’s particularly true for vets. Having health records handy—online, in a memory stick, or [something] similar—means that any doctor will make smarter decisions on your behalf. It also means that the treating doctor could add records of the new treatment to the existing Blue Button record.”

This applies to the entire health care sector, which continues to grapple with paper records, Newmark says, noting that he has to tote piles of paper from one specialist to another, compared with “Blue Button style,” in which doctors just email them.

“Right now, getting records from one place to another is difficult enough that we don’t do it, or get it done painfully. Blue Button can get everyone reliable health records that can be shared between medical professionals. That means, for example, that doctors won’t prescribe conflicting drugs, and that saves lives,” he says.

Newmark and Makar characterize Blue Button as “VA’s gift” to the nation.

Five Feds and Six weeks

Former VA deputy secretary Scott Gould says Blue Button stands out as a prime example of the public sector producing something valuable that helps the private sector. Gould, who resigned in March and now is executive vice president of medical affairs for CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, a health insurer that serves the Baltimore-Washington area, estimates 1.8 million people use Blue Button to access their personal health records.

The program had its genesis at a January 2010 meeting of public and private health care providers at the New York-based nonprofit Markle Foundation focused on health IT, Levin says. The germ of the idea was that patients should share in medical decisions with clinicians and have access to their records.

Levin returned from that meeting and in February 2010 pulled together a team of five VA employees to quickly develop a way for patients to both access and contribute to their health records. He tapped Rachel Lunsford to lead the effort as product manager. Lunsford was a 25-year-old self-described “pedigreed geek” with a Master of Science degree from Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in public policy management.

Lunsford, now health IT coordinator for the Iowa Medicaid Enterprise, says development focused on data simplicity. The Blue Button team relied on the most basic data format—ASCII text, which can be read by both people and machines—developing a prototype in just six weeks.

Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park summarized the approach in remarks at a Microsoft health care conference in March 2012: “Look, there’s all this complicated stuff happening with health information. But why can’t we just do this: Why can’t we just let an American get a copy of their own information? And don’t worry about the format.” The signpost was a large blue button.

That first VA prototype, Levin says, primarily included self-reported information, such as demographics and health history. The next release, in late 2010, allowed patients to access lab data. Today, veterans who have authenticated their identity can access their entire VA health record online, he says.

Veterans also can use Blue Button to make appointments and access information provided by Defense, including service and deployment dates.

Levin said Blue Button quickly evolved from its ASCII origins and now handles data in machine-readable code based on the health care industry’s Health Level 7 Continuity of Care Document XML-based standard for patient information.

ONC has bootstrapped development of Blue Button apps through mashups and crowdsourcing challenges, spokesman Peter Ashkenaz says, including a prize-winning iPhone app for clinicians developed by Humetrix of San Diego.

People have a legal right to their health information, Makar says, which is enabled by Blue Button. ONC has started to develop a Blue Button hub—a central website that will detail which insurers and providers use Blue Button, so patients can get access to their data.

The Blue Button movement could soon spread to the United Kingdom.
Beverley Bryant, director of Strategic Systems and Technology for the National Health Service there, says she would like to use the technology to help manage care for diabetics and elderly patients suffering from dementia—two key health issues the United States faces as well.

Bryant says she was impressed by the speed with which VA developed Blue Button—a credit to a project that succeeded by putting simple first.

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 01:00:00 -0400

Chasing Ghost Viruses

After detecting malicious software in system components at Commerce Department headquarters, federal officials in 2012 disconnected the Economic Development Administration’s computer infrastructure, annihilated $170,000 worth of equipment and cut off staff email and website access nationwide, according to an inspector general audit released in late June.

The response was overkill. It turns out there was no widespread malware infection—something officials learned more than a year later, after the IG informed them.

The chain of destruction began in late 2011, when the Homeland Security Department notified Commerce about possible worms in the department’s systems. Commerce traced the problem to parts on the headquarters’ network that support the Economic Development Administration. Believing the issue was widespread, EDA in January 2012 asked Commerce to disconnect its systems from the network, which cut access to email for all agency employees and prevented field office personnel from accessing other vital applications as well.

Officials then began demolishing computers, printers, TVs, cameras, computer mice, keyboards and other IT parts. In April 2012, the agency brought the workforce back online using alternative services, but the demolition continued for four more months—until the agency ran out of funds. In total, EDA spent more than $2.7 million—over half of its fiscal 2012 IT budget—on recovery efforts, the IG found.

One cause for the confusion: The Computer Incident Response Team member assigned to the job was unqualified. Rather than hand the agency a list of possibly infected components, the employee mistakenly provided a roster of 146 components within the network, only six of which were actually contaminated.

- Aliya Sternstein

The Eyes Have It

New federal guidelines on iris recognition allow the Homeland Security Department to proceed with a $100 million plan for modernizing employee badges.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress passed legislation requiring that government personnel have smart card credentials to access all government buildings and networks. In May, DHS began searching for a contractor to replace the department’s fingerprint identification system with more cutting-edge technology, such as iris matching capabilities. But there was no consistent way to exchange eye images between cameras and card readers.

That changed in July after the National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized guidelines for incorporating iris scans into employee IDs.

As of July 3, DHS expected to spend up to $102.8 million to provide staff with upgraded biometric smart cards during the next decade, according to contract filings.

- Aliya Sternstein

Lagging IT Reform

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., lashed out at federal technology leaders for being slow to adopt cost-saving reforms laid out early in the Obama administration—such as consolidating data centers and shifting data to computer clouds—and for inadequately reporting on progress.

“My hope is that as we move forward all of us can try to find ways to encourage and exhort and pressure the federal government to come into the 21st century with management changes and allocation and investment changes that will better serve the country,” he said.

- Joseph Marks

China Loves the Navy’s GPS Landing System

I did a Google search for some background information on the precision GPS landing system the Navy used to help guide its unmanned X-47B to a carrier landing, and one of the first hits to pop up was a paper by three authors from China’s Naval University of Engineering.

The paper, presented in May at a conference in Wuhan, China, goes into great detail about the landing system. I wondered where China obtained so much information about a U.S. Navy program, until I stumbled across a 2010 Naval Air Systems Command presentation, which included many of the details used in the 2013 China report.

The authors even included the same graphic used by the U.S. Navy in 2010 to illustrate how the precision guidance system works.

Too bad NAVAIR can’t copyright its slide decks.

- Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Bob Brewin, Joseph Marks, and Kedar Pavgi — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 01:00:00 -0400

CIA’s Virus Trouble

The Government Accountability Office found that the CIA gave Amazon an unfair advantage when it agreed to weaken security requirements on a $150 million contract for a massive intelligence community computer cloud it had already awarded to the Web giant.

During post-award negotiations, Amazon asked the CIA to weaken a requirement that all software in the cloud be verifiably free from computer viruses that might let unauthorized people see intelligence data, GAO wrote.

Amazon asked that it only be required to vouch for software it had built itself, not for third party and open source software it planned to include in the system. The CIA agreed, prompting a challenge from IBM, which had also bid on the contract.

If IBM had known in advance that requirement might be loosened, that could have substantially changed both the company’s bid and its competitiveness.

“It is a fundamental principle of government procurement that competition must be conducted on an equal basis,” GAO said. “Offerors must be treated equally and provided with a common basis for the preparation of their proposals.”

GAO recommended that the CIA re-bid the cloud contract and reimburse IBM for the cost of challenging the award. GAO’s bid protest rulings aren’t officially binding but agencies often follow them.

Computer clouds typically offer cheaper storage space than traditional government data centers and allow agencies to perform more complex computing operations with larger amounts of data.

GAO also upheld another section of IBM’s protest, which claimed the CIA unfairly adjusted the likely price of proposed cloud offerings based on inconsistent standards.

- Joseph Marks

Twitter Diplomacy

The State Department’s social media presence vastly dwarfs that of other countries using Internet-based tools for public diplomacy efforts, according to a new report.

The 39 U.S. ambassadors with a digital media presence pack a significant punch, based on an analysis by the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute. U.S. ambassadors with Twitter accounts have a combined 538,942 followers and average more than 16,000 followers per account.

“Users of social media who do not engage in substantive, real-time exchanges are unlikely to make their voices heard,” the report says.

