GAO chief: DATA Act has a ‘long way to go’
The head of the Government Accountability Office expressed cautious optimism that the federal government could establish governmentwide financial data standards by May 2015.
“I think that Treasury and OMB and the agencies are off to a good start,” U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told lawmakers during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing Wednesday. He added, “They’re laying the initial framework. There is a long way to go before they’re going to have the standards in place.”
Dodaro was referring to a deadline set by the DATA Act, an attempt to make U.S. federal government’s financial expenditures more transparent. Passed May 9, the legislation requires the White House Office of Management and Budget to work with the Treasury Department to develop the standards by May 2015.
By 2018 under the law, federal agencies must disclose their direct expenditures in a machine-readable format and link federal contract, loan and grant spending information to agency programs. The information would go on USASpending.gov.
Agencies already are supposed to report their spending on USASpending.gov, though Dodaro pointed to previous
GAO research released year that found agencies neglected to report 342 assistance award programs totaling approximately $619 billion. That’s out of the $3.5 trillion that the government spends each year.
During the hearing, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and other House lawmakers pressed witnesses on the importance of adhering to the schedule set by the DATA Act.
David Mader, controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said his agency and Treasury have taken several steps to see the DATA Act through. The two agencies have established of a governmentwide governance structure to guide the effort, developed a DATA Act implementation plan and worked to improve USASpending.gov’s interface, according to Mader’s written testimony.
“We have chartered a very aggressive path toward implementation,” he said.
In the meantime, Dodaro told lawmakers his agency would track every stage of implication and issue a report in 2015 on the program’s status.
“I want to make sure data standards are complete,” he said.
At the end of the hearing, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia warned that the act should be enacted slowly, pointing to the problems with the initial roll out of Healthcare.gov.
“Surely, seeing what it took to get one agency to go online … should caution us to do this very slowly with pilots in the agency first,” she said.
Though, Issa noted that there have been several efforts to help agencies find interoperable systems. “Isn’t the DATA Act a simply roadmap to a transition that has been ordered by people who predate my 14 years in Congress?” Issa asked the panel of witnesses.
“Yes, definitely,” Dodaro said, though he said that there are new features within the act, including provisions for machine-readable data. He added, “Without the legislative underpinning and consistent oversight, this won’t happen.”
Issa said that in the long term, the federal government should invest in making all data – not just financial – available in machine-ready formats.
“The quality of the data that goes in [the National Archives] sadly is for a long time to come going to be paper or digital equivalents of paper,” like PDFs, Issa said.
He added, “We have to also invest in leaving a legacy of deep information that future generations can easily search. Hopefully we’ll use this as a base and continue across the spectrum.”
VanRoekel talks firsthand of Ebola-plagued West Africa
Steven VanRoekel, about two months into his detail as chief innovation officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development and its battle against Ebola, recently spent seven days in Ebola-stricken Liberia. Despite painting a disastrous and bleak picture of a region crippled by the epidemic, VanRoekel did say, in some ways, things were beginning to return to normal.
“A region that was really the shining star of the continent on economic growth, on education — on so many things that were happening here, they’re now seeing stalled,” he said during an Information Technology Industry Council event Wednesday in Washington, D.C. However, while he was there, “they lifted some of the emergency status of the country, some of the curfews were lifted, restaurants were starting to open back up.”
From his technology- and innovation-focused perspective, though, VanRoekel said the region’s response efforts are crippled due to a lacking communications infrastructure.
“The miracle of the Internet is [that it’s] the backbone by which we build all innovation and all connectivity, and it’s just not there” in West Africa, he said. VanRoekel said the region reminds him of his time working with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in India in the late ’90s, one with IT potential waiting to be unlocked.
Before the epidemic hit West Africa, there were improvements being made. However, when Ebola began spreading through the region this summer, the engineers building up the communications network evacuated. “The network has suffered ever since,” he said.
A joint
study from USAID and NetHope found that about 80 percent of Liberia has no cellular service. While in Liberia, VanRoekel used his cellphone in the northern end of the country and “had pretty basic but decent 2G connectivity — I was able to SMS back to my team back in Monrovia,” he said. That type of connectivity, though, tends to follow the road systems and the population, and, even with that, there are large populations without connectivity due to geographical limitations.
USAID workers, and other U.S. responders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Defense Department, are supplied with all of the communications technology they need to effectively track and battle Ebola and treat those who contract it, VanRoekel said. But the focus has in some ways shifted to second-order effects, or as he put it, “thinking about how do we prevent the next Ebola by solving this one in the right ways?” For instance, a lot of VanRoekel’s talks with government officials were about sparking e-government initiatives and “how they could create market demand for communications infrastructure, getting benefit from the populace about being able to connect to their government.”
