I’m back with the latest edition of “This Week in Government Tech Media,” a weekly blog in which we take a quick look at the stories generating the most buzz among media covering the government IT space. This week, we look at reports on election security and news on Department of Defense (DOD) cloud programs.
Election Security
Many federal tech-focused publications reported on new developments related to election security this week. Early this week, John Curran of MeriTalk posted a story on comments by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to the American Bar Association in which she raised warnings about bad actors using AI to create “new avenues to misinform and threaten voters through deepfakes that contain altered video or cloned audio.”
In other election security news, Washington Technology published Alexandra Kelley’s article on a pledge by 19 leading tech firms such as X, Google, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft and McAfee to monitor their online platforms for AI-augmented content related to the forthcoming 2024 presidential elections. Another (hopefully) positive development was reported this week by David DiMolfetta of Nextgov/FCW: At the Black Hat conference, Jen Easterly, director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told attendees that China’s Volt Typhoon hacking group has shown no indications of being able to access core election infrastructure deemed essential for voting.
As a side note, check out an interview with DiMolfetta for Washington Technology’s WT 360 podcast in which he discusses the recent Crowdstrike outage.
Focus on DOD
Lots of action on the Defense Department front this week. In MeriTalk, Cate Burgan reported on the DOD’s announcement that it has awarded $969 million in task orders on its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) cloud services contract vehicle and currently has 75 orders in process for award. Burgan noted that JWCC is a key element of the department’s push for digital modernization and a critical enabler for the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) project to connect the platforms, sensors and data streams for warfighters.
In other Defense cloud news, Grace Dille of MeriTalk shared comments from George Lamb, director of cloud and software modernization in the DOD’s Office of the CIO, about the department’s forthcoming multi-cloud strategy. “Lamb said he expects the strategy to be released to the public in the next ‘four to six months,’” Dille wrote. Also, Lauren Williams of Defense One revealed that the Pentagon is updating its Stratus private cloud offerings to provide better data access in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
The news keeps coming, and I’ll be back next week for another update on the trending news in the federal tech space.