State has pushed to incorporate the latest social media networks in its public diplomacy efforts. Recently, the General Services Administration struck a deal to allow agencies to use the video-sharing service Vine. Many embassies have begun posting videos that show off American culture.

- Kedar Pavgi

Goodbye Paper

In June, the Veterans Affairs Department finished installing its paperless Veterans Benefits Management System in all 56 of its regional offices. VBMS is a key element of plans to eliminate the backlog of disability claims.

“Now that the system is in place, much work continues to be done as we roll out more features and train more users,” says Tommy Sowers, assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs.

“This is a big crossover year for us,” says VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. “We have for decades sat astride rivers of paper. Now we are in the process of turning off paper spigots and turning on electronic ones.”

- Bob Brewin

Oops, About Those Loan Records …

The Veterans Affairs Department inadvertently deleted 464,000 home loan files, and Sen. Ron Portman, R-Ohio, wants to know why.

In a letter to VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, Portman said he learned that the Cleveland regional office deleted almost half a million electronic records relating to loans, grants and applications. “While I understand the VA has taken steps to remedy the situation, the limited communication and delayed incident reporting are particularly concerning,” he said.

Portman had a lot of questions, including whether VA had backup systems and how often backups were performed.

VA spokeswoman Jo Schuda said human error on May 25 accounted for the deletion of the documents and images, which are used by lenders, appraisers and internal staff.

Employees are being retrained to prevent this error in the future, she said. No personal information was compromised.

- Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Data Derby

Government agencies must collect and publish new information in open, machine-readable and, whenever possible, nonproprietary formats, according to a White House executive order and open data policy
published May 9.

The idea behind the initiative is that information the government collects for the purposes of management, regulation and security can also be used by entrepreneurs to build products that aid consumers and turn a profit—much like the billion-dollar industry that has been built on government-supplied Global Positioning System information, for example.

What’s more, public access to government data can raise awareness of an issue or lead to smarter consumer choices. The website WeMakeItSafer, for example, aggregates government information about product recalls.

“Starting today, we’re making even more government data available online, which will help launch even more new startups,” President Obama said in a statement. “And we’re making it easier for people to find the data and use it, so that entrepreneurs can build products and services we haven’t even imagined yet.”

Government contractors and the open government community both applauded the executive order.

Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition trade association notes that better maintained government data could help contractors save money by allowing them to automate more reporting and compliance processes.

“Spending and programs would become more efficient, because data standards would permit the deployment of big data analytics to find waste and fraud,” he says. “Even our capital markets would benefit, because public regulatory filings converted into open data would be a more accessible source of actionable information
for investors.”

- Joseph Marks

Secure Those Phones

The Office of Management and Budget sent agencies instructions for securing government-owned commercial smartphones and tablets in an effort to bring consistency to what had been an ad hoc patchwork of guidelines. The 104-page compilation of controls was accompanied by a manual for picking the most appropriate mobile device setup.

The instructions are part of a digital government strategy the White House laid out one year ago that called on agencies to “adopt a coordinated approach to ensure privacy and security in a digital age.”

The departments of Homeland Security and Defense, along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, developed the baseline protocols as first steps only. Later guidance, for example, might focus on continuous monitoring of controls, cryptography, securing the data instead of the device, and ensuring data is only shared with authorized users.

- Aliya Sternstein

Savings Shortfall

An initiative to consolidate federal data centers is well short of its goal of $3 billion in reduced spending by 2015, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Only five of 24 federal agencies have reported estimated savings through 2014 and those total less than $700 million, according to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s panel on government operations.

The proposed savings, which GAO expects the White House will achieve eventually, will come from moving data to computer clouds and using more efficient centers.

- Joseph Marks

The Health Records Mess

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s decision to modernize the Defense Department’s electronic health record through the purchase of commercial software looks like a setback for development of an integrated electronic health record with the Veterans Affairs Department.

Except for a passing reference, the Hagel memo makes no reference to the iEHR, and seems more of the same go-it-alone approach favored by the Pentagon.

This approach could run into serious congressional roadblocks. On May 14, the House Appropriations Committee backed language in the 2014 Defense spending bill that said no funds could be expended on any EHR project unless it is an open architecture that serves both departments.

In addition, Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, says 20 vendors have products that could meet the Pentagon’s needs—and since they all have lawyers, protests are inevitable.

- Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Tue, 28 May 2013 09:56:18 -0400

Transparency Moves

President Obama’s fiscal 2014 budget proposal transfers control of USAspending.gov, the spending transparency website, from the General Services Administration to the Treasury Department.

The administration plans to give Treasury $5.5 million to manage the site, previously bankrolled by the congressionally mandated e-government fund, which is devoted to using the Internet to improve citizen services and access to public information.

“Treasury will conduct an analysis of the operation and information in USAspending and determine what changes in the medium or long term may be warranted,” a department spokeswoman says. “The collection of governmentwide financial management information is closely aligned with Treasury responsibilities.”

Whether the transfer from GSA to Treasury is good or bad news for transparency advocates is unclear, says Daniel Schuman, policy counsel for the Sunlight Foundation.

Congress envisioned the e-gov fund as a proving ground for technology-driven transparency initiatives, so it’s appropriate that the five-year-old USAspending should move to a permanent home, he says.

On the one hand, Treasury may be seen as a less political home for USAspending than the White House-based Office of Management and Budget; on the other hand, OMB has a better bully pulpit to force agencies to report spending and to make other transparency reforms, he says.

The USAspending transfer may leave more of the e-gov fund for other transparency initiatives such as the federal IT Dashboard, which tracks tech spending.

The president requested $20 million for the e-gov fund this year, but Congress typically appropriates less money than the White House requests.

- Joseph Marks

Budget Shift

The Defense Department has quietly shifted management and oversight of health information technology, including procurements, from the Military Health System and the TRICARE Management Activity, to Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense

for acquisition, technology and logistics.

One official said the move reflects frustration among senior Pentagon leaders with MHS’ efforts to procure new health IT systems, both independently and in partnership with the Veterans Affairs Department to develop an integrated electronic heath record. The departments have spent at least $1 billion during the past five years pursuing an integrated system.

The shift is a major blow to MHS and TRICARE.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told lawmakers at a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s Defense panel on April 16 that he had taken personal responsibility for the iEHR and said in late March he had deferred a request for proposals for a new Defense electronic health record because “I didn’t think we knew what the hell we were doing.”

- Bob Brewin

CIOs Support IT Reform

Many government chief information officers think a proposed congressional overhaul that would give them broader authority over how their agencies buy information technology is a “step in the right direction,” according to TechAmerica’s CIO Insights survey.

In congressional testimony, CIOs typically avoid saying whether such budget authority would be helpful. Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel has said authority over IT spending is less important than CIOs having “a seat at the table” during agency mission discussions.

The survey found 76 percent of IT spending still goes to the operation and maintenance of existing systems, despite attempts to shift more funding to new initiatives.

- Joseph Marks

About That Job Description

In August 2010, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates shut down the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Networks and Information Integration as one small piece of a budget cutting exercise, with a new and improved chief information officer shop taking over many of the tasks once performed by the office.

In late April, Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter sent out a memo that finally got around to transferring the responsibilities and functions of the disestablished Networks and Information Integration Office to the Defense CIO.

That memo clarified that the CIO—currently Teri Takai—will provide policy guidance on cybersecurity and gives her what looks like considerable sway over the IT budgets of the four services.

- Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Bob Brewin and Joseph Marks — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Rebooting IT Acquisition

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., wants to overhaul the way the government buys information technology with legislation introduced in March.

Issa first floated the proposed IT reboot in September 2012 and has been gathering input from industry and government workers since then.

The Federal IT Reform Act would give chief information officers full budget authority, including the ability to shift agency funds from one project to another based on particular needs. It also would make agency CIOs presidential appointees. The bill was co-sponsored by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., ranking Democrat on the oversight panel’s main technology subcommittee.

The government’s $80 billion in annual IT purchases has been plagued by cost overruns and missed deadlines. Issa and others have touted technology’s ability to lower the overall cost of government by making operations more efficient and reducing the need for travel.

“Ultimately IT is the toll we pay to better spend $3.5 trillion,” Issa said. “It’s not about the $80 billion we spend on IT.”

