The top U.S. spy office has tapped a research official to spearhead the intelligence community’s work on AI.

John Beieler, who serves as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ top science and technology advisor, has been named chief artificial intelligence officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Beieler confirmed his additional role during a speech today at an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance in Arlington, Va.

Beieler now leads a council of chief AI officers from the 18 elements of the intelligence community, including the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He said the council, which reports directly to Haines, has been meeting every two weeks for the last two months.

“What we’re focusing on as a group is AI governance,” Beieler said.

He said the group is writing the first IC-wide directive on AI. It will describe what intelligence agencies need to do to deploy AI and machine learning.

“Things like documentation, standards, [application programing interfaces], what sort of data documentation needs to happen, how all these things fit together, the responsible adoption, ongoing monitoring,” Beieler said, describing what goes into the directive. “The responsibility of an individual developer, the responsibility of management and leadership. We’re really focusing on that responsible, ethical adoption.”

He added that the directive will also lay out civil liberties and privacy protections that need to be included in the algorithms developed by the intelligence community.

The new AI council is also leading an update to ODNI’s AI strategy.

“We want to make sure that we have that one consolidated viewpoint of, what do we think is important for AI and the IC, to drive some of those resource conversations,” Beieler said.

Concerned with rapid advances in AI by China and other countries, lawmakers have also urged the intelligence community to prioritize the adoption of AI, with safeguards.

The Fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act directs the DNI to establish new policies “for the acquisition, adoption, development, use, coordination, and maintenance of artificial intelligence capabilities,” including minimum guidelines for the performance of AI models used by spy agencies.

Beieler has a background in data science and machine learning. Prior to joining ODNI in 2019, he led research programs on human language technology, machine learning and vulnerabilities in AI at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency.

At ODNI, he has also helped lead the intelligence community’s Augmenting Intelligence using Machines or “AIM” strategy. With many intel agencies dealing with a deluge of data, the goal of AIM has been to coordinate the adoption of AI and automation across spy agencies.

While spy agencies have used forms of artificial intelligence and machine learning for decades, the emergence of widely available large language models like ChatGPT has added both new considerations and renewed urgency to the AI race.

“A lot of this is focused on making sure that folks that are using these tools understand them,” Beieler said.

ODNI has already funded various training and upskilling programs across intelligence agencies. And he acknowledged the challenges with generative AI and other large language models, such as hallucination errors, copyright issues, and privacy concerns.

“Getting analysts, collectors and the broad base of the IC workforce familiar with these things, so they understand some of these failure modes, but doing that in such a way that they don’t immediately write off the technology,” Beieler said. “That’s the tricky part in upskilling across the workforce.”

With just a handful of companies — rather than government labs or academia — developing the so-called advanced “frontier AI models,” Beieler acknowledged the intelligence community finds itself in a unique “LLM moment.”

He said it will be crucial to test and evaluate the models for different failure modes. He added that the IC isn’t interested in just “buying a widget” from companies, but partnering with industry and academia test and evaluate how AI will impact the world of intelligence.

“That doesn’t mean that we won’t have humans. In fact, I think it might mean that we have more humans, but again, is what is the role?” Beieler said. “What is that teaming, what is that partnership, and how do we work? And how do we put some of those guardrails in so that analysts understand and collectors understand some of these models that they’re working with.”

The post Intelligence community gets a chief AI officer first appeared on Federal News Network.

Two commercial space companies have agreed to work together on enhancing national security capabilities in the commercial space domain. Voyager Space and Palantir are using their abilities to help support and protect new technologies to be used on the International Space Station, and the soon to come Starlab commercial space station. I wanted to find out more about what this agreement means and get an overview of those involved, so I spoke to Matt Kuta, Co-Founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Voyager Space.

Interview Transcript: 

Matt Kuta Voyager Space and Palantir are both Denver based companies. And Voyager, we’re a space technology company, largest commercial user in the world of the International Space Station. Notably, we’ve also are prime contractor to build through a public private partnership the replacement of the International Space Station, owned by private industry. And when we think through a space station and, the platform, there’s a lot of data that is generated in space, structured and unstructured data. And for lack of a better analogy, the ability to send all of that data down the pipes are restricted to pipes are kind of clogged. It’s very difficult to send all the data down to Earth to transmit it. So when you think about how do we capitalize on all this data that is, generated on a space station that’s privately owned, and then think through the concept of maybe computing on the edge, or you’re using a company like Palantir, and they’re proving credibility and capability of artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically kind of transmit down to the customer, the end user, the answer or and a few options of answers for them to then go use however the customer might need. That’s how you kind of arrive at this really unique partnership with Palantir and Voyager space, where Palantir is not in the business of building space station. Voyager is. At the same point Voyager is not in the business of, creating from scratch in organic AI machine learning capability. So that’s kind of, how it came about.

Eric White So when you say AI and the machine learning capability, you primarily mean creating a mechanism that can take all of the vast amounts of data that, you know, whatever machine you have up in space right now is gathering at all times and being able to do what with it, break it down, or just categorize it in a way that’s actually useful because it’s a lot it is a lot of data, as you mentioned.

Matt Kuta Right? Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I, I actually turn out to say it’s a little bit of what the customer needs. Right. So, some customers might say, hey, here’s our constraints and our, our desired outcomes and send me the answer like it’s maybe it’s to track, certain things in the ocean or something like that, or send something down to a warfighter on the battlefield. And it’s a very precise solution we’re delivering to a customer. But it can also be to your other point, hey, you know, we have all this data. Here’s more curated assemblage or smorgasbord, if you will, of options for you to kind of go and use. But the bottom line is, how do we leverage a space station’s higher power supply computing on the edge to partner with a company like Palantir to send a much more concise, user friendly answer versus giant packets of data that, might not be able to all complete and be able to be transmitted down to Earth.

Eric White And so let’s focus back on those said customers. Who might that be? Would that be government agencies, I imagine, and maybe some other entities that could find that data useful. Who are you looking to work with? And what are the fruits of the labor going to look like?

Matt Kuta Yeah. Well, I say, as I mentioned today, Voyager is the largest commercial user of the International Space Station. As a matter of fact, Voyager and Palantir have actually already worked on a joint proposal to a Department of Defense customer already. So, they think to replace that ISS. It’s a spectrum of it’s a continuation of stuff we’re already doing today and what will occur in the future, if you think to those customers, certainly national security customers. But, given the future space station called Star Lab will be a commercial station, it can certainly also be both national security and commercial use. So, example could be maybe in Star Lab, we’re serving, a DoD customer, for example, maybe like United States Navy or something like that to help support naval assets. But we think through a commercial application. Maybe there’s some, tangential or direct application of helping a commercial company with our shipping vessels. Something like that.

Eric White Got it. We’re speaking with Matt Kuta. He is the president of Voyager Space. And so, as you talk about these national security implications, you know, just from a person who covers this, beat, and sees the amount of business that these commercial space companies have been doing with defense entities all over the world really, that amount of work together has exploded. And it’s part of the importance, you know, in defense industry and Defense agencies seeing the importance in space. But can you talk about a little bit about that and how, you know, how much more are you working with, government entities for national security purposes?

Matt Kuta Yeah. Well, it’s a bad a bad use of the word when talking to a space guy about the industry exploding. oh. Yeah.

Eric White Sorry. We’re full of puns here at Space Hour.

Matt Kuta Right, right. But when you think through rapidly growing, if you will. Yeah, it’s really exciting time to be in a space, sector. Commercial space sector. You know, just a couple things. One, the I’ll call it the national security apparatus is in this transition. And what you know it won’t happen completely for many reasons. But it’s in this transition where instead of the U.S. government owning some of these hard assets, government owned, government operated for decades, they’re seeing how efficient the private sector can be and looking to capitalize on that efficiency, both in the capital markets, that innovation nimbleness speed to execution and completion, and have the ability to buy it as a service. You know, we talked about the space station. You know, the International Space Station today is owned by the government. It’s really five space agencies, five kind of government entities. It’s NASA, the European Space Agency, Roscosmos, JASA, the Japanese space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It’s effectively owned and capitalized by those five entities. And when the International Space Station is deorbited in 2030, which is publicly announced, the United States government will never own another low-Earth orbit space station. It will be owned by private industry. That’s what we’re working on. And when it is in orbit, the industry will own it. And then the customers governmental customers like NASA, ESA, national security customers, commercial customers like pharmaceutical companies, life science companies or basically build a microgravity laboratory. We’ll use it as a customer. And it’s an infrastructure investment. And there’s a precedent for this. If you go back in time to the late 1990s, early 2000s, and you ask yourself, well, who owned the space shuttle with the wings, you know, come in and land? That was the government. Government owned that NASA. And then, early 2000s around 2006 seven, the US government ended the space shuttle program. And so, we have to privatize it. And at a time, two companies want a public private partnership contract called a Space Act agreement. One was Orbital Sciences is with now orbital ATK, owned by Northrop Grumman. They built a Cygnus resupply vehicle down to about two dozen times to the ISS. And the second company was a four-year-old SpaceX. It had never launched a rocket. And fast forward 15-20 years, if you ask anybody, well, who owns SpaceX, who owns the rockets? No one says the government. They say, well, the company does, the investors do. And then the customer, the government, venture capital backed satellite companies, tourist, whoever pay SpaceX as a customer to launch their payload and they charge margin. You’re seeing it you being used in applications like in the in the Ukraine conflict with Russia and Planet and Max are you know, governments are buying imagery from commercial companies now. So, there’s lots of exciting, you know, developments in us.

Eric White And talking a little bit about the past, before I talk about the future, I’d like to get a little bit more into Voyager’s past itself. You’ve mentioned a couple times now on how you’re the biggest commercial user of the ISS. How did you all get to this point? And, you know, where did you all start? Where did you all actually start out?

