Following on the earlier theme of open government and sharing ideas, FedLine brings you more ways you can contribute to President Obama’s national discussion on improving government. Today the White House, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Academy of Public Administration launched a site to gather input on how information technology can bring greater transparency to recovery spending. The week long “National Dialogue” is soliciting ideas from the public on what Recovery.gov should do and how it should do it. Topics include data collection, data storage, data analysis, data presentation, Web site design, and waste, fraud and abuse…
Browsing: Information Technology
Melissa Hathaway, the official in charge of the White House’s 60-day cybersecurity review, gave a speech last night at the RSA conference in San Francisco. The review concluded last Friday, so there were high expectations around the speech: most experts expected her to announce her findings. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, apparently because the administration hasn’t read the final report yet. I’m told that the White House deputies committee is meeting to review it today or tomorrow. So we’ll probably see a final copy early next week. Hathaway did confirm that the final report calls for the White House to coordinate…
Symantec has an interesting report out on government IT threats. I’ve uploaded a copy, in PDF form, here. Still digesting the whole (lengthy) report, but it seems like hackers are “diversifying” their attacks — using different approaches than they did in 2007. U.S. government systems are still popular targets (nearly a quarter of attacks on government systems target the U.S.); most of the attacks come from China, it seems.
Earlier this week I wrote about how FDA was using Twitter to tweet about product recalls. But that’s not the only agency that uses Twitter to share information in a crisis. The FBI tweets too. And is tweeting right now to let folks know that agency hostage negotiators are on their way from Albany to Binghamton, N.Y. to respond to the shooting and ongoing hostage situation there.
The Health and Human Services Department is tapping some of the same social media tools used to spread the word about salmonella-tainted peanuts to handle the budding pistachio crisis. Already, the Food and Drug Administration’s recall twitter feed, which helped to quickly spread information about the nearly 4,000 products recalled during the peanut crisis, is tweeting about recalled pistachio products. Other tools HHS used during the salmonella outbreak in peanuts could come into play as the department shares information about pistachios, Andrew Wilson, a Web manager for HHS’s Web Communications and New Media division, told Federal Times today.
The General Services Administration has chosen 59 of the 62 bidders for its $50 billion Alliant information technology contract, the agency announced today. This could be the start of another round of protests for the already protest-plagued procurement. This time last year, a federal court upheld the protest of eight bidders that claimed GSA didn’t properly evaluate their bids. All eight of those protesters were awarded contracts this time around, but it’s not clear if the losing bidders will seek to protest this latest decision. The awardees are: 1. Abacus Technology Corporation 2. Accenture National Security Services, LLC 3. Advanced…
The General Services Administration will finally re-award it’s multibillion dollar Alliant information technology contract tomorrow, the agency said. The announcement comes about one year after a federal court upheld a protest against a previous set of awards GSA made, forcing the agency to re-evaluate the procurement meant to become the government’s premier IT contract. Following the protest decision, Federal Times uncovered an apparent conflict of interest regarding the contractor GSA hired to collect performance information from the bidders. The GSA IG found other irregularities with GSA’s evaluation process. One has to wonder whether this round of awards will spark new rounds…
Update 2: The Associated Press is reporting that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is on leave “until further details of the case become known” following the raid of his former office this morning. While the raid was going on Kundra spoke at an IT conference today. He set out bold plans for reforming federal IT by opening up more information to the public for review and feedback. During today’s White House press briefing, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs declined to comment on the investigation into Kundra’s old office. Stay tuned. Update 1: The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia released some court documents…
Just finished a conference call with Vivek Kundra, the president’s pick for chief information officer. A few highlights. First, he promised to embrace cloud computing — which uses networked software distributed across remote servers, not on individual desktops — whenever it’s permissible under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and other security regulations. Cloud computing has been hugely successful in the private sector (Facebook and Gmail, for example, use a “cloud” model) but government has yet to really embrace it. I reject the view that the public sector has to lag behind the private sector. Kundra also promised to…
After weeks of speculation, it’s official. The White House announced today that Vivek Kundra will be the government’s chief information officer. Kundra has served as the chief technology officer for Washington, D.C. since 2007. In his new role, he will direct governmentwide information technology investments, policy and spending oversight. When a governmentwide chief technology officer is named, they will work together to advance the president’s technology agenda. We’ll have more for you following a news conference with Kundra later today.