His bill also will call for the title CIO to be reserved for just one person at each agency. There are now 243 CIOs across government; the excessive use of the title diminishes its authority, he said.

“This is a single point of accountability with the title of chief—someone who can say ‘I’ve got $6 billion, and I’ll be darned if I’ll waste it,’” he said.

- Joseph Marks

Replacing a Dinosaur

The Navy and the Defense Contract Management Agency have started the process of replacing the vintage 1996 Defense Department Standard Procurement System, which managed 800,000 contracts worth $190 billion in 2011.

In a request for information to potential vendors posted on FedBizOpps, the Navy said it wants to acquire an electronic procurement system to replace the contract writing capabilities of the Standard Procurement System. DCMA posted a notice seeking similar software.

Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, mandated the sunset of the Standard Procurement System by September 2015 and directed the services to develop their own. The 17-year-old departmentwide system “is difficult to maintain and improve and is technologically fragile,” Kendall said in a 2011 memorandum.

Emerging technologies no longer require a “one size fits all” contracting system, he said.

- Bob Brewin

Averting the Next Scandal

The General Services Administration is considering building a menu of contractors offering services that can help agencies avoid the sort of conference spending scandals that rocked GSA itself in 2012.

Contractors listed on the menu would help centralize agencies’ conference and meeting spending in unified databases, ensure competitive pricing for purchases, minimize the risk of cancellation fees and archive key information to pass along to watchdogs, the request for information said.

If GSA moves forward with the project, meetings management would become a special item number on GSA’s Schedule 599 for Travel Services Solutions.

- Joseph Marks

How Rubber Cement Brought Down a $4.6 Million Drone

The Air Force used a rather weird approach to technology insertion with a Predator drone that crashed in Afghanistan on May 8,
2009, according to the service’s aerospace mishaps database.

Some unknown soul “tacked into place” a software chip that controlled an aileron on the wings of the armed Predator, using the same kind of silicone vulcanizing rubber cement used for minor car repairs, according to the Air Force crash report. This makeshift approach was aimed at facilitating easy removal of the chip for programming updates, the report said.

Alas, vibration in flight knocked the chip loose, which in turn knocked out operation of the aileron and led to the crash and destruction of the $4.6 million drone.

- Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:00:00 -0500

Radio Static

The Homeland Security Department spent $430 million on a fruitless plan to enable radio users departmentwide to communicate on the same frequency, according to an internal audit released in November 2012.

Of 479 radio users the DHS inspector general tested, only one knew how to tune in to the common channel, the report stated. Employees either were unaware the channel existed, could not find it, or switched to an outdated channel inherited from the Treasury Department.

“Personnel do not have interoperable communications that they can rely on during daily operations, planned events and emergencies,” acting IG Charles K. Edwards wrote in the report.

About 123,000 employees use the handheld and mobile radios. Homeland Security this spring shelled out $3 billion for new tactical communications to serve the entire department, along with the White House and the Interior, Justice and State departments.

The root of the disconnect, according to the report, is top department leaders have provided little guidance and no enforcement to ensure personnel use the channel. The shift to a single frequency began when the department formed in 2003.

The department rejected the IG’s recommendation that leaders create an office with the power to ensure users across agencies can communicate with each other. In an undated response to a draft report, DHS officials explained they already have such an entity overseeing interoperability, called the Joint Wireless Program Management Office.

The IG replied that the office is toothless.

“The structure, based upon cooperation and not authority, is the same management approach that proved ineffective in the past,” Edwards wrote. “The department has a high probability of repeating past mistakes.”

- Aliya Sternstein

Digital Savings

The $34 million Federal Citizen Services Fund, which pays for tools such as a template for writing federal
purchase orders and the USA.gov website, saved the government nearly twice that dollar figure in fiscal 2012, officials say.

The fund pays for much of the work done by the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. The $64 million in savings comes primarily from using free or low-cost services provided by OSCIT and from eliminating duplicative purchases, according to the office’s annual report.

Some highlights:

- The government’s search engine Search.usa.gov has more than doubled the websites it supports to 1,100.

- Federal agencies signed 728 service agreements with 58 social media providers and GSA negotiated agreements with Foursquare, Google Plus, Storify, Tumblr and others.

- Officials working on the office’s First Fridays project tested the usability of 26 federal websites, 61 percent more than in 2011.

- Joseph Marks

Destination Pinterest

The Obama administration joined the social media site Pinterest late last year by pinning a registration form to attend a White House “holiday social” in December.

The White House also posted its first set of pinboards that day, and administration officials sought advice from commenters about how they should use Pinterest.

The administration is likely to post “pins and boards that range from inspiring images and quotes to infographics that help explain key issues to details about the life inside the White House,” a blog post said.

The General Services Administration has penned a service agreement with Pinterest that other agencies can adopt.

- Joseph Marks

Easing Into Civilian Life

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments have beefed up their Transition Assistance Program for troops leaving the armed services. They have set up a one-stop website with the Labor Department replete with resources to ease the way from military to civilian life and careers.

These include online career transition courses, an employment hub with tips on how to craft a résumé and handle job interviews, a resource directory for ill or wounded troops, and a guide on how to file disability claims early.

I had none of these resources available to me when I left the Marine Corps in 1967. My transition amounted to heading back to New York City on my lonesome. The development of this website is a sign that bureaucracies can change for the better.

- Bob Brewin

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Budgeting for Mobile Computing

Bob Brewin — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Federal agencies are facing substantial outlays to manage mobile computing devices as they shift from a culture of PCs and laptops to smartphones and tablets. But there is a silver lining. Agencies are likely to save money if they don’t have to maintain their own systems to secure and support employee mobile devices. And vendors offer discounts for volume purchases of their software and services.

Providers of mobile device management tools—including Atlanta-based AirWatch, MobileIron of Mountain View, Calif., and Zenprise of Redwood City, Calif.—charge between $3 and $4 per month for client software installed on an employee’s mobile phone or tablet. AirWatch is a supplier on the Veterans Affairs Department’s initial $4.4 million mobile contract awarded in October.

That monthly fee may seem like small change until it’s applied somewhere like the Defense Department, where planners are looking to move every active-duty and reserve organization to mobile computing. Defense’s workforce includes 1.4 million active-duty troops, 1.3 million National Guard and reserve personnel, and 800,000 civilian employees—that’s 3.5 million people.

If everyone in the department needed a mobile device—the Defense Information Systems Agency envisions widespread use—at $3 a month the Pentagon would face an annual tab of $126 million, and at $4 a month the cost would be $168 million a year for the necessary software. VA could end up with a bill between $10 million and $14 million annually to provide mobile support to its workforce of 300,000.

Providers offer perpetual client licenses for about $50 apiece, which in the case of Defense would result in a one-time cost of $75 million, and at VA, the tab would be $15 million. Mobile device management vendors sell both cloud-based services and in-house network support.

Some companies, including AirWatch, do not charge annual maintenance fees for mobile services based in the cloud. But if an agency chooses to host the software itself annual maintenance and support fees could run about 20 percent of the contract cost. For Defense, annual support costs could range from $24 million to $32 million. Hardware and software charges to set up department servers average about $20,000, and about $30,000 for cloud-based service.

But large agencies shouldn’t expect to pay list prices for mobile client licenses, software and services, according to AirWatch chairman Alan Dabbiere and Chandra Sekar, director of vertical product marketing for Zenprise. They say large-scale deployments would net substantial discounts.

The Pentagon could qualify for a 30 percent discount, based on volume, according to Bernie Skoch, a technology consultant and retired Air Force general who did a tour at DISA. While still a stiff bill, the department could make it up in savings generated from not having to develop its own systems, he says, such as expensive tactical command-and-control networks. Skoch says he has no doubt commercial smartphones and tablets will become a key part of tactical systems.

Warren Suss, president of Suss Consulting, says a Defensewide purchase of mobile management software will “not be cheap.” He says the smart approach would be to phase in tablets as the inventory of desktop PCs and laptops reach the end of their life cycle. The real savings, Suss and Skoch agree, would come from replacing tactical radios, which can cost $70,000 apiece. Commercial gear that costs $500 or less and requires a minimal monthly fee for client software can look like a bargain in comparison.