Matt Kuta Yeah. So, over the last few years, Voyager has been basically vertically integrating core parts of the space station supply chain in anticipation that the US government was going to look to deorbit the ISS and privatized ISS. Over the last couple of years, Voyager has a series of seven acquisitions as part of our space station supply chain, strategy. And so, Voyager itself, the company is, just over four years old, the underlying operating history of Voyager, it goes back, you know, about 20 to 30 years.

Eric White And so now, towards the future, what is it looking like? You know, you just spoke a little bit about how you’re preparing for that deorbit of the ISS. But, you know, as this moves forward, do you all see you yourselves going into other areas of space acquisition or, you know, working in other sectors as you increase, you know, in the national security realm as well?

Matt Kuta Certainly. I mean, as I mentioned, we do a lot of work on the ISS today. We do a lot of work, in communications. I think, we have around over 4 million space flight hours in communication technology and in orbit. I think we have about 450 assets in space today. So, when you think through space station and the space station replacement, that’s, a very marquee program. It’s very exciting. It is a strategic asset. It’s a demonstration of sovereignty in orbit, to the to the United States and our allies. But at the same point, there’s a lot of other exciting, opportunities both within space sector that Voyager, you know, is already capitalize on. And we’ll continue to we’re very excited about the continued development of cislunar infrastructure, basically the place between Leo and in the moon, a lot of, for lack of a better word. Railroad tracks need to be laid between, the Earth and the moon. There’s a lot of stuff happening on the moon. So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity here or there over the next, you know, 10 to 20 years. And, of course, always, close to home. And Leo is kind of the government agencies have ceded through, you know, ceding investment, if you will. The lower Earth orbit, geography, and economy, they’ve been working on it for 70 years. And what you’re seeing in the last ten years is a slow transition, where now NASA and the government can free up budget dollars to go deeper into space. As they hand the baton and the keys to private industry for the stuff closer to home, in low-Earth orbit.

Eric White Matt Kuta is the co-founder, president, and chief operating officer at Voyager Space. Find the rest of this interview at our website at Federal News network.com. Search the Space Hour.

The post A joint business venture to help maintain national security in space first appeared on Federal News Network.

We all share life on this big blue rock, and we all share the space around it as well. So in order to get the most out of it from a business and defense aspect, the U.S. is going to need allies. So how are the relationships between the U.S. and strategic partners when it comes to space-related goals? The RAND Corporation was recently tasked with looking into that very topic. To learn more about what that research found, I got the chance to speak with Bruce McClintock, Senior Policy Researcher and lead of RAND’s Space Enterprise Initiative.

Interview Transcript: 

Bruce McClintock So in about the 2022-time frame. Lieutenant General Whiting and he was at the time was in Space Operations Command commander, a Beatles commander in United States Space Force, asked Rand to take a close look at how the US was currently cooperating with select allies on space operations matters and where they’re all ….. those relationships. So that was very active in the project in that time.

Eric White All right. And so, in looking through that, you know, what entities did you speak with, and how did you go about trying to find out those answers for them?

Bruce McClintock So we used a very rigorous approach where the project started off by. Well, throughout the course of the project, we conducted over 140 interviews with more than 115 people that represented 24 different organizations. And those organizations included representatives from select allied countries, NATO Space Center, …, Space Command headquarters, EUCOM headquarters, several Department of Air Force organizations all the way up to senior policy level. And then below, on top of those interviews, we actually conducted 13 different site visits, to include visits to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and then several U.S. military networks. In conjunction with all that, we then analyzed close to 200 different documents, ranging from U.S. policy documents to plans for space operations to country specific documents. So, it’s a pretty rigorous, very holistic approach to conducting the research for the project.

Eric White All right. And so, then the next question is what some of your findings were. So, let’s go through it. You did a lot of site visits. You talked to a lot of allies. When it comes to space and U.S. space policy, you know, what were some of the concerns that that you were hearing from counterparts in other governments?

Bruce McClintock So one of the most common things that we heard from counterparts in other governments are what they often euphemistically referred to as the gap, or the policy or practice gap, if you will. And what they mean by that is that the U.S. was often cited as being very much publicly committed to integrating allies in the space activities and operations. But at the end of the day, in many cases didn’t deliver at the level where it was stated publicly.

Eric White Were there any, you know, examples of this that you can give me that were brought up? And, you know, I don’t need you to go through the litany of, of any policy failures, but just an example of what they meant by that.

Bruce McClintock Sure. So, you know, one of the most frequent, especially in interviews with specific allies, one of the most frequent examples that we would encounter once the failure of the US in many cases to fully include exchange officers from other countries in space related discussions or activities. And I think it’s an important distinction here. In the U.S. parlance, there are two types of foreign officers involved in activities. There are liaison officers, which are officers that represent the interests of their country, but their liaison with the United States. So, it’ll be a representative of their foreign country that might be assigned to the US or another nation as a liaison. On the other hand, there are exchange officers which are intended to be a foreign national that are embedded in the US positions of filling US roles and responsibilities. And often what we heard was that means these allies will put into exchange ops or billets. And were told they were going to be doing a specific job in support of US national interests. Often weren’t given access to information that was necessary to perform the job that they were posted to. But that’s just one example. There were many others, but that’s not that was a very common.

Eric White Yeah. This comes down to you know, disclosure policies. I mean, the U.S. works in many arenas with its allies, whether it be, you know, on the waters or even in ground operations or anything like that. My question is, why is space such a vexing problem for when it comes to what information we can disclose to our allies and what we can’t? What exactly are the hurdles? Or, you know, is it just, you know, bureaucratic? Oh. I’m sorry. You know, you should have access to this, but you for some reason, don’t.

Bruce McClintock So I think it’s a combination of at the highest level and it’s just an evolution, based on information sharing between two different major departments in the U.S.. So that’s Department of Defense and intelligence community. At that very high level, even though their guidance flowed originally from the same executive order, they’ve both taken different approaches to that kind of process for information sharing. And then it does flow down because of that high level disconnect between those two organizations. It does flow down to lower levels, where there are essentially bureaucratic impediments that could be overcome, but there’s not necessarily motivation to overcome those impediments that exist.

Eric White Yeah. And what were some of the solutions that you all garnered? And then we can also get into some of the other, other aspects of this report. But as far as that solutions go. What is the idea there of, you know, making sure that everybody is at least on the same page when it comes to information sharing?

Bruce McClintock So one of the one of the very high-level things we recommended was that we thought there should be a deputy secretary defense level coordination effort with the ODNI. Obviously, director of National intelligence that really spanned that divide between DoD policies. And what is generally referred to as the ICC, the intelligence community policy on information sharing. And that that would be a very high-level effort, a working group if you will, that we thought would take a couple of years, but we thought we could be that high level because there are still disagreements within DoD components and uncertainty about their own internal DoD roles and responsibilities. So, because of those two aspects, we recommended a very high-level working group billet.

Eric White We’re talking here with, Bruce McClintock. He’s a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation and also the lead of the Rand Corporation Space Enterprise Initiative. So, let’s get a little bit more holistic here. What is the optimal amount of coordination that needs to happen between the U.S. government and its allies when it comes to space? What would be the ideal situation there?

Bruce McClintock I’d say before we get into the actual optimal level of involvement, I think the first step to the United States is just come up with a coherent holistic policy on involving our allies, and that doesn’t exist right now. That contributes somewhat to the capacity do gap problem. Some of the outstanding options, and one of the things that we would say more about holistic approach is it’s not every ally is going to be treated the same way. Right. So, this isn’t about opening the floodgates that we will and sharing everything with every ally. There needs to be a thoughtful approach to how much we’re going to share with people allies. But the US need to be clear upfront about mutual relationship levels so that that’s point one. I would note on that. Once you have decided on those different levels. And by the way, this is what this is a relationship that goes two ways. There are different allies that want different levels of interaction with the United States. Not every ally wants to be fully integrated with beyond states in terms of space operation. And that’s, of course, their national sovereign right. So, both sides need to be clear with each other. Once you establish those different relationship level expectations by ally, then you set up a U.S. structure that addresses those different levels. And the U.S. has made some progress in this area. Some of that starts with just basic information exchange and information sharing at the fully unclassified level. So, this is not always about having a very highly qualified conversation. That makes sense.

Eric White Yeah it does. And you know, not to be you know, two to our own horn or anything. We’ve got a pretty good space program especially you know; we’ve got the Space Force that now is doing its own thing. What exactly does the U.S. need or rely on its allies? You know, the major allies out there? You know, since their space programs may not be as advanced, what exactly are is the U.S. getting from these, allies in the space arena?

Bruce McClintock Two broad terms to describe what the advantages to working with allies, because the US don’t have a very robust, very strong space program when you speak about national security in general. But the first thing I would talk about is coverage of sector one, diversity. And there are other aspects that we could talk about later in life. So, the coverage thing, I think, is the one that is arguably the most important commercial quality, because space is not just about putting things on orbit, it’s also about being able to detect, characterize and track things that are on it. And that requires geographic locations across the globe. Right. So, we’ve been doing a little use of the parameter space power. Now we need geographic access to other territories to be able to improve our space situational awareness network and also our space domain awareness infrastructure. And the same is true for potential future adversaries like China. Like, so we’re out pursuing locations to be in the satellite tracking territory and not China. So that’s one very obvious example. It’s the information sharing like space situational awareness, which is the most fully developed program in the U.S.  The U.S. has a large number of agreements signed with other nations and other entities or SSA Galaxy. So that goes to the coverage piece. But there’s also value in diversity and space capabilities. Things like things that are on orbit but also ground stations become more vulnerable to threats. It’s good to have a diverse set of resources available.

Eric White Are there other areas. And you talked a little bit about it as far as intelligence sharing and coordinating with ODNI, are there other areas where the U.S. government works with its allies, you know, in other arenas that these space policy folks can draw from and see? Okay, so that’s how they do it. You know, maybe we can apply that idea when it comes to, coordination on the space end when you’re up, up higher a little bit.

