This Week in Government Tech Media – July 19, 2024

Welcome to “This Week in Government Tech Media,” a weekly blog in which we’ll take a quick look at the stories generating the most buzz among media leaders covering the government IT space.

The end of this week saw a massive global IT outage, which affected government agencies along with many other organizations. We’re seeing coverage of the incident in the mainstream media and federal government trade publications and expect to see more as the reverberations of the situation continue to be felt. Stay tuned for more information as things develop.

Beyond that, here are the stories generating the most buzz this week:

AI

Not surprisingly, leading government media outlets are focused on all things AI. Specifically, generative AI continues to capture headlines, with Edward Graham of Nextgov/FCW reporting on comments by the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Radha Plumb on a new task force to “help us understand what the guidelines and guardrails we need to put in place [are] as we begin testing and using generative AI.” In Washington Technology, Graham also reported that the Department of Homeland Security is using generative AI to train officers in conducting interviews with those seeking refugee status in the U.S., embracing inconsistencies in the technology to better simulate real-world situations.

Meanwhile on the state/local government side, Chris Teale of Route 50 reports that an overwhelming majority of public sector employees don’t even understand what generative AI is. According to a recent survey, “just 37 percent of the public sector workforce understands generative AI well or completely.” On a somewhat more positive note, StateScoop’s Keely Quinlan finds that state and local governments are already embracing generative AI for cybersecurity.

In the area of AI applications for space agencies, Zhenping Li of ASRC Federal contributed an article to SpaceNews on how AI is improving the performance of NOAA weather satellites.

CJADC2

Recent comments by the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Plumb related to the department’s Combined Joint All Domain-Command and Control (CJADC2), its initiative to connecting military forces across operational domains, were covered by multiple outlets. Courtney Albon of Defense News writes that Plumb announced DOD is looking to expand industry support of CJADC2 by creating a new process through which companies can propose solutions and DOD can evaluate them. Plumb’s comments on CJADC2 were also covered in ExecutiveGov and Breaking Defense. Meanwhile, Lee Ferran and Carley Welch of Breaking Defense noted that the DOD Inspector General launched an investigation of CJADC2 to assess “the effectiveness with which the DoD developed and implemented the [CJADC2] line of effort to modernize mission partner information sharing.”

Cybersecurity

Matt Bracken of FedScoop reports that the Treasury Department this week issued cybersecurity guidance for financial institutions, including “a roadmap for comprehensive or hybrid cloud adoption, best practices for third-party risks tied to cloud service providers, an assessment of existing oversight authorities for cloud providers, and strengthened transparency and monitoring of cloud services for security by design practices.” Natalie Alms of Nextgov/FCW was on the story as well.

In other cyber news, FedScoop’s Rebecca Heilweil writes about Cellebrite, a cyber company that just established a federal solutions business unit following the company’s reported role in helping the FBI break into the phone of the man who shot former president Donald Trump.

Our team at W2 Communications will continue to keep our eyes on trends in media coverage in the world of government tech and report to you each week at this time on what we’re seeing. Stay tuned for more from “This Week in Government Tech Media.”