Vendors say they offer sophisticated software for securely managing and controlling smartphones and tablets, coupled with a private app store for users. Access to these apps, in most cases, is governed by role-based permissions set in an enterprise’s active directory.

Ojas Rege, vice president of strategy for MobileIron, says the company’s system walls off the most sensitive apps from employees who are not authorized to use them, and even access to commercial apps is routed through its private app store. Zenprise mobile software allows users to access commercial app stores, but can detect and inhibit installation of apps forbidden by agency information technology managers.

AirWatch has built geolocation software into its mobility software, allowing IT managers to track where a mobile device is being used and to shut it down if it appears to have been stolen. The company also provides IT managers with what could be viewed as the nuclear deterrent of mobile computing—the ability to remotely and automatically wipe a smartphone or tablet of all data if an employee violates policies on commercial apps and security. This includes devices owned by employees. MobileIron and Zenprise offer similar features.

As agencies develop bring-your-own-device policies, Dabbiere says the Office of Management and Budget should offer guidance on who must pay for client software on personal devices—employees or their agencies.

In January, the Health and Human Services Department released its mobile strategy, which expects employees to pay for mobility management software for their personally owned devices.

Despite the substantial cost of mobility management software, DISA has made it clear it must adopt new guidelines for mobile wireless computing, based on a cohesive enterprisewide strategy. DISA officials say Defense must embrace mobility management tools to ensure military users don’t lag behind the private sector in secure mobile computing capability worldwide.

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Doctors blazed the BYOD path at Veterans Affairs

Bob Brewin — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:00:00 -0500

In November, 2010, Roger Baker, the chief information officer at the Veterans Affairs Department, had his first taste of what eventually became the bring-your-own-device revolution in the federal government.

Clever orthopedic residents at the Chicago VA hospital had developed their own calendar application hosted on Yahoo.com that contained information on more than 1,000 patients, including names, the last four Social Security number digits and scheduled surgeries. They accessed this information from handheld gadgets. Security was a joke -- four residents shared the Yahoo account using the same password, and in turn passed that password on to other residents.

Baker also discovered eight other hospitals had turned to cloud-based Google Docs, which feature online spreadsheets, word processing programs and presentation software -- to store patient information. He quickly ordered a shut-down of the Yahoo and Google accounts for security reasons. But he also realized he and the VA needed to keep pace with ground-up innovation.

Both Yahoo and Google provide great tools, and Baker said his job was to figure out how to support the use of non-traditional applications within the secure VA information technology infrastructure and stay ahead of its 134,000 medical employees.

This includes the pioneering use of mobile device management software to manage tablets and smart phones, including tools that will allow VA to wipe insecure and non-compliant software off the gadgets, a nuclear option Baker said he had no reservations about using.

Since 2010, the department has aggressively pursued a BYOD path. In June 2012, Baker predicted that VA had probably made its last desktop PC purchase -- within five to six years, the department would no longer provide employees with hardware, he speculated.

Department officials may have to accelerate that schedule to keep up with its tech-savvy medical staff -- close to 80 percent of clinicians in the country already use smartphones or tablets.

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Computing On the Fly

Bob Brewin — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 01:00:00 -0500

Ffederal agencies are facing substantial outlays to manage mobile computing devices as they shift from a culture of PCs and laptops to smartphones and tablets. But there is a silver lining. Agencies are likely to save money if they don’t have to maintain their own systems to secure and support employee mobile devices. And vendors offer discounts for volume purchases of their software and services.

In January, the Health and Human Services Department released its mobile strategy, which expects employees to pay for mobility management software for their personally owned devices.

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Tracking Diplomats

The agency charged with securing U.S. embassies plans to purchase a system that could locate and track diplomats during an emergency based on the signals beaming from their satellite and cellphones, documents show. That system could be extremely effective at monitoring security during an embassy or consulate attack, but also could expose diplomats to new dangers if the system were hacked.

The personnel tracking locator system would replace nine-year-old technology that the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service uses to pinpoint the location of employees both at embassies and domestically. It’s not clear whether the existing personnel tracker played any role in the State Department response to the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other diplomats. The department declined to answer questions about the current tracking system or its proposed replacement.

“What’s dangerous about this is that these systems can be hacked so they could basically be beaconing [diplomats’] positions,” says Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity at Trend Micro, a company that develops antivirus software.

“There’s a phenomenon all through the U.S. government where physical and personal security folks adopt technology to provide more kinetic security and, in fact, they open up an entirely new can of worms,” Kellerman adds.

DSS is responsible for securing embassies from attack and for protecting certain State Department officials traveling abroad. The service also is responsible for guarding some foreign dignitaries traveling in the United States.

- Joseph Marks

Stormy Forecast

The Obama administration’s plan to share weather satellite frequencies with commercial cellular carriers could degrade scientists’ ability to forecast hurricanes and monitor flooding, weather and spectrum, experts told Nextgov.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed reallocating spectrum used by weather satellites in the 1675-1710 MHz band for commercial use in its 2010 National Broadband plan, a shift widely opposed by weather organizations worldwide. FCC and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in August narrowed the portion of spectrum up for grabs to the 1695-1710 MHz band and endorsed sharing it with commercial users.

John Snow, professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, says this plan could interfere with the reception of data from satellite sounding instruments that measure atmospheric temperatures, cloud cover, moisture and humidity. Weather satellite instruments play a key role in assessing conditions over oceans—where hurricanes form—because forecasters do not have other means of measuring key parameters as they do over land, Snow says.

- Bob Brewin

Cyber Safeguards

U.S. and foreign government officials, along with antivirus companies and banks, have formed a coalition to push for adoption of electronic safeguards that could help them avoid data breach lawsuits.

Led by a veteran of the National Security Agency, the Consortium for Cybersecurity Action is proposing a set of 20 security controls for immunizing computer systems.

“This is about priority,” said Tony Sager, who in June retired from NSA. The 20 steps are “the most important defenses that every firm should put in place that are of greatest value.”

- Aliya Sternstein

Demonstrating Telework’s Value

While much of the federal workforce in Washington took Oct. 29 to 30 off when Hurricane Sandy pounded the East Coast, 2,000 employees at the Defense Information Systems Agency—roughly 40 percent of DISA workers—continued to work from home thanks to a well-developed telecommuting plan put in place more than five years ago.

DISA spokesman Steven Doub said employees who are authorized to telework were instructed to take their laptops home the weekend prior to the storm as a precautionary measure so they could take unscheduled telework as needed.

Although some Washington-area federal workers probably lacked power and Internet service and had to deal with storm damage, Sandy makes a good argument for having a governmentwide telework infrastructure.

- Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, Joseph Marks, and Dawn Lim — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 01:00:00 -0400

Rebooting Federal IT

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is floating proposed legislation that would drastically reform the way federal technology is purchased and grant agency chief information officers authority over their information technology budgets—authority currently held only by the Veterans Affairs Department CIO.

If approved, the draft legislation would be the most significant amendment to the federal technology landscape since the 1996 Clinger Cohen Act, which created agency CIOs, and the 2002 E-Government Act.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which oversees much of the government’s technology spending, described those previous acts of Congress as worthwhile reforms that had nevertheless failed to stem inefficiency, duplication and waste in government. The proposed legislation calls for the creation of a Commodity IT Acquisition Center to oversee large, governmentwide IT contracts. Agencies would be required to consult the center regarding most acquisitions that cost more than $500 million and the center would “establish guidelines that, to the maximum extent possible, eliminate inconsistent practices among executive agencies and ensure uniformity and consistency in acquisition processes for commodity IT across the federal government.”

In an op-ed on Nextgov, Issa noted “because of the antiquated way the government defines its requirements and acquires IT, we are wasting billions of taxpayer dollars each year on failed programs.”

Issa spent months gathering feedback on the proposed legislation from industry IT leaders and plans to gather more from his colleagues and others before formally proposing the Federal Information Technology Reform Act in Congress.

-Joseph Marks

As the Worm Turns

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been developing an online Android app store for troops on the battlefield since 2010, and now the agency wants to ensure any tools loaded into the marketplace are worm-proof. To help achieve that goal, officials awarded a service-disabled veteran-owned small business called Aderon LLC a $73,879 contract to help build testing software. The security tool is slated to be released in September 2013.