Bruce McClintock So for our research, we took a pretty close look at a couple of other domains to draw lessons in best practices from those other domains. And the first area that we looked at in particular was nuclear weapons cooperation. For a couple of reasons. We thought that would be an interesting case. First of all, nuclear weapons will probably be most carefully guarded about capabilities, most sensitive, even more so than space capabilities. And so, we wanted to see if there was even any potential share at that level. And there was, in the mid-1950s, we had the United States had exceptional capabilities in that domain, but the Soviet Union was a threat to us. And so, the United States worked closely with the United Kingdom to come up with, neutral …. That were related to nuclear weapons. There was some level of data sharing between the United States and United Kingdom. And there was other, information exchange and coordination that, was important if you consider to be best practices. We also looked at, special operations, any newer area where there has been much touting about being able to cooperate with allies and share information in a way that hasn’t been demonstrated yet in inspection of it. So those are two areas that we looked at. Looked at the two others, two clearly are in charge and sharing opinions, see, and the three primary areas limiting jamming.

Eric White All right. And so yeah, there’s really nothing more that you can say about what’s at stake when you talk about nuclear weapons, but what’s at stake when it comes to space. And, you know, if we don’t get this right as far as working and we’re getting the most that we can out of these relationships with our allies in that domain.

Bruce McClintock I think it, I’ll start at the lowest level of what’s at stake. It’s just a reduction in efficiency. And by that, I mean, in some cases, if allies feel like they can’t depend on the US to share important national security related information about space, then these allies that have significantly more limited resources than the United States has, they feel obligated to invest in their own capabilities for things as simple as space situational awareness, which I talked about earlier, whereas we had a much more robust information sharing, relationship where it was maybe not fully reciprocal, but it share the pieces of information that they could invest, that those resources in other aspects of space security that could be to the benefit of the U.S. So that’s one example. It’s reduced efficiency if we just don’t cooperate as well with our closest allies. If you move up the scale in terms of the significance of the impact, the adverse impact. If we don’t, find ways to become allied by design. There are things like reduced trust and willingness to depend on the United States in times of crisis when it comes to space. So those are now obviously more extreme, but they are package, and I don’t feel like they could count on the United States to share information when the quote unquote chips are down. Then they sometimes say, well, we need to figure out ways to be not only independent but have our own capability. And then there’s less of a need for them to turn to the US on geopolitical policy decisions.

Eric White Wrapping up here, I’ll give you a chance to say anything else on this topic that you think is important for the conversation. But if you could run through also just, you know, some of the other recommendations that you all made, based on what you found in, you know, talking and also what did DoD have to say about this? I guess we could actually ask them and include them in this.

Bruce McClintock Yeah. So I would say as far as what the DoD has to say about this, first of all, you know, I applaud the Department of Defense, starting with, Gerald Whiting for taking an interest in this topic and asking somebody like Rand to look at it because they knew that they were going to get an independent, objective and rigorous analysis of the problem. That we weren’t going to just tell them what they wanted to hear. So not only by initiating process, but then listening to throughout the course of the last couple of years and they provided preliminary insights and recommendations on our final findings and recommendations. I want to applaud, you know, the Department of Defense for being so willing to listen, because it’s not always easy to listen to something that might be tough love. They’re not telling you exactly what you want to hear. And in that vein, I think over the last couple of years, the Department of Defense has taken on some of the recommendation, not all of them by any means, but that’s their prerogative. But they have done things like made expanded the interaction with allies in select venues. So, they have grown and see SPO initiatives that combined space operations in which, you know, that used to be seven nations, it now 10. They’re working on our international space cooperation strategy that was informed by this Rand research. And it’ll also want to applaud a recent announcement from OSD, where they signed a memo that removes a lot of the legacy classification barriers that have inhibited the United States’ ability to collaborate across the U.S. and with allies. Now, that’s a direct example of a recommendation we made, not necessarily because of the Rand report, but in line with the Rand report’s findings and recommendations that the department backs. So, there been great steps taken. There’s a lot more to be done.

Eric White Bruce McClintock is senior policy researcher and lead of the Space Enterprise Initiative at the Rand Corporation. There is indeed more to the interview. You can find it along with a link to the report at Federal News network.com, or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next. Governments aren’t the only ones joining forces to improve national security in space. Some commercial entities are as well. This is the space our on federal news network returning after this break I’m Eric White.

The post How well does the U.S. work with its allies when it comes to space? first appeared on Federal News Network.

Women make up about 40% of the intelligence community’s workforce, a percentage that ranks behind both federal workforce and civilian labor benchmarks.

That’s according to the latest demographics report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And women are even more underrepresented in the leadership ranks throughout the IC.

But agencies aren’t ignoring the issue. The National Security Agency’s “Future Ready Workforce” initiative has already led to several changes that will likely make the NSA a more attractive employer for all employees, including women. And the NSA is also investing in education and other programs that encourage girls to get involved in STEM.

Inside the IC spoke with three women leaders at the NSA about the past, present and future for women at the agency. They are Morgan Adamski, chief of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center; Kristina Walter, director of the NSA’s Future Ready Workforce Initiative; and Tahira Mammen, acting chief of the AI Security Center, which is housed within the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center.

This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity: 

Justin Doubleday I’d love just to kick off by asking any of you to reflect on the role that women have played at NSA, historically, maybe some of the challenges and how we got to where we are today?

Kristina Walter I think the NSA is a unique space in that we do have a history of women being involved in the cryptologic mission. So we think of Elizabeth Friedman, and a lot of cryptographers that have contributed to the National Security Agency’s mission from World War Two, when we’re talking about codebreaking.

And so a lot of us can see that in the day to day. We have a lot of strong women leaders here. But I think we face the same challenges that any organization does, especially a predominantly military organization, where we’re still working through the balance of women being visible and at the table. And I think what we found is, we need to be inclusive of that environment. Women have a lot to offer in that space.

And so what systems can we put in place to just be inclusive of everybody’s thoughts and ideas and really bring that diverse perspective in? And so that’s really what we’re trying to achieve, as we move into this new era of rapidly evolving technology changes, rapid competition for talent that we haven’t had to face before. So how can we be really an attractive employer for all people, including women?

Justin Doubleday Morgan, there’s this overlap between the challenges that women face in the intelligence community but then also in the cybersecurity field. I think maybe the numbers are even worse writ large across the cybersecurity field.

Morgan Adamski There’s definitely a really strong focus right now on getting more women involved in cybersecurity, more women involved in STEM roles. And I think that’s really important. Just because when you have diverse opinions, diverse backgrounds, whether you’re male or female, they, however you want to describe yourself, it’s really important that we have those conversations. In cybersecurity, you need innovation and unique solutions to complex problems. And that means you have to approach that in many different ways. And so you have to have a lot of different people at the table to have that discussion.

Kristina talked about some of the things we’re doing at the agency in focusing on people. The cybersecurity community, and NSA historically, has been involved in strong technical backgrounds. That’s what we do here. And so the same challenges you see on getting more women in STEM is how we try to encourage and recruit more women in NSA. It has to go hand in hand.

Justin Doubleday Tahira, AI is one of the newer fields, depending on how you define it. Are you seeing any specific challenges in that field kind of pour over from maybe the legacy STEM challenges that we’ve seen? How are you confronting this as a woman in the AI field, a leader in the AI field?

Tahira Mammen I’ll start by saying that we have many brilliant women at NSA who are experts in AI. I think one of the challenges in the AI or cybersecurity space, in these deeply technical fields, right, is making sure that when we think about women — how to help women advance, how to help women with mentorship — sometimes there’s a lot of focus on “women helping women,” which is very important.

But there’s a critical role for allies who are different than you. So as Morgan was saying, I believe that a diverse group makes the best decisions. And that’s also true in helping people rise up through the ranks. And so while and all the women at this table are definitely committed to helping women, I just want to emphasize how important it is that men also see their role in helping bring the diverse voices to the table.

Justin Doubleday If you look at some of the data from the ODNI demographics report, it shows this consistent trend where women and men start out at the same at the GS-10 level. It’s 50/50, almost. And then, as you go up, that gap widens where we get up to GS-15, and it’s 65% men 35% women. And it’s just this widening gap as you go up. You all have become leaders in this space. Do you want to share maybe how you’ve gotten to where you are? Maybe any specific challenges that you’d be willing to share today?

Morgan Adamski When you talk about the intelligence community, you talk about NSA, you talk about cybersecurity, They’re all fast-paced, unique environments. And part of that requirement is being in an office for a certain amount of hours a day. And for those of us who do have families or children, you’re trying to balance that in your head of how do I continue to succeed at mission and deliver outcomes, while also not having “mom guilt,” because you can’t pick your kids up at a certain point in the day. And that’s difficult for people to balance.

That flexibility, whether you’re male or female, especially for some of the newer generations, is really critical to having happiness at work. And so I think that for me in particular, I don’t necessarily think about work-life balance, as others might. I think about it as prioritization. What is the most important thing that I need to do today for my family, for my work? And then I execute that prioritization, and then that prioritization may change the next day. It’s constantly a trade off, and you have to determine what’s going to be the most valuable on any given circumstance.

Kristina Walter I think what we’ve seen is because women sometimes feel like they can’t achieve that balance, they self select out. So when you look at trends of women kind of growing, they think, “I could never handle that, or I’ve never seen another woman who is working at the senior executive level, because you can’t maintain that balance.”

And I 100% agree with Morgan’s perspective of, balance is hard. I’m good at compartmentalization. So when I’m home, I’m 100% home. When I am at work, I’m 100% at work. Building the support system around you to do that is important. I think showing women that it’s achievable, and then putting policies in place to help it are really helpful. So things like paid parental leave, where we’ve rolled that out at NSA. Phased parental return, so you don’t have to come back immediately, and you can phase that in.

How do we look at the policies that can help women think, “This isn’t too overwhelming, it isn’t too hard”— or anybody who’s balancing challenges — and “I can continue to grow in my career here and not self select out,” is really what we’re looking to reinforce.

Tahira Mammen I think that encouraging women to take up space, to use their voice, to voice the solution to a problem they’ve identified. I think everyone in work or in life, you can say, “Okay, this is really a problem. And it bothers me.” And for my personal path, most of my success has come from being able to identify a problem, really advocate for being allowed to fix it, and then doing that work.

And then when you do it, people say, “Wow, okay, look at what you were able to do. Let’s give you a harder problem.” And that is what rising has looked like throughout my career. And I think a space where, if you’re taking a step back, as Morgan and Christina, were saying, you miss the opportunity to do work that you’re passionate about that also helps your career.

Justin Doubleday Is there specific data you can share about the NSA? Are there any specific trends that you’re seeing in terms of the share of women at the NSA, the share of women in the leadership ranks?

Kristina Walter We set goals every year for our hiring to reach about 40% women where we’ve been able to meet or exceed that over the last several years. And we want to be reflective of society. So recognizing across the board that we are bringing in people that reflect the American people, since that’s who we serve.

And so those are the trends and we see that we’re consistent, but we want to make sure, digging into the data, that that’s across all skill sets. We’re looking at the technical skill sets, the STEM roles. Maybe there’s a smaller pool, and we’re really targeting those. So we’re doing a lot of recruitment and engagement, targeting female schools and underrepresented populations, and making sure that those folks see themselves at NSA.

And I think what we found is when we start in college level, we’re too late. And so engaging at that K-12 level. We run GenCyber camps, we’re really trying to expose younger students to STEM, cybersecurity and federal service. And so we’ve seen great success in that space. I talked to a recent student of Stanford, who said, “I was first exposed to cybersecurity at an NSA GenCyber camp. And that’s what made me pursue this path of participating in other events.” And making sure that we’re out in the community so that girls at the young age can see where they’re going, and then we can make sure that those girls follow through and then commit to the agency with our relevant programs.

There are benefits and negatives to working in a classified environment. One of the benefits is that balance. You come in and you work in a secure environment. And you can work on really hard problems that you can’t do anywhere else here. But then you can also leave that job when you leave and you can’t bring work home in certain spaces, and have that balance. And so we do try to make sure people are aware of the opportunities that are here, so that we can hit our hiring goals related to female and minority hiring and all the different objectives that we set every year.

Morgan Adamski One thing I’d like to highlight is just the focus that the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate has taken on really promoting, advocating and recruiting women into the cybersecurity mission. I’m proud of the fact that the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center is over 55% female. That’s great in the cybersecurity arena. It is just kind of the way we formed.

But we also spend a lot of time trying to invest in things like women-in-cybersecurity conferences, recruiting from the right schools. We recently hosted a women’s cybersecurity event here where we brought in students from different colleges. We talked about the entirety of the NSA mission. We talked about recruitment and how they could join. And trying to do those very concentrated efforts on, how do we encourage more women to get into the cybersecurity field.

Tahira Mammen Women are not a monolith. Women come in so many different, diverse experiences. And so at the agency, we have employee resource groups that are employee-led organizations that do some of that work I was talking about before. Identifying issues or challenges within their demographic, and then seeking to improve the culture for everybody.
And so on the inside, especially in my experience, through the employee resource groups, we’re working on building the culture when people come in the door, then they find their place, they find their mentors, they find opportunity to drive change and mission.

Justin Doubleday This is a somewhat nebulous question, but what do you view the future for this issue. With some of the changes you’re making now, 10or 20 years down the line, do you have a sense of where this is going in terms of securing a better place for woman at the NSA and the IC?

Kristina Walter Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do is think about all of our employees and what they need. And there’s talent out there, a lot of which is women. And so we want to take advantage of all the talent. We want women to feel like there’s a place for them here and a space for them at the table.

I think when you look at the leadership teams at the National Security Agency, it’s an exciting time, because you can really see yourself there right now, both in the established leadership, but also the up-and-coming leaders. And so I think the more we can share that with the public and make sure that they see that there’s a space for them here, and then just make it easier for them to come in and stay. One of the best parts about the National Security Agency, talking about my experience, is you can reinvent yourself. You can join different career fields. You can explore lots of options, and so enabling our whole workforce to do that is important and that will inherently benefit the women that are coming into the agency as well.

The post NSA women leaders find opportunities to ‘drive change and mission’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

Geospatial knowledge has always been core to military intelligence, but its highly dynamic nature makes it vital to collapse the time window between data capture, and analysis and dissemination. Today, this latency is growing more pronounced as data volume, variety and speed grow at a mind-boggling rate. Such cumbersome access to information leads to slower, less accurate decision-making, which can negatively impact geo-intelligence.

Why is geospatial data performance (fast query time) such an obstacle? Various types of geospatial data are often kept in purpose-built data silos. Not having all this data in one place is a major impediment, forcing geospatial analysts to resort to inefficient, time-consuming and cumbersome methods to consolidate and analyze data in aggregate, where it becomes inherently richer.

Any single dataset only gives a finite amount of information that is used for a limited number of purposes. Integrating and linking these datasets is the key to unlocking valuable insights that lead to better decision-making. Spatial overlays – or the joining and viewing together of separate datasets sharing all or part of the same area – are an example. In a defense context, this ability to view data in aggregate via superimposing may translate into increased situational awareness, such as mapping terrain and the movement of people to identify hotspots for illegal border crossings or drug trafficking.

Traditionally, data analysts have had to download multiple file formats and develop their processing pipelines to synthesize and enrich data in this way. Before starting a processing task, an analyst had to search various databases to find the needed data and then download this complex data in multiple formats as inputs into a processing pipeline, with each input requiring its own API. In a defense example, target detection using hyperspectral data requires a custom processing pipeline incorporating aerial imagery for context and possibly point clouds for advanced 3D visualization.

Naturally, this convoluted approach hinders the ability to do rapid data processing spanning multiple sources. There isn’t a single, consolidated place for all geospatial analytics and machine learning, preventing deeper data contextualization.

Rapid processing from multiple data sources is the key to achieving this integrated information richness that supports more informed decision-making. Beyond basic data access and capture, this type of analysis adds even more complexity because heterogeneous tools are used to analyze each data type. For example, currently, advanced imagery analytics require custom tools with limited API integration. Imagine the power that could be unleashed if a single API optimized data access and could integrate all of these tools.

Finally, today’s geospatial analysts face restrictive computing limitations, given that data and compute are largely kept separate. Analysts often have to take the time to spin up clusters, which is outside of their core competency and can slow down time to insights even further. Advances in serverless architectures can eradicate this problem, allowing developers to spin up or down as many applications as they want, as frequently as possible, without concerns about hardware availability.

Any industry relying on geospatial data needs a new approach, one that is capable of delivering insights in minutes as opposed to days or weeks. This can be achieved through:

• A single platform to support all data types – there needs to be an efficient and unified method to store and analyze all geospatial data and derivative results.
• Distributed and highly scalable computing that allows geospatial analysts to fully embrace the cloud to run any pipeline at scale without having to initiate and activate clusters.
• Finally, all of this needs to be accomplished while protecting sensitive information and ensuring data integrity. There should be compliant and isolated on-premises capabilities to ensure compliance with data sovereignty requirements for both your mission and partners.

Geospatial knowledge continues to offer a deep well of insights that are used for the betterment of defense and intelligence operations and, at a higher level, human society. However, the volume, variety, and velocity of this data require a new approach to manage it cohesively since current methods are too fragmented. Doing so will be the key to maximizing the power of geospatial information in the coming years, hopefully transforming data into life-changing intelligence within increasingly short timespans.

Norman Barker is vice president of geospatial at TileDB.

The post Multimodal geospatial data – Shrinking time from acquisition to actionable insights first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Defense Department operates a slew of intelligence activities and programs. It even has a senior intelligence oversight official, who has come up with more than 100 recommendations over the last five years. But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has some recommendations of its own for the oversight official. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin got the details from GAO’s Director of Defense Capabilities and Management, Alissa Czyz.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin So we have oversight of overseers here. You might say, with respect to the defense intelligence activities and just sort out for us what activities belong to the Defense Department in the gigantic intelligence apparatus.

Alissa Czyz The Department of Defense oversees 26 components that do intelligence or intelligence related activities. This is like National Security Agency. The military services each have their own intelligence department’s director of intelligence. Those types of things. This is not the broader CIA, FBI, the broader intelligence community. So, DoD has its own intelligence components.

Tom Temin Right. So, it’s a wonder they only had a couple of hundred recommendations for all of these 26 activities. But what were you looking at here to see whether those capabilities were responding to the Defense Department’s own overseer or whether the overseer was overseeing properly?

Alissa Czyz Right. It’s what you said at the beginning, Tom. So, we were asked to look at the roles and responsibilities of the DoD senior intelligence oversight official, or they call it SIO for short, of course, because DoD has lots of acronyms. So, this office is responsible for conducting oversight of those 26 components within the Department of Defense that do intelligence or intelligence related activities, right. They want to make sure that they’re following proper policies and procedures. They’re following the letter of the law. You’re carrying out those activities in a way that is proper and professional. So, they have a very important responsibility. They work, you know, in tandem with other DoD offices that provide oversight, like the inspector general’s office and the general counsel, but they play an important role in overseeing these defense components.

Tom Temin And how big is the silo operation? I mean, like the defense IG’s office is a couple of thousand people.