The software “will expose potential security vulnerabilities through fault injection”—or the introduction of errors into code—as well as enforce access controls, the federal documents state. And it will “scan, annotate, modify and instrument Android mobile application software” to comply with Defense Department security requirements.

The testing software also must be able to analyze third-party app libraries invoked by the Android tool. The work will be performed through the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s computer security division.

-Aliya Sternstein

Mind Readers

The Pentagon’s research wing is seeking technology that can determine whether a soldier is prone to commit suicide or murder. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to fund the development of “mathematical and computational models that predict whether a person is likely to commit suicide,” contract databases reveal. The goal is to extend prototypes to “predict other neurocognitive states of extreme order, including homicidal intent.”

The algorithms, called Predicting Suicide Intent, would derive data from a person’s brain chemistry and behavior and deliver a snapshot of the individual’s frame of mind.

-Dawn Lim

Stormy Forecast

Get ready for some really bad space weather. That’s the message from four space scientists at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who warned of increased solar activity, which can disrupt all types of communications, including Global Positioning System signals, with the sun pumping out more solar flares during the next five years than any time since 2003.

The scientists cautioned, “if you are used to space weather being a nonfactor in your operations, that is about to change.”

In a presentation to a civil GPS confab in Nashville, the APL scientists warned that “solar max”—what happens when the sun tosses off a lot of high-powered flares—is approaching, resulting in increased GPS interference, including signal fading and precision errors. If you have a secret decoder ring, you can learn more at the Space Environment Applications, Systems and Operations for National Security conference in Laurel, Md., Nov. 14-16.

-Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 01:00:00 -0400

Cold Fusion

Nearly half of federal agencies are not sharing documented incidents of potential terrorist activity with U.S. intelligence centers, according to officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Homeland Security and Justice departments since 2008 have been teaching federal officials and police to deposit, through a secure network, reports of suspicious behavior while being mindful of civil liberties. The point of the technology is to piece together terrorist plots before they are executed.

But, some criminal justice experts say, a major obstacle is dampening the initiative. Work is slow-going in connecting local agencies to fusion centers, intelligence facilities partly funded by the government that vet reports for possible distribution through the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. Nearly half—46 percent—of federal departments told ODNI that they were not frequently sharing leads. In a new report to Congress, the Information Sharing Environment, an agency within ODNI, stated that 16 percent of agencies said that they never submit notices, 15 percent reported they rarely file and 15 percent said they sometimes share.

“This is a serious problem because unless we are able to convince all the local agencies to participate and to submit their SARs to the fusion center, we create the very real possibility that we will miss detecting the next Mohammed Atta who goes around taking flying lessons and passing up on the lecture of how to land his aircraft,” says Paul Wormeli, Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute executive director emeritus and a consultant on the project. Atta allegedly hijacked one of the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Aliya Sternstein

Corporate Crackdown

The Obama administration has drafted plans to require federal contractors to adopt cybersecurity safeguards for equipment that transmits government information.

NASA, the Defense Department and the General Services Administration released the draft rules. Under the plan, doing

business with the government would be contingent on agreeing to protect corporate-owned devices and federal data on websites.

The administration wants antivirus or antispyware mechanisms, and prompt installation of software patches and security updates. Federal data posted to company Web pages must be secured through passwords or other restrictions. Information and equipment also would have to be guarded by one physical element, such as a locked case, and one digital defense, such as a login.

NASA reported 5,408 computer security incidents in 2010 and 2011 in which outsiders installed malicious software or accessed systems. And during a cyber strike on a defense contractor in 2011, attackers excised 24,000 files related to weapons systems.

Aliya Sternstein

Wiping Smartphones

The Interior Department is considering purchasing a mobile device management product that will allow it to remotely update, manage, monitor, and shut down or wipe employees’ smartphones and tablets even when they are traveling abroad.

Interior “has recognized a real threat to the integrity of electronic devices on international travel,” the request for information states.

A device that is compromised abroad could go on to infect other parts of Interior’s systems, according to the documents.

Joseph Marks

Palpable Paperweight

Roger Baker, the Veterans Affairs Department chief information officer, promises that VA will have a paperless claims processing system installed in all its regional offices next year, none too soon for the Veterans Benefits Administration employees in North Carolina whose safety is threatened by mountains of paper files.

The VA inspector general reported that the VBA office in Winston-Salem has so many backlogged claims that employees have stacked 37,000 paper files on top of file cabinets, on the floor and in boxes along the walls.

These foothills of files have “the potential to compromise the structural integrity of the sixth floor of the facility. We noticed floors bowing under the excess weight to the extent that the tops of file cabinets were noticeably unlevel throughout the storage area,” the IG said.

That’s a serious records management problem.

Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Cellular Revolution

The Veterans Affairs Department is looking to consolidate its cellphone billing into a national contract that covers voice and data airtime, as well as hardware such as smartphones and tablet computers.

The national mobile device and services contract would include the department’s 300,000 employees in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to a request for information that VA issued to industry in July. The department currently uses multiple contracts to acquire mobile hardware and airtime.

To cut down on both voice and data airtime costs, VA plans to use the national contract to pool minutes and wants unlimited nighttime calls, unlimited text message service and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling within a specific carrier’s network.

Jin Wang, president of iSYS LLC, a McLean, Va.-based firm the General Services Administration hired to help federal agencies manage mobile communications, says the trend in government is to consolidate cellphone contracts, although the VA plan to acquire phones and tablets in the deal is an unusual approach.

In June, VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker said he would a back a departmentwide policy allowing employees to bring their own devices to the job, but acknowledged he had not worked out the financial details of such a plan.

Wang says a BYOD plan probably would require some kind of employee reimbursement for hardware costs and airtime, a complex accounting process. The national mobile plan ultimately could save VA hassles and money, Wang says, adding “the carriers may just throw in the devices for free,” considering the large scale of the contract.

-Bob Brewin

Cybersecurity Rocks

In July, a world-renowned cybersecurity researcher received emails from someone claiming to be an Iranian scientist and reporting what has to be one of the most surreal cyberattacks in recent months—a computer virus that allegedly blared music while stopping equipment at the Natanz nuclear plant.

There was “music playing randomly on several of the workstations . . . I believe it was playing ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC,” reads one email from the Iranian scientist that Mikko H. Hypponen, chief research officer at antivirus firm F-Secure, posted to his blog.

The scientist began the note by stating, “I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility, Fordo, near Qom”—a reference to the Stuxnet virus that crippled the Natanz plant in late 2009.

Hypponen confirmed that the purported researcher was sending and receiving emails from within the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

-Aliya Sternstein

Happy Campers

Customer satisfaction with federal websites hit a new high in the second quarter of 2012, but remains slightly below the average for all online and offline businesses measured by the consultancy ForeSee, the company reports.

Average satisfaction with federal websites on the American Customer Satisfaction Index rose from its previous high of 75.5 out of 100 in the second quarter of 2011 to 75.6 at the same time in 2012. The average score has slowly risen from about 70 to about 75 since 2003.

-Joseph Marks

Navy Missed the Boat

Military watchers are raising concerns that the Iranian Navy has developed a fleet of small, heavily armed patrol boats that could swarm and possibly sink large U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Navy could have its own swarms today if it had not dismissed the idea for a small, light ship that the late Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski proposed in 2001, which he dubbed the “Streetfighter.”

Cebrowski argued then that buying a bunch of inexpensive ships—rather than a few expensive ones—would leave the Navy with a substantial force even if an enemy sunk many of them, a notion critics derided as the “throwaway ship” concept.

The Streetfighter, Cebrowski said, could take on missions in waters close to shore that carriers, cruisers and destroyers could not handle due to their size and draft—the situation it faces today.

-Bob Brewin

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The More Things Change

Bob Brewin — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The Army’s new tactical network, which is expected to zap data around the battlefield at megabit speeds, comes down to something I’m all too familiar with from my days as a Marine Corps radio operator almost 50 years ago—a heavy load carried on a strong back, one step at a time, mile after mile.

In Vietnam, a Marine Corps Forward Air Control team attached to an infantry company grunted along under the burden of three radios that, with extra batteries, weighed in at more than 200 pounds. One of these radios—the behemoth AN/PRC-47 single sideband set—came in at more than 90 pounds with assorted cables, antennas and spare batteries. The load was split between two Marines.