Alissa Czyz Right? It’s a pretty small office, actually. It’s only, you know, a handful of individuals. And the senior intelligence oversight official who also has a direct line to the secretary of Defense if needed. So, they don’t have a lot of resources, but they do have a very important role to play, and they can kind of partner with other offices if needed. But what they’ve been doing over the last several years that’s really important for the Department of Defense, is doing these inspections of these DoD components that do intelligence or intelligence related activities. So, they’ve been going every 3 to 5 years out to different components, and they check and see if they’re making sure that they’re doing their intelligence activities in accordance with policies and procedures. And they’ve provided a lot of value in doing those inspections of the components. They’ve made recommendations hundreds, as you mentioned over the years, to these components. So, they’re small shop, but they have a lot of important responsibilities.

Tom Temin And just out of curiosity, when they make a visit to look at something invisible, which is the intellectual activity of gathering intelligence, that sounds like more of an interview situation. What is it they can audit and look at?

Alissa Czyz Right. So, they do look at the components, own policies and procedures, what types of activities they’ve been carrying out, what types of training they provide, their personnel. They do interviews as well. They have kind of a checklist of things that they look for when they go out and do these visits. And in addition to those inspections, they do their own training for those components and for others in DoD. So, they provide that important resource as well.

Tom Temin Yeah. The question is what they tell people they do at cocktail parties, I guess we’re speaking with Alissa Czyz. She’s director of defense capabilities and management at the Government Accountability Office. And you found some risks, though, that have been entailed, even though they are pretty diligent about conducting these activities. What are some of the risks you identified?

Alissa Czyz Yeah. So, as I mentioned, they have been very active in doing inspections of these defense components. Their work over a five-year period that we looked at resulted in almost 300 recommendations for improvements to those components. The issue that we found were a few things. One, that they were not tracking the status of those recommendations. So, I’m from GAO. We make a lot of recommendations to executive branch agencies, and we follow up on our recommendations. We ask those agencies how they have implemented those. And that’s a really important part of the process. Right. So, all of these hundreds of recommendations, they didn’t have a good process in place to track whether those prior recommendations had been implemented. That was one issue, and we made a recommendation to make sure that they were tracking the progress. And they could do that in a number of ways. Right. They could require the components to report on their progress. So, there are some kind of low resource ways that they could implement that. One of the other big issues that we found that was a risk where they have actually decided to halt doing these inspections of defense components. So, in 2020, they decided to give it away from this and instead do these, what they call topic assessments. So instead of going out to one component and conducting a thorough inspection of that component, they are looking at topic areas like counter drug analytics support for example. And so, they are looking at all of the components that play a role in that particular topic. So, they are kind of hitting a larger swath of components by doing these topic assessments. But as we pointed out their component individual inspections had resulted in hundreds of recommendations over the year. So, we did see a lot of risk in that decision to halt those. Sure. We got feedback from some of the components to that. We’re worried about that as well.

Tom Temin And did they halt them because of pandemic? Because they didn’t want to go see people in person or it was hard to travel.

Alissa Czyz They decided that doing these topic assessments would kind of get at a larger group of components at one time. And we see merit to that, definitely. But what we found was that they didn’t assess the risk of stopping those individual inspections. So really what happens by not doing those individual inspections is that DoD is relying on the component itself to inspect itself, right. Some of these components are pretty, you know, experienced and have the resources to do that oversight of themselves. Others, like Space Force, is pretty new. I mean, they don’t have the experience. And there’s also some question of, you know, having an independent office come in and do an evaluation can provide a lot of benefits, too. So, we made a recommendation that they assess the risks of stopping those inspections as they move toward these topic assessments.

Tom Temin And then you also found that when they do the topic assessments, they weren’t fully developed with respect to what it is they were going to find out about them, the criteria.

Alissa Czyz Right. So again, we’re GAO. Right. So, we have a lot of processes that we follow and such as the inspector general standards that we use to conduct our audits. And the IG does as well. And we found that the SIO did not have all of these standards in place. So, we identified 22 standards that were relevant to their topic assessments. These are things like having a quality control system in place, or making sure you’re documenting evidence, or making sure the folks that are doing the investigations don’t have a conflict of interest. Those types of things. So, we identified 22 standards that would be important for their work. They had implemented many of them, but not all of them. So, we made a recommendation. An example would be that one about the independence of investigators. They did not have a process in place to assure that their investigators were independent. So, we made that recommendation to implement all 22 standards as they adopt this topic assessment process and evaluate the risks of stopping the inspections.

Tom Temin Right. But you didn’t quite go as far as to say you should go back to doing those inspections.

Alissa Czyz I mean, they have the ability to start those inspections. And we also, you know, acknowledge that, you know, they want to make their own decisions on how they’re going to conduct their oversight. But, you know, a risk analysis we think is prudent, right. Those inspections provided a lot of benefit. So, taking a look at those, and if there are gaps that exist, by stopping those inspections, by doing some type of analysis like that, they could take steps to mitigate those risks.

Tom Temin And the SIO office generally agreed with what you came up with.

Alissa Czyz They did they agreed on the 22 standards, they thought, but maybe not all of them were applicable. We strongly believe that all of them are applicable. We actually operate under those standards. The IG does as well. They’re broad. They’re not overly prescriptive. So, we do reiterate that we think that they should adopt all of them. But they did generally agree with all of the recommendations.

The post Report card shows shortcomings in how DoD oversees intelligence first appeared on Federal News Network.

The new initiative comes under an executive order President Joe Biden was expected to sign Wednesday. The EO is aimed at protecting Americans’ sensitive data from being accessed by so-called “countries of concern” through data brokerages and other transactions.

Under the EO, the Justice Department will issue regulations around the bulk sale of sensitive data to unfriendly foreign nations, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. The EO will specifically highlight geolocation data, personal health data, personal financial data, and biometrics, among other categories.

“Buying data through data brokers is currently legal in the United States,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters on Tuesday. “And that reflects a gap in our national security toolkit that we’re working to fill with this program.”

In a fact sheet, DoJ also described how its program will regulate the sale of “government related data,” regardless of whether it meets the “bulk” thresholds or not.

DoJ’s regulations will focus on sensitive data marketed “as linked or linkable to current or recent former employees or contractors, or former senior officials, of the federal government, including the intelligence community and military.”

The rulemaking will also address government-related locations by focusing on “geolocation data that is linked or linkable to certain sensitive locations within geofenced areas that the department would specify on a public list,” the department said in its factsheet.

Officials have warned for years that foreign adversaries could use commercially available data as an intelligence tool. In a January 2023 white paper, the MITRE Corporation summarized how advertising technology or “adtech” on mobile phones and other devices could be used to target influential individuals for blackmail and coercion, or even physically map and target sensitive sites.

Brandon Pugh, policy director of the R Street Institute’s cybersecurity and emerging threats team, noted members of the military and intelligence professionals face unique threats in the digital age.

“Adversaries have an interest in identifying them, targeting them for blackmail and disinformation, and tracking their movements to and from government facilities for strategic advantage,” Pugh told Federal News Network. “We have seen this play out in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and there is no doubt that countries like China have similar interests.”

Pugh also noted it will be difficult to track when and how sensitive data reaches countries like China and Russia.

“An area that will be tricky to follow and enforce is when data is ‘re-exported,’ where third parties share the data with countries of concern,” he said.

CISA security requirements for sensitive data

While DoJ will play a lead role under the EO with its advanced notice of proposed rulemaking, several other agencies will be involved in advancing the order’s goals to better protect sensitive data

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for instance, will establish security requirements for “restricted transactions” that will be allowed to go forward under the EO, so long as they meet certain stipulations.

“These security requirements will be designed to mitigate the risk of access by countries of concern or covered persons and may include cybersecurity measures such as basic organizational cybersecurity posture requirements, physical and logical access controls, data masking and minimization, and the use of privacy-preserving technologies,” the DoJ fact sheet explains.

Pugh said it will be notable to watch “how prescriptive these requirements are, how they are assessed and monitored, and how they might evolve over time.”

“Enhancing baseline cybersecurity has been a priority of the federal government even outside of this executive order as the updated NIST cybersecurity framework from this week conveys,” he added.

Meanwhile, the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and the National Science Foundation will “consider taking steps to use their existing grant making and contracting authorities to prohibit federal funding that supports, or to otherwise mitigate, the transfer of sensitive health data and human genomic data to countries of concern and covered persons,” the DoJ fact sheet states.

Biden urges Congress on privacy legislation

The White House acknowledged that while the EO is aimed at protecting American’s sensitive data, it isn’t a substitute for broader privacy actions. Biden is encouraging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to take steps to prevent data brokers from “illegally assembling and selling extremely sensitive data, including that of U.S. military personnel,” the White House said.

And Biden is also urging Congress to pass “comprehensive bipartisan privacy legislation, especially to protect the safety of our children.”

In a statement, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) applauded the forthcoming EO. “While I welcome these steps, today’s action does not assuage the need for comprehensive data privacy legislation,” Warner said. “I urge my colleagues to come together on legislation that finally protects Americans’ privacy online.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) also praised the White House’s actions, while calling on the Senate to consider his Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Surveillance Act of 2023, which could potentially apply to a much broader set of countries than Biden’s EO.

“Authoritarian dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and UAE cannot be trusted with Americans’ personal data, both because they will likely use it to undermine U.S. national security and target U.S. based dissidents, but also because these countries lack effective privacy laws necessary to stop the data from being sold onwards to China,” Wyden said.

The post Biden EO aims to safeguard sensitive data on fed employees, facilities first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Agencies will soon have free access to a Microsoft feature that could help detect cyber attacks. Starting this month, Microsoft will make advanced logging capabilities available to all federal agencies at no additional charge. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency worked with Microsoft in recent months to make the feature available to the government. Microsoft said it will retain agency network logs for 180 days at no additional charge. Lawmakers have previously criticized Microsoft for profiting off of network logging features that are typically needed to identify cyber incidents.
  (CISA, Microsoft unveil progress on free logging capabilities for federal agencies - Federal News Network)
• The General Services Administration is starting to research the future of federal telecommunications services. Agencies are still a year or more away from fully transitioning to the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions or EIS telecommunications vehicle, but that isn't stopping GSA from asking what is next. In a new request for information, GSA is seeking industry feedback as it develops the Next Generation Network Infrastructure strategy and the associated acquisition initiative. The EIS contract expires in July 2032. GSA is seeking answers to 38 questions, covering a host of topics, including what the telecommunications market will look like in the future and a list of services that will no longer be offered in the next 10 to 15 years. Responses to the RFI are due by March 15.
  (GSA's RFI kicks off planning for 2032 next generation telecom program - SAM.gov)
• The U.S. Special Operations Command is seeking feedback from small businesses. SOCOM is hosting an acquisition executive small-business forum to assess the state of its small business programs. SOCOM wants to better understand the challenges in working with the command. It also wants to hear suggestions on making the process of doing business with the command easier. Participation from a variety of industries is encouraged. In-person attendance is limited to 25 people, and virtual attendance is limited to 150 people. The forum will take place on March 28, right after the conclusion of the small-business boot camp.
  (SOCOM wants to hear from small businesses - SAM.gov)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to manage the size of its largest-ever health care workforce. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is taking a more targeted approach to hiring. But it is telling its leaders to rescind tentative or final job offers to candidates only as an “action of last resort.” In cases where it must rescind a job offer, VHA said it will make every effort to place candidates in other jobs at other facilities. VHA now has a record 400,000 employees, after it saw a hiring surge last year. VA’s press secretary said there are no plans for a hiring freeze or reduction in the VA health care workforce.
  (VHA tells leaders to rescind job offers only as a ‘last resort’ to manage size of health care workforce - Federal News Network)
• A top Defense Department intelligence official is retiring. Ronald Moultrie will step down from his position as under secretary of defense for intelligence and security at the end of this month. During his time overseeing DoD’s intelligence apparatus, Moultrie was charged with reviewing the military’s security practices in the wake of the Discord leaks. He also testified about military encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena. Moultrie’s government career spans 44 years. He previously served in positions throughout the intelligence community, including as Director of Operations at the National Security Agency.
  (Upcoming departure of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie - Defense Department)
• Agency ethics officials are reviewing financial disclosures from federal executives after about 400,000 people submitted their forms last week. The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) said one-in-five civilian executive-branch employees, from about 140 agencies, are required to complete a confidential financial disclosure. OGE said any executive-branch employee, whose duties would affect the financial interests of outside companies or persons, may have been required to file. In the coming weeks, agency ethics officials will review these confidential financial disclosure reports. If they find a potential conflict between the employee’s official duties and a financial interest, they will ask the employee to take action to include everything from selling a holding, resigning from an outside job or avoiding certain government work. OGE said these efforts are vital to protecting the integrity of government programs and operations.
  (Federal ethics officials reviewing 400,000 financial disclosure forms - Office of Gov't Ethics)
• Taxpayers in a dozen states may soon get the chance to try out a free, online tax-filing platform that is run by the IRS. The agency said it has completed internal testing of what is called its "Direct File" system, and will allow more taxpayers to use it to file their federal tax returns. The IRS said it will accept new users for short, unannounced windows of time, to manage the amount of traffic on the Direct File platform. The agency is generally limiting testing to taxpayers who live in states without an income tax.
  ( - IRS)
• The U.S. Central Command is paving its own data narrative. CENTCOM is about to release its data strategy. While the command relied on the work of the chief digital and artificial intelligence office, it is taking its own approach to the way it governs data. Michael Foster, CENTCOM’s chief data officer, said the strategy will be continuously evolving and adapting over time. The command is using “VAULTIS,” a DoD acronym for data that is visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable and secure as a framework to practically drive their governance processes. Hence, VAULTIS.
  (CENTCOM to release its data strategy - Federal News Network)

The post Top DoD intelligence official retiring first appeared on Federal News Network.

• As Congress works on the next military budget, some are asking President Joe Biden to focus on the well-being of service members and their families. Lawmakers want the White House to prioritize quality of life issues in the fiscal 2025 defense budget request. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), among others, are asking President Joe Biden to focus on housing, compensation, health care and child care as Congress begins to draft the 2025 defense policy bill. President Biden is expected to release his 2025 budget request on March 11, but Congress has yet to pass the fiscal 2024 budget.
  (Lawmakers ask Biden to prioritize military quality of life issues - House Armed Services Committee)
• The Commerce Department is seeking public feedback on the openness of artificial intelligence tools. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is launching a request for comment, as it looks for more feedback on the benefits and risks of “open-weight” AI systems. AI model weights are a distillation of what an AI model has been trained to understand, and how that model continues to behave. “Responsible AI innovation we know is going to bring enormous benefits to people. It’s going to transform every corner of our economy. But we also know that we will only realize the promise of AI if we also address the serious risks that it raises today," NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson said.
  (NTIA seeks feedback on risks, rewards of ‘open-weight’ AI models - Federal News Network)
• One of the National Security Agency’s top cyber officials is stepping down this spring. Rob Joyce, NSA's director of cybersecurity, will retire on March 31. Joyce has served at the agency for 34 years, including a stint as the leader of the Tailored Access Operations unit. Since taking over as head of the Cybersecurity Directorate in 2021, Joyce has led the NSA’s efforts to secure defense contractor and critical infrastructure networks. He will be succeeded by David Luber, the deputy director of the Cybersecurity Directorate.
  (National Security Agency announces retirement of cybersecurity director - NSA)
• The Agriculture Department is looking for tech talent to improve its level of service to the public. USDA’s Digital Service and its Office of Customer Experience are partnering to launch a Digital Service Fellows Program. The department is looking for fellows to improve its customer experience, procurement and digital-service delivery. USDA is taking fellowship applications through March 4. Once hired, fellows will start a two-year, full-time tour of service, with the option of serving up to four years. The department is offering jobs in Washington, D.C., as well as remote positions.
  (USDA launches their first digital service fellows program advancing the department’s technology workforce - USDA)
• The United States Central Command is moving toward Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control. The command is currently working on building its zero trust environment, with the goal of sharing this environment across a broader set of partners. While the environment is not operational yet, the command expects to be able to add partners and allies to their environment this year. CENTCOM’s Chief Data Officer Michael Foster said the environment needs to encompass all stakeholders, partners and allies for CJADC2 to be fully effective.
  (CENTCOM moves towards CJADC2 - CDAO)

The post NSA cyber official retiring first appeared on Federal News Network.

Threats to American and allied interests worldwide are rising. Against this backdrop, we see it as only good that members of Congress in both parties are recognizing that responsible and compliance-focused American companies – and the innovation and technology they bring – can support national security goals through best-available, trusted open-source intelligence (OSINT). The use of OSINT, composed of both publicly-available information and commercially-available information, has grown dramatically in the past decade, and has become a key tool in supporting national security missions worldwide.

As executives at Flashpoint, a leading American provider of OSINT to governments and global enterprises, protecting civil liberties and securing our nation are not just features of our business. They are fundamental to our mission.

Working side by side with the public sector, we are able to see daily how our focused commercial intelligence, which is produced and curated by hundreds of professional analysts and technologists, helps drive critical missions in protecting people, property and assets. These partners have been able to better inform decisions that ultimately save lives, solve investigations, uncover terrorist plots, apprehend criminals, thwart fraud, and help direct smart international investment. Our company does this while adhering to core principles of privacy and civil liberties, and that is reflected in a thoughtful, deliberate and compliance-first approach to the collection and dissemination of OSINT.

Accordingly, as Congress evaluates amendments to Section 702, we urge a thoughtful, deliberate and transparent process that acknowledges the critical role that OSINT, and the intelligence analysts that drive OSINT collections, play in upholding our national security.

Our adversaries, of course, have no limits in their efforts to undermine the U.S. through mass data thefts and purchasing and scraping of private data on individual Americans and allies. We see elevating risks based on the activities of advanced state-backed threats from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and networks of proxy actors on every continent, which has led to increased risk and scale of cyber and physical attacks, ranging from ransomware to destructive malware campaigns and threats on critical infrastructure.

It would therefore be devastating to U.S. agencies and our foreign allies not to be able to leverage the data and insight that companies like ours produce responsibly. As a result, while we encourage a nuanced and thoughtful debate around how OSINT can be leveraged in an ethical, privacy-focused way, amendments to Section 702 must not sacrifice the ability of agencies to swiftly and effectively use this data without draconian restrictions.

Fortunately, we need not sacrifice civil liberties and fundamental privacy rights to benefit from the great power and scale of OSINT and commercial intelligence. For example, here at Flashpoint, we take a careful, compliance-first approach to all of our analyst activities, and remain vigilant on how we can support privacy imperatives without sacrificing mission success. These technologies and practices which empower better illumination of hazy threats also empower better protection of civil liberties and privacy. With national security as our shared North Star, we stand ready to support an open, transparent legislative process and engage with government, academia and other stakeholders to arrive at a solution that enlists the full power of American technology while always upholding the standards of American values.

Donald Saelinger is the president of Flashpoint, a U.S.-based risk data and intelligence firm.

Andrew Borene is Flashpoint’s executive director for global security. Based in London, he is a former officer at the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Previously, he has been an associate deputy general counsel at the Pentagon, and he is a Marine Corps veteran.

The post FISA amendments must acknowledge critical role OSINT plays in preserving national security first appeared on Federal News Network.

OMB approved the Personnel Vetting Questionnaire (PVQ) in November, according to the latest quarterly update on the “Trusted Workforce 2.0” initiative from the Performance Accountability Council. The questionnaire consolidates the SF-86, “Questionnaire for National Security,” along with several other vetting questionnaires used for federal jobs, including public trust and non-sensitive positions.