I sometimes toted an AN/PRC-41 ground-to-air radio that weighed 40 pounds, the attached battery another 14 pounds and a spare for a total radio load of 68 pounds. I strapped this load onto a frame that also carried C-rations, a poncho, smoke grenades, a small pack and a cartridge belt that held a pistol and three canteens of water—another 40 to 50 pounds of gear. I also wore a 9-pound flak jacket and topped off the entire ensemble with a 5-pound steel helmet.

The total weight of this load? Just shy of 125 pounds, strapped on to my very thin 125-pound frame.

Thanks to the invention of the transistor and the computer chip, Harris Corp. has managed to stuff the functionality of all the radios a Marine FAC team carried into its AN/PRC-117G wideband tactical radio, which the Army plans to field to brigade combat teams slated to deploy to Afghanistan next year.

The Army also plans to start fielding the manpack version of the Joint Tactical Radio System developed by General Dynamics. It operates over the same frequencies, including satellite links, intended to serve as the network bridge between platoons and company headquarters, and from company to battalion level with a data rate as high as 2 megabits per second.

Compared to Vietnam-era radios, the Harris and General Dynamics radios are featherweights—12 pounds and 14 pounds, respectively. But add in extra batteries and factor in the weight of improved body armor and the average grunt radio operator today will heft a load well over 100 pounds.

In Vietnam, infantry squads were equipped with the AN/PRC-6 radio, the original Korean War-era walkie-talkie, a clunker with a range not much better than a loud shout. Grunts solved this problem by asking their families to send them CB radios, which were much more power- ful and had a longer range than the AN/PRC-6.

Today’s troops take an updated approach to the lack of radios in Afghanistan and buy their own smartphones that run on local cellphone networks, a do-it-yourself approach with inherent security risks acknowledged by Paul Mehney, spokesman for the Army’s System of Systems Integration Directorate, the outfit responsible for making these things work on the battlefield.

Mehney says the Army will plug communications gaps by equipping roughly half the troops in brigade combat teams slated for deployment to Afghanistan next year with the General
Dynamics Rifleman Radio, which weighs just under 2 pounds. He says 775 soldiers will be equipped with bare-bones radios that can transmit voice and location data from Global Positioning Systems; another 639 soldiers will be furnished with the radio and a smartphone-type display.

At its heart, Mehney agrees, the Army’s new battlefield network is a modernized radio network with key nodes carried on a strong back, one step at a time, mile after mile.

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Inside Job

The Transportation Security Administration is shopping for a computer program to snoop into the online activities of agency employees, including their keystrokes and emails, for signs of potential leaks. TSA’s solicitation for an “enterprise insider threat software package” in June coincided with an Office of Special Counsel memorandum to federal agencies warning against targeted email monitoring. The memo followed a Food and Drug Administration retaliation case in which FDA allegedly spied on the private correspondence of whistleblowers.

Many government offices, particularly those in the intelligence and defense communities, are embracing employee-surveillance technology to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of federal information. TSA is specifically looking for a tool that can track keystrokes, chat messages and email, file transfers, and other activity—all without tipping off the employee.

Spokesman David A. Castelveter says, “as the agency whose serious responsibility it is to deal with national security, TSA must remain vigilant to safeguard sensitive information in order to secure the nation’s transportation systems. This software is intended to assist in carrying out that mission. This initiative will be used in accordance with all federal laws and will be reserved for specific instances that meet TSA’s qualifications for an insider threat.”

FDA early this year ran into trouble with email monitoring when employees sued for allegedly bugging their government-issued computers after they informed the Office of Special Counsel about the agency’s approval of unsafe medical devices.

In her memo, Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said agencies should evaluate their monitoring practices to ensure they don’t impede employees from using appropriate channels to disclose wrongdoing.

Aliya Sternstein

End of an Era

Veterans Affairs Department Chief Information Officer Roger Baker predicts that within five or six years VA no longer will furnish employees with computers. Instead, they will use the devices they own to connect to department networks. He also believes VA has issued its last desktop PC contract, a $477 million deal for up to 600,000 desktops awarded to Dell in April 2011.

Baker would like to see VA get out of the business of providing its roughly 300,000 employees with hardware to access department networks and said he backed a policy that would allow employees to bring their own devices to the job. Asked how VA would manage the financial aspect of that type of policy, Baker says, “that’s a [human resources] issue.”

It will take a “massive investment” to ensure data is protected before VA can proceed with a widespread bring-your-own-device plan, Baker says. Managers and employees also would have to ensure that personal applications are free of viruses and malware before they are connected to the department’s computer systems.

Bob Brewin

Energy Drain

One barrier to gauging progress in the government’s data center consolidation effort is the fact that federal agencies aren’t measuring energy costs for some smaller data centers.

It’s especially difficult to meter data centers that occupy only part of a building’s space and use a limited amount of energy, says Robert Harden, who works on IT efficiency for the Navy.

The Energy Department faces similar challenges, says Emily Stoddart, a program analyst with its Sustainability Performance Office. Officials are trying to determine which resources to put into small data centers that will likely be consolidated or closed. “We want to document a baseline for these data centers, but we’re wary of investing in a formal metering project,”
she says.

Joseph Marks

Pentagon Needs a Family (Cellphone) Plan

Buried deep within the Defense Department mobile device strategy released in June is a suggestion for a long overdue cost-saving idea: a centrally managed cellphone expense management system.

Outfits like The Bill Police help commercial enterprises centrally manage their cellphones—including ways to reallocate unused minutes from one phone to another—and Defense probably could save big bucks with the same approach.

I read FedBizOpps every day, and at least once a week some outfit in Defense has posted a cellphone service procurement. That’s an inefficient way to buy minutes for the world’s largest enterprise.

-Bob Brewin

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The Warrior Next Door

Bob Brewin — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

As commander of the 3,200-square-mile White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico— the Defense Department’s largest installation—Army Brig. Gen. John Ferrari has two simple watchwords that help guide him: collaboration and cooperation.

The range is larger than Delaware and sprawls across five New Mexico counties, which means Ferrari has to work at being a good neighbor. That can be a challenge when the mission includes testing systems that churn up dust, make loud noises and require roadblocks.

White Sands needs the cooperation of its neighbors—including ranchers and mayors in the nearby cities of Alamogordo, Las Cruces and Socorro—to accomplish its missions, Ferrari says, adding that he has to keep them informed.

“We need to be transparent. They need to know what we are doing and when we are going to do it,” he says. Ferrari personally hosts tours for these VIPs during major events, such as the Army Network Integration Evaluation exercise this spring, which required frequent road closures to accommodate troop maneuvers.

White Sands hosts a number of Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA and National Reconnaissance Office units, and Ferrari’s job is to ensure they have the supplies they need. The range operates on a reimbursable basis, so satisfied tenants are critical to boosting business and the bottom line, he says.

The 1,093 military personnel, 2,459 federal civilian employees and 4,058 contractors who work at White Sands are key to its operations, Ferrari says. His job, he adds, is “to unleash their creativity . . . and come up with collaborative solutions.”

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Around Government

Charles S. Clark, Andrew Lapin, and Bob Brewin — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Battle of the Blaze

Crews stand by for another dangerous wildfire season.

Federal wild land managers predict another volatile forest fire season in 2012, particularly in the Southwest, where states experienced record-breaking blazes in 2011 and Texas remains gripped in a tinder-producing drought. New Mexico battled another epic fire this spring that churned through 390 square miles.

The Interior and Agriculture departments have a combined firefighting budget of $2.9 billion, and masses of personnel and equipment are standing by.

In this season’s forecast, the National Interagency Fire Center held out slim hope that El Niño—a warm weather pattern in the Pacific that can promote quenching rainfall—could abate conditions that resulted in last year’s 469,000-acre Wallow Fire, which started
in Arizona, and the 150,000-acre Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico.

- Bob Brewin

Pulling Ahead

One month after the summer Olympics, another gathering of the world’s best athletes will take place in London: the Paralympic Games. And for one military service member, the games are part of an unexpected journey.