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is now working on plans to integrate the PVQ into the new “eApp” web portal for background investigation applications. The effort is part of DCSA’s development of a new IT system, the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS).

“The PVQ interface in NBIS eApp is still in development, and we anticipate working with the Trusted Workforce executive agents to share a deployment timeline,” a DCSA spokesman told Federal News Network.

The new questionnaire includes several key updates to questions in the SF-86 and other forms. The Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the PVQ, included updates to questions on marijuana use, mental health and several other key areas.

The PVQ includes a separate section on “marijuana and cannabis derivative use,” distinct from questions about other illegal drug use. In its original public notice on the new PVQ, OPM said distinguishing marijuana use from other drugs is “in recognition of changing societal norms.”

Prior reports have shown confusion around past marijuana use policies may be dissuading people from applying for a cleared position.

The PVQ first asks applicants whether they had used marijuana or derivative substance within the last 90 days before asking more detailed questions about their prior history with marijuana.
The SF-86 currently asks applicants about all prior drug use, including marijuana, within the last seven years.

John Berry, a security clearance attorney at Berry and Berry PLLC law firm, said the new PVQ represents a “good faith effort” to reflect how many states have legalized marijuana, even if it remains illegal at the federal level.

Still, use of marijuana by federal employees remains prohibited, while past use is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. And Congress appears unlikely to amend the Controlled Substances Act in the near term.

“So I think that we’re left with liberalizing it,” Berry said on Inside the IC. “And that’s kind of what [OPM] is trying to do. But it’s still there. And I think it’s just going to be an agency-by agency decision. I think [the Defense Department] will be your most standard one, which will probably give you a little bit more leeway on things.”

Meanwhile, intelligence agencies, which typically require a higher level of clearance and a polygraph exam on top of a background investigation, are likely to be less liberal, Berry said.

“Are they really going to say 90 days and you’re good? I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re going to have polygraph, and they’re going to dive into these details, and you’re going to be telling them the same information anyways.”

Mental health updates

The new PVQ also continues an effort to de-stigmatize mental health treatment for individuals with a security clearance. Since 2016, the SF-86 has had more specific questions about hospitalization and specific diagnoses, rather than about all mental health treatment. OPM said the PVQ aims to further reduce stigma by limiting the scope of the questions even further.

For instance, the PVQ limits many of its questions on “psychological and emotional health” to hospitalizations and treatments within the past five years, rather than “have you ever” questions included in the SF-86.

Berry called the narrowing of the mental health questions “helpful.”

“I’ve been handling security clearance cases since 1999, and it used to be back in those days, depression and anxiety could trigger adjudications,” Berry said. “And so I’m just thankful to see that the forms are finally recognizing that nobody here gets out unscathed. There’s . . . a slightly bit more understanding about these health conditions.”

Foreign connections and gender-inclusive terminology

OPM also made changes to questions regarding foreign connections and activities after the Partnership for Public Service commented on the draft PVQ, arguing that many legacy questions in the SF-86 that deal with foreign influence and connections “have not been substantively updated for decades and seem to reflect assumptions about the nature of international communications, education, and business that are no longer accurate.”

For instance, the final PVQ limits questions about an applicant’s foreign contacts to those “with whom they have feelings of affection, a romantic relationship, are bound by social, moral, financial, or legal obligations or with whom they have shared information about themselves that, if known, could be used to influence them to act against the interest of the U.S. government.”

Berry said the changes help address a more interconnected world where people travel, work and study abroad.

“Especially people that have lived abroad or have gone to school abroad, you have a lot of classmates and such, and it can be difficult task to track everything down and make sure you get it right,” Berry said. “So it’s helpful to limit it more than it has been.”

And unlike the SF-86 and other forms, the PVQ doesn’t require the respondent to indicate “Male” or “Female.” OPM and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined the use of gender-inclusive terminology “would not adversely affect personnel vetting processes,” the agency said in its original notice.

The timeline for integrating the new PVQ across agency processes remains unclear — OPM and DCSA did not provide specific answers about when the new PVQ would go live and when the other forms would be sunset.

But Berry said he expects a steady roll out rather than an immediate one.

“Is it going be rolled out all at once? Is it going to be a consistent application of it? Are we going to be using the old forms, in some cases for a year or two? Because then it might get confusing for individuals,” Berry said. “But I doubt it’s going to be like, ‘OK, on April 5, 2024, everyone’s using the new form,’ because it doesn’t work like that.”

The post Goodbye SF-86? OMB approves new ‘Personnel Vetting Questionnaire’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

• There is a new face in charge at another one of the largest U.S. intelligence agencies. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse is now director at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He takes over for retiring Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, who had led DIA since October 2020. Kruse was previously adviser for military affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The change-in-command at DIA took place on Friday, the same day Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh took the reins of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command from Army Gen. Paul Nakasone.
  (Berrier relinquishes command to Kruse at DIA - DIA X account)
• The Postal Service plans to significantly shrink its carbon footprint by the end of the decade. By 2030, USPS expects to cut carbon emissions from fuel and electricity by 40% and reduce emissions from contracted services by 20%. The agency plans to make that happen by rolling out a majority-electric vehicle delivery fleet and consolidating facilities. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said these sustainability goals will give USPS an advantage over its competitors, as it looks to grow its package business. "Through our efforts, the Postal Service be the most sustainable way to mail and ship," DeJoy said.
  (USPS plans to shrink its carbon footprint with majority-electric fleet - Federal News Network)
• House Republicans are once again looking to cut through what they feel is ambiguity surrounding teleworking federal employees. After what they say has been months without enough clarity, leaders on the Oversight and Accountability Committee are turning to the Office of Management and Budget to get information on agencies' telework policies. The lawmakers said OMB should give them access to agencies' workplace environment plans, which detail how many feds are teleworking each day. They also want to know if there has been any resistance from employees when told to return to the office. The lawmakers say getting more data on telework is ultimately a question of agency performance. They gave OMB a deadline of Feb. 14 to respond.
  (Letter to OMB on federal telework - House Oversight and Accountability Committee)
• The Defense Department is laying the groundwork for building a workplace culture accepting of telework and remote work. DoD has a new telework policy and the biggest change is that it now addresses remote work. The document, updated for the first time since 2012, said DoD wants the military services to “actively” promote remote work and telework. It also encourages the component heads to eliminate barriers to telework program execution through education and training. The policy said remote work and telework can be used to recruit employees with specialized skills, retain valuable employees, and increase work-life balance.
  (DoD’s new policy - Federal News Network)
• The State Department is getting a new second in command. The Senate voted to confirm Kurt Campbell as the next deputy secretary of state. Campbell is currently serving as the deputy assistant to the President and coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council. He will take over for Wendy Sherman, who left the State Department last summer. Among his previous jobs, Campbell served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs during the Obama administration. He also served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific affairs during the Clinton administration.
  (Senate Press Gallery - Senate Press Gallery on X)
• The Office of Management and Budget will add a chief customer experience officer to its ranks, if a bipartisan bill keeps advancing through Congress. The Government Service Delivery Improvement Act is heading for a House floor vote, after making it through the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. The bill requires OMB to appoint a senior official whose primary job is to lead governmentwide improvements in customer service. The bill also makes it clear agency that heads are responsible for how well they deliver services to the public.
  (Full committee business meeting - House Oversight and Accountability Committee)
• The Environmental Protection Agency is pulling out all the stops this week to try to recruit younger and more diverse talent. Today, potential job applicants will hear from EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe in a hiring webinar. She will offer information to try to clear up the federal hiring process and detail the many different career paths available at the agency. In the next year, EPA plans to onboard over 1,000 new employees. Many of the positions will involve working on initiatives from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Law.
  ( "Be EPA" recruitment week - Environmental Protection Agency)
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to modernize one of its most widely used forms. FEMA is seeking public comment on its plans to standardize the Homeowner Flood Form. The agency said the new form will provide homeowners with a more personalized, customizable product, along with using simplified language in a more user-friendly format. The form is part of the National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA is seeking comments through April 8.
  (FEMA seeks comment on simplified Homeowner Flood Insurance Form to improve customer experience - FEMA)
• The Army is selecting brigades to experiment with electromagnetic warfare, networks, cyber, small drones and robotics while overseas. Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy George calls it “transforming in contact.” The plan is to adjust network equipment and the number of drones and add electromagnetic capabilities, robotics or next-generation squad weapons inside those formations. The goal of the experiment is to receive feedback on the tech used and get recommendations on capabilities needed at the echelon level. Gen. George said the Army is already sending some equipment to the Central Command, with which to experiment in theater.
  (Army is selecting brigades to test cyber, networks capabilities - AUSA)

The post Intelligence community gets another new leader first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Exactly when new federal employees first get health care coverage may soon change, but just slightly. After becoming eligible for health benefits, new federal employees have 60 days to decide whether they want to enroll in the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) program. But after they make that decision, they have to wait until the next pay period for the coverage to take effect. Now the Office of Personnel Management is proposing to give new feds health benefits a little sooner, by moving up coverage to the pay period in which they first become eligible. The goal is to remove any unintended gaps in coverage. OPM is accepting public comments on its proposal until April 1.
  (FEHB modification of effective date of coverage for employees with an initial opportunity to enroll - Office of Personnel Management)
• The Office of Management and Budget wants to bring the power of AI to privacy impact assessments. With existing privacy risks escalating and new privacy risks emerging, OMB is asking for help to redesign and apply artificial intelligence to privacy impact assessments (PIAs). In a new request for information, OMB, along with the Justice Department, the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy are seeking feedback on how analytical tools and notices to the public would assist agencies in identifying, addressing and mitigating these privacy risks. OMB has not issued major new guidance on PIAs since 2003. Comments on the RFI's 11 questions are due by April 1.
  (OMB seeks feedback on using AI to improve privacy assessments - Federal Register)
• An ex-CIA officer has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for the biggest leak in the agency’s history. Joshua Adam Shulte, 35, was sentenced last week for crimes including espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography. Shulte was a software developer in the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. He was accused of sharing classified information about CIA hacking operations to Wikileaks, leading to the so-called “Vault 7” leaks in 2017.
  (Former CIA officer Joshua Adam Schulte sentenced to 40 Years In prison for espionage and child pornography crimes - DoJ)
• After disappointing results in the first governmentwide Section 508 assessment, the General Services Administration is looking ahead to accessibility improvements. GSA and the U.S. Access Board are refining questions for the 2024 government-wide Section 508 assessment survey. Last year’s first-of-its-kind assessment showed the majority of federal agencies are struggling to meet digital accessibility requirements. But under a new White House memo, agencies are required to make digital accessibility an operational imperative. And GSA has been tasked with working on a range of accessibility initiatives, including new Section 508 training for agency staff.
  (GSA looks ahead to Section 508 improvements after first assessment - Federal News Network)
• It ended two months ago, but lawmakers continue to express concern about Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) 10-month blockade of military nominations. Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) are asking the Government Accountability Office to assess the extent of damage done to national security by Tuberville's hold on military promotions. In a letter to Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, lawmakers want GAO to review how the senator's actions affected military families, as well as the overall impact the hold had on DoD readiness. They are also requesting more information about the processes used by the Defense Department when military promotions are stalled for prolonged periods of time.
  (Lawmakers requesting GAO review of Senator Tuberville’s blockade of military nominations - House Committee on Oversight)
• Right now, there are nearly 117,000 so-called TSP millionaires. It is an all-time record for the Thrift Savings Plan, with accounts totaling more than $1 million. The latest numbers show a 52% increase since this time last year. By comparison, in the early months of 2023, there were just about 77,000 TSP millionaires. TSP millionaires climbed relatively steadily throughout the last year. The TSP board mainly credits the increase to stock-market performance.
  (TSP millionaires report - Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board)
• President Joe Biden will send his fiscal 2025 budget request to Congress on March 11. The Office of Management and Budget confirmed the request will come four days after the State of the Union Address. At the same time, Congress and the White House must still finalize the 2024 budget. The current continuing resolution expires on March 1 for some federal agencies and on March 8 for others. Senate lawmakers marked some progress recently by agreeing to spending allocations for each bill in 2024.
  (Biden to send 2025 request to Congress on March 11 - OMB)
• The Pentagon's ground station system, needed to control its global positioning satellite (GPS) constellation, is facing another delay. The Defense Department's latest operational test-and-evaluation annual report said its troubled Generation Operational Control System is facing a delay of 16 months from the date set in last year's annual report. The Space Force now plans to operationally accept the system in July 2025. Ongoing development delays are impacting navigation warfare functions and the fielding of operationally acceptable M-code capable receivers. The report said these continued delays affect the Pentagon's ability to conduct successful operations due to the lack of access to modernized GPS position, navigation and timing information.
  (Pentagon’s ground station system facing another delay - DoD Operational Test & Evaluation)

The post Ex-CIA officer gets 40-year sentence for agency’s biggest leak first appeared on Federal News Network.

DIA is in the second year of modernizing the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, JWICS. The network connects military bases, intelligence sites and other local networks needing access to top-secret data, covering more than one million users across the world.

DIA Chief Information Officer Doug Cossa said the agency is well underway in making some overdue hardware updates to the network.

“This is replacing a lot of the aged network hardware, things like routers and switches and encryptors, that we rely on for the secure connectivity, and updating those that are critical nodes that make up that web of the JWICS network,” Cossa said on Inside the IC.

Beyond the “technical refresh” work, Cossa said DIA is also building redundancy into the top-secret intelligence network.

“So if and when equipment does fail, we have a second stack of equipment at our core nodes that we can failover to,” he said. “And in many cases more than a second stack. We’ve got full redundancy across all the critical network components. That’s really been our focus over the past year, building that up around all of our functional areas that rely on JWICS.”

Cybersecurity is also a key focus area. Instead of conducting just an initial cyber assessment when agencies want to connect to JWICS, Cossa said DIA has now moved to continuous assessments of existing local networks as part of its “JWICS cyber inspection program.”

DIA conducted “several dozen” inspections over the past year, he said.

“That goes through the full, end-to-end realm of cybersecurity, everything from how user accounts are managed to how hardware is managed in the sense of making sure that technical parameters and guidelines are implemented, and patching is done,” Cossa said.

The cyber inspection program doesn’t just test against the possibility of outside hackers penetrating the JWICS-connected networks. DIA also examines how effectively JWICS users are monitoring against insider threats, too.

Insider threat monitoring has received increased attention after a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman allegedly used his access to top-secret intelligence networks at Joint Base Cape Cod, Mass., to leak secrets on the Discord website.

“It’s definitely increased in terms of priority,” Cossa said of insider threat monitoring in the wake of the Discord leaks. “Insider threats are always a significant requirement of the intelligence community and DoD.”

Defense and intelligence officials see “zero trust” security as a key component of defending against both outsider hackers and insider threats in the future. Two years ago, President Joe Biden directed defense and intelligence agencies to develop a plan for implementing zero trust architectures on classified networks.

Cossa said zero trust brings security to the “next level” by allowing local area networks to determine the “entitlements” each of their individual users should be granted for accessing certain data. Those entitlements will be managed and enforced through metadata standards defined by the intelligence community’s chief data officer and DoD’s chief data and artificial intelligence officer.

Once implemented, Cossa said DIA can assess the extent to which agencies are following those metadata standards as part of the JWICS cyber inspection program.

“Traditionally, we have only looked at, are you cleared to see something? But when it comes down to a ‘need-to-know,’ that really relies on data tagging standards, which is going to take some time to do,” Cossa said. “Many agencies are well underway. But certainly the core of the zero trust pillar for data is the entitlements and getting that implemented. The network gives you access. The network itself doesn’t define how that access actually occurs.”

The post DIA’s cyber assessments, including insider threat defenses, key to modernizing top-secret network first appeared on Federal News Network.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is building on a pilot program to recruit people with autism, as the agency plans to hire a new cohort of “neurodivergent” individuals this year while also embedding those efforts more broadly into its persons with disabilities program.

“Neurodiversity” is an umbrella term that refers to differences in brain functioning. Autism, attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder, and dyslexia are among the most common examples of “neurodivergent” conditions.

Neurodivergent individuals are a growing part of the workforce, with 15-20% of the global population estimated into fall into the category. But they also face high rates of underemployment, according to research cited in a new MITRE white paper, “Enabling Neurodiverse Talent in the Intelligence Community.”

NGA became the first federal agency to launch a neurodiversity pilot in late 2020, with a focus on hiring people with autism. The agency partnered with MITRE and Melwood, a DC-area nonprofit that provides job training and other services to people with disabilities.

The goal of NGA’s pilot was to change how neurodivergent job candidates are recruited, hired and retained for federal positions. Recruits went through a six-month internship and were then offered formal offers of employment.

After the initial pilot in 2021, NGA took a “strategic pause,” according to Jen King, a senior GEOINT analyst at NGA. King also serves as program manager of the neurodiversity program at the agency.

“We wanted to evaluate all the areas that we had experienced during the pilot to determine where we were successful for our new teammates, where we can improve and where we can continue to support individuals in their career,” King said on Inside the IC.

NGA now plans to hire a new cohort of four-to-six neurodivergent individuals later this year, King said. The agency also will fold its neurodiversity hiring efforts into its persons with disabilities program.

The broadening effort at NGA will be called the “Accessing Diversity to Employ Professional Talent,” or “ADEPT,” program.

“We do have a lot of neurodivergent talent and a lot of talent in our pipelines for our people with disabilities program,” King said.

MITRE’s white paper points to research that shows those with autism and other neurodivergent conditions display cognitive and performance traits, such as pattern recognition, that would be particularly useful to intelligence work.

Teresa Thomas, MITRE’s program lead for neurodiverse talent enablement, said some important lessons came out of NGA’s initial pilot program, including how to provide autistic individuals with specific training on what to expect from the security clearance process.

“We had an idea that it was probably very difficult for someone specifically on the autism spectrum to get through all of that, especially a TS/SCI with the polygraph kind of clearance,” Thomas said. “And, yes, it was even more complicated than I thought.”

Melwood also provided training for some of NGA’s polygraphers on potential behavioral differences for people with autism.

“It made a huge difference,” Thomas said. “So that was one of the takeaways, that it’s not impossible. It just takes some real thought for folks to get through.”

King said NGA has also created neurodiversity training for senior executives and supervisors across the agency. The goal is to ensure people understand different neurodivergent conditions and associated behaviors. For instance, some individuals may not engage in eye contact with others.

“We train our hiring managers, we are training our security staff that will be running the background investigations,” King said. “We ensure that everyone is aware that there may be behaviors that are a little bit different, and that’s okay.”

Thomas said NGA’s efforts have been successful because agency officials did not treat its pilot as an isolated program.

“They were really thinking about how do we make NGA a better place overall?” Thomas said. “And then how specifically do we make it a better place for our neurodistinct employees?”

King said many of NGA’s existing employees have come forward since the pilot program to share their own neurodivergent diagnoses. King, who is autistic herself, leads a Neurodiversity Working Group at NGA.

And she said many of the changes that would make workplaces more welcoming to neurodivergent individuals are not seismic shifts in workplace culture or processes.

“The changes don’t have to be huge all at once,” she said. “They can be small, such as ensuring that you’ve got an agenda for a meeting 24 hours in advance, or if there’s certain smells that are overpowering, you can use unscented dry erase markers for your whiteboards. It’s little, small things over time that are going to make that great change.”

The post NGA building on efforts to recruit ‘neurodivergent’ talent first appeared on Federal News Network.