Two years after losing both his legs in an explosion in Sangin, Afghanistan, Marine Sgt. Rob Jones will be representing Team USA in the Paralympics. Jones, with teammate Oksana Masters, will be rowing in the trunk and arms double sculls event. Not bad for only taking up the sport in 2011. A Marine who once chased explosives may soon be on his way to a medal.

- Andrew Lapin

Counting Plum Jobs

Congress is mulling legislation to speed the infamously slow presidential appointment process. The ability of senators to hold nominees hostage to unrelated political imperatives has long brought despair to agency staff, good-government advocates and nominees in limbo.

But how many would be affected is a bit murky. A bill that cleared the Senate in 2011 would remove 170 mid-level presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed positions from a larger list that the
Congressional Research Service puts at 1,200 to 1,400.

Only 900 to 1,000 of those are full-time jobs, the remainder being part-time memberships on commissions and advisory boards. The reason for the range, according to CRS analyst Maeve Carey, is the total is extrapolated from the Plum Book. That’s a listing of more than 9,000 civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches compiled every four years by the Office of Personnel Management.

CRS says it has uncovered errors in the Plum Book where positions have been added or eliminated or advice and consent requirements have changed. Also, the book does not include positions typically considered routine nominations, such as military officers. In any case, if the House were to approve the Senate plan to remove slots from the list of those subject to becoming pawns in the great political game, the change might result in 170 more satisfied public servants.

- Charles S. Clark

Invisible War

Documentary reveals that sexual assaults are more prevalent in the armed forces.

When Oscar-winning director Kirby Dick set out to film The Invisible War, a new documentary about the epidemic of sexual assault in the armed forces, what he found disturbed him. Dick, whose father served in the Navy during World War II, tracked down more than 100 victims of military rape and interviewed many of them for the movie.

“The reality is that people who come into the military have a greater incidence of having sexually assaulted someone prior to coming into the military,” Dick says. The premise behind his footage is that a lack of accountability in the chain of command perpetuates the problem, refuting the Defense Department’s
theory that assaults in the military are simply a reflection of civilian society.

“The military has to realize that they have a situation here that is not the same as the civilian society,” Dick says. “I don’t really understand why they haven’t gone after this as aggressively as they should have, because they are
losing so many good soldiers.”

Currently in limited release, The Invisible War already has reached its single most important audience: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.

Andrew Lapin

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Tech Roundup

Katherine McIntire Peters, Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Network Defense

The Obama administration is expanding to all military contractors a computer security program that shares classified threat information. After a year of trials with select vendors, the Defense Industrial Base, or DIB, cybersecurity pilot program will invite all military vendors and their Internet service providers to voluntarily join the two-way information-sharing initiative.

The National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s code-cracking branch, will disclose the “signatures,” or unique hallmarks, of identified malicious programs so that vendors can incorporate those red flags into antivirus software. In return, companies must report known breaches of defense information to the government within 72 hours after discovering an incident.

Companies are allowed, but not obligated, to disclose such incidents to the larger contracting community. The Defense Department, however, can circulate intrusion reports stripped of identifying information among participants, other agencies and certain non-defense contractors.

The administration is making this move during a heated debate over public-private computer security. Currently, the White House is at odds with the House and some Republican senators over legislation modeled after the DIB cyber pilot that would allow other federal agencies and critical sectors to exchange similar intelligence. The administration argues the 2011 Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, does not contain enough personal privacy protections and stops short of regulating certain security protocols for private industry.

Republicans maintain that the government should not control a company’s security practices. But both contingents agree valuable federal and business information has become all too susceptible
to hacks.

- Aliya Sternstein

The Cloud Takes Off

The federal government in June began accepting security certification applications from companies that provide software services and data storage through the cloud.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program aims to protect federal data as agencies increasingly turn to Web-based storage and computing.

By creating industrywide standards and focusing more on risk management, as opposed to strict compliance with reporting metrics, officials expect to improve data security and simplify the processes agencies use to purchase cloud services, says Katie Lewin, director of the federal cloud computing program at the General
Services Administration.

FedRAMP aims to speed the adoption of cloud services and reduce the cost and time required to conduct redundant agency security assessments. A key component of the program will be third-party assessors—independent auditors with the technical expertise to evaluate applicants’ offerings. As of early June, nine firms had been accredited for performing that role.

- Katherine McIntire Peters

Performance Issues

The Office of Management and Budget has fully completed only three of the 10 pillars of its information technology reform plan, despite having declared in December 2011 that it had closed out seven, a government watchdog says.

Recently, the Government Accountability Office picked the 10 disputed agenda items from OMB’s 2010 25-point plan to reform IT management. David Powner, director of GAO’s IT team, said many agencies haven’t established firm metrics for how data center closures will translate into savings. Declaring victory too soon could lead to sloppy performance down the road and erase OMB’s early gains, Powner says.

- Joseph Marks

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Vital Signs

Bob Brewin — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

As the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments work to develop an integrated electronichealth record the concept is simple—streamline the military health care system for active-duty service members, veterans and retirees—but getting there is not. The two departments will not deploy the system until 2017, eight years after President Obama kicked off the project in April 2009.

The interagency program office managing the iEHR wasn’t set up until October 2011, and its director wasn’t appointed until April 2012. That gives VA and the Pentagon five years to develop what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta dubbed the world’s largest electronic health record system, which would serve 9.7 million active-duty and retired military personnel and their families, and 7.8 million veterans.

The project is vital to the health care of roughly 6 percent of the U.S. population and requires a slow and deliberate approach to make sure “we get it right,” VA Secretary Eric Shinseki said in May.

“We’ll go as fast as we can without accepting . . . risk that’s not tolerable,” Shinseki said at the Capt. James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center, a jointly operated Defense-VA hospital in North Chicago that serves as a showcase for pilot iEHR projects. “If we can go faster, we will. But quality and safety are the standards we measure ourselves by.”

For Navy Lt. Cmdr. Donna Poulin, chief information systems officer at the North Chicago hospital, getting it right means focusing on business processes and the clinical staffers who use them, more than the information technology. At a tri-service medical IT symposium earlier this year, she said the “distinction between a business solution and a technical solution is always a challenge. IT is often seen as the problem solver, where business processes should be the driver of the technical solution.”

Dr. David Brailer, who was the first national coordinator for health information technology from 2004 to 2006, agrees. Development and deployment of the hardware and software needed for the iEHR pales in comparison to the “massive change management” processes that address the “human side” of the iEHR, he says.

Brailer, now chairman of Health Evolution Partners, a San Francisco-based health care equity fund, says iEHR developers should expect to spend two to three times more on process changes than they will on hardware and software.

VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker pegged development costs for the iEHR at $4 billion, the amount Kaiser Permanente spent on an electronic medical record deployed in 2003 to serve 8.6 million patients—the closest project in scale. Brailer warns that when fully de-ployed, the iEHR initially will decrease clinician productivity, and he predicts it will take doctors up to a year to master the new system.

In a recent report to Congress, iEHR Interagency Program Office Director Barclay Butler said it’s a challenge to “effectively coordinate joint documents, policies and decisions through both departments for senior leadership approval in a timely manner,” which results in long lead times.

Defense and VA have fundamentally different views on how to develop the iEHR. Dr. Jonathan Woodson, the assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, told Congress in April that the Pentagon wants to draw on best-of-breed commercial software to build the system. VA, on the other hand, backs an open software development approach based on upgrades to its existing Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture electronic health record system, known as VistA.

VA remains committed to developing a system “open in architecture and nonproprietary in design,” Shinseki said in May.

Tom Munnecke, who helped develop VistA and worked on the Defense electronic health record when he was chief scientist at the Science Applications International Corp., believes the best-of-breed approach espoused by the Pentagon is bound to fail. It is analogous to the assumption that the best way to build a superior car is “to use the engine of a Ferrari and the leather seats from a Rolls-Royce,” says Munnecke, now an independent consultant.

Brailer acknowledges the catchall approach has its challenges, but he argues an amalgamation of commercial software is far better than open-source software, which he notes has never gained traction in health care IT, with the exception of VistA.

It appears Congress will have the final say on the structure of the iEHR. The House Defense and VA appropriations bills restrict any funding on the iEHR until both departments submit a fiscal 2013 execution and spending plan and a long-term roadmap for the project, including annual and total spending during the next five years.

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Crime Stopper

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is shopping for crime forecasting technology to predict where gun violence may occur so that ATF can intercede before it happens.

The Justice Department in April issued a solicitation for a system “designed to accurately identify the risk of personal and property crimes” covering 200 locations throughout the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.

ATF wants software that will display color-coded crime risk maps with interactive features for locations that are identified as high risk. The technology would interpret the current and changing demographics of communities to produce trend analyses and to
generate online reports for users at government agencies and businesses.

“It’s a step forward for ATF,” said Paul Wormeli, executive director emeritus at the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute. State and local police already are using geolocational information to perform some of the same kinds of predictive analyses described in the solicitation, he noted.

Wormeli expects the technology one day could augment forecasts with smartphone text messages, video and other observations from witnesses and good Samaritans out in the field. “We spend a lot of money getting officers to the scene of an incident,” but dispatchers using “citizens as sensors” can save officers trips by collecting video from people at the scene of a crime, he said.

The solicitation appears to reflect one of the big movements in law enforcement—place-based policing, often called “proximity-based policing,” rather than a person-based approach, Wormeli said.

- Aliya Sternstein

Backlog Backlash

The Veterans Affairs Department faces a “staggering” backlog of 897,566 disability claims with more than 65 percent pending for more than 125 days, a problem compounded by an error rate of 16 percent, representatives of veterans services organizations told lawmakers on the House Veterans Affairs Committee in April.

Officials expect the backlog will grow to 1.2 million claims this year and another 50,000 will accrue in 2013 as veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars flood the system, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee earlier this year. He vowed to process all claims in fewer than 125 days with a 98 percent accuracy standard by 2015.

VA plans to roll out its paperless Veterans Benefit Management System to 16 regional offices by September, with installation in all 56 regional offices in 2013. But even as VA moves to a paperless claims system, the department has yet to determine when or how older paper claims will be converted to digital files.

- Bob Brewin

CTO Clout

The White House is in the process of launching a new council of federal technology officers who will be tasked with sharing insights and solving problems across government, Veterans Affairs Department Chief Technology Officer Peter Levin said in April.

The new council doesn’t have an official name, but it will function something like a less formal version of the Chief Information Officers Council. It will augment the President’s Innovation Cohort, a group formed early in the Obama administration for politically appointed chief technology and chief innovation officers, by bringing in career staff, Levin said.

- Joseph Marks

Conduct Unbecoming

The Marine Corps wants to sack Sgt. Gary Stein for insulting President Obama on his Facebook page with the comment, “Screw Obama. I will not follow all orders from him.” After the fact, Stein conceded this comment was tasteless, but then argued he had a First Amendment right to express his opinion.

One of Stein’s attorneys told ABC News that “we feel very strongly that the Department of Defense regulation that was used to oust Sgt. Stein is not constitutional, because the law is really clear that a person does not give up their First Amendment right of free speech when they go into the military.”

I have a news flash for Stein: Employers outside the military also have policies that put limits on what their workers can do or say on social media.

- Bob Brewin

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Getting More Out of Technology

Bob Brewin and Joseph Marks — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:00 -0400

All About Face Time

Since 2009, Brandon Friedman, director of online communications for the Veterans Affairs Department, has helped launch a VA blog, 150 Facebook pages and 70 Twitter feeds, all of which have garnered a wide audience of veterans.

Though Friedman, a former Army infantry officer who served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq and Afghanistan, has many high-tech tools at his disposal, he has a simple mission: “Get the right information to the right veteran at the right time.”

That means using social media to provide the most basic information to vets in a new way, he says. VA’s blog, launched in 2009, is a prime example. Friedman says the most popular post on VAntage Point, by then-Deputy Undersecretary for Benefits Tom Pamperin in January 2011, served as a primer on the filing of a disability claim. It drew 676 responses.

Friedman, who wrote the memoir The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War in 2007, views VA social media as a key component of the coming home process, allowing vets to easily keep in touch with their comrades. Since VA hospitals are such a familiar institution for vets, Friedman ensured that 150 of the department’s 152 medical centers launched Facebook pages in 2011 as another form of outreach.

VA has only begun to tap the power and potential of this modern form of communication. While the department has developed a means to pump out information, Friedman says his next goal is to figure out how to harvest the material vets post on VA sites to help them even more. - Bob Brewin

Cutting the Phone Bill

“Over the past year, USDA has moved from over 700 separate mobile service plans with three carriers that account for the largest portion of USDA cellular services to 10 service plans in three contracts at an estimated 18 percent to 20 percent savings,” she said in an email.

The new slate of contracts is costing USDA about $1.2 million per month compared with about $1.6 million for the legacy plans. - Joseph Marks

Combat Computing

The Defense Department may develop forward-deployed data centers to handle computing requirements for forces operating outside the United States, Teri Takai, the Defense chief information officer, told lawmakers last month.

Takai said she envisions “the possibility for some forward-deployed/deployable data centers. The centers will be flexible and will hold both regional and enterprise services and data, all tailored to the mission situation and to the speed and reliability of the connection to the more fixed portions of the network.”

A number of outfits already offer containerized data centers, which require only power and network connections to operate. This gives a whole new meaning to the concept of plug and play. - Bob Brewin

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Tech Roundup

Aliya Sternstein, Bob Brewin, and Joseph Marks — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Chain Reaction

Counterfeit materials increasingly endanger the military supply chain. Because technology often touches many hands in foreign countries before reaching a contractor, malicious actors have multiple opportunities to taint materials.

In March, the Government Accountability Office announced its undercover investigators had ordered military-grade parts from online portals and received 40 price quotes for bogus part numbers—all from vendors located in China.

To guard against compromised technology, which potentially could fail or harbor malware, acquisition specialists are forging new relationships with the intelligence community, says Mitchell Komaroff, Defense’s director of trusted mission systems and networks.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has conducted about 500 analyses for military purchasing programs, he said during a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing. A robust trusted systems and networks strategy for limiting supply risks is expected to be operational by fiscal 2016, he added.

GAO’s online shopping experiment focused on defense components that are hard to find, including those used in weapons systems. When the auditors asked vendors for invalid part numbers that GAO had concocted, the firms sent the auditors bogus parts labeled with the invalid numbers. In other words, the Chinese suppliers offered to sell parts that do not technically exist. The trial ran from August 2011 through February 2012.

Separately, a 2010 Commerce Department survey found that of 387 defense contractors, 39 percent had encountered counterfeit electronics during a four-year period. And those military suppliers witnessed a more than 140 percent increase in incidents during that period.

-Aliya Sternstein

Big Data’s Big Day

Science agencies across government are investing $200 million in new research and development related to the mining, processing, storage and use of big data.

The National Science Foundation, for instance, announced a $10 million grant to build new algorithms and tools to sort through petabytes, terabytes, exabytes and zettabytes of data. The National Institutes of Health plans to put a data set of the human genome project in Amazon’s EC2 computer cloud with tools to make the information easily accessible to researchers.

Zachary Lemnios, the assistant Defense secretary for research and engineering, says the Pentagon plans to develop tools that can use big data to make “truly autonomous” defense systems that “can learn from experience with very little training and learn the limits of their own knowledge.”

The initiative was sparked by a June 2011 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which found a gap in the private sector’s investment in basic research and development for big data.

- Joseph Marks

Cutting the Phone Bill

The Agriculture Department has saved about 20 percent of its mobile phone costs by consolidating mobile service contracts. The total savings amount to about $400,000 per month, an Agriculture spokeswoman said. “Over the past year, USDA has moved from over 700 separate mobile service plans with three carriers that account for the largest portion of USDA cellular services to 10 service plans in three contracts at an estimated 18 percent to 20 percent savings,” she said in an email.

The new slate of contracts is costing USDA about $1.2 million per month compared with about $1.6 million for the legacy plans.

- Joseph Marks

What’s Brewin: Combat Computing

The Defense Department may develop forward- deployed data centers to handle computing requirements for forces operating outside the United States, Teri Takai, the Defense chief information officer, told lawmakers in March.

A number of outfits already offer containerized data centers, which require only power and network connections to operate. This gives a whole new meaning to the concept of plug and play.

- Bob Brewin

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