During his time in Liberia, he said the big success was “getting data harmonized” into a repository hosted by the Liberia Ministry of Health. Now that the data is more meaningful, the job is going to “be about how do we take that as a best practice and scale it to the region, because we don’t have as much visibility in Sierra Leone and Guinea,” VanRoekel told FedScoop.
But plans to improve the health infrastructure long-term are often put secondary to the harsh human realities of the disease. VanRoekel’s described the “incredible” and vivid smell of bleach every where he went, because “you have to wash with bleach water before you can enter” major buildings in the affected areas.
“It’s important to really consider that while technology plays a role, there’s a whole very human role,” he said. Take contact tracing as an example. While the technology behind it provides a powerful picture of the spread of Ebola, if people are afraid to talk about their possible exposure to it, it’s not going to work.
Still, the unprecedented crisis has called for an unprecedented response from the U.S., the former U.S. CIO said, and he thinks we’re succeeding.
“The way the U.S. government has approached this and taken on this challenge of helping Liberia and really now expanding our efforts in the other countries and expanding best practices to those places really is testing new muscle for us,” VanRoekel said. “I think we’re meeting the challenge, but we’re having to be very agile and kind of take that notion with technology.”
In October, VanRoekel delivered a
keynote address at FedTalks 2014 before his travel to Liberia. During his talk, he described his agency’s innovative role in assisting in the Ebola response.
IT reform comes up for vote as part of Defense bill
After nearly two years and several iterations, the bill formerly known as the Federal Information Technology Acquisition and Reform Act is heading to the House floor as part of the 2015 Defense authorization bill.
The bill, which could head to the House as early as Thursday, would add additional authorities for agency chief information officers, effectively codifying the position’s oversight responsibilities for IT management and governance.
According to the text of the bill, every agency chief information officer, except for the Defense Department CIO, would have a significant role in “the decision processes for all annual and multi-year planning, programming, budgeting and executive decisions, related reporting requirements and reports related to information technology.”
Those CIOs would also lead the formulation of their agency’s IT budget and would have the final say on any IT-related contracts, as well as any moving of funds from one IT-related program to another.
Earlier drafts of FITARA included a provision that would limit an agency to one CIO position; however, the version included in the NDAA would allow the CIO of a larger agency to appoint CIOs for smaller agencies. The bill does assert that the duties of a CIO are not delegable, though. An agency CIO could only delegate approval of IT contracts or systems that are classified as nonmajor under the White House Office of Management and Budget’s guidance.
In the case of the Defense Department, the CIO would review and provide recommendations to the Defense secretary on the department’s IT budget request.
Almost none of the CIO’s additional IT authorities will apply to any telecommunications or IT funded under the National Intelligence Program or the Military Intelligence Program, the bill said.
In an effort to more effectively manage the risk of some agency IT investments, the director of OMB would make a list of each major executive branch IT investment publicly available. The information would be updated by agency CIOs semi-annually and would be categorized according to risk.
Then, every agency investment identified as high risk for four consecutive quarters would be reviewed to determine the cause of the risk or if that risk can be mitigated. If the high-risk status remained a year later, the director of OMB would be required to deny any request for additional development funding until the CIO of the agency determines the cause of the risk and establishes a plan to address it.
The provisions of the FITARA portion in the NDAA also would provide for the establishment of an annual IT portfolio review at the agency level that looks for ways to consolidate IT systems and eliminate duplicative IT investments. Agencies would be required to align the portfolios with a multiyear strategy to cut IT costs.
At the Defense Department, the portfolio management requirement would only apply to business systems within the department’s IT systems. The bill would exempt national security systems from the annual review and multiyear plan.
In another attempt to cut down on costs of IT, the bill also would codify OMB’s 2010 Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative. The head of each agency, with the help from the CIO, would be required to submit a comprehensive inventory of the agency’s data centers to OMB. Like the IT portfolios, agencies would be required to align data center consolidation with a multiyear strategy “by which the quantitative and qualitative progress of the agency toward the goals of the FDCCI can be measured.”
The Government Accountability Office would evaluate agency progress in data center consolidation annually. Any cloud-related consolidation efforts would need to comply with Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, and National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines, the bill said. The director of national intelligence or the Defense Secretary would retain the authority to waive applicability of the FDCCI to any system related to national security; however, the agency must submit its reasoning to Congress.
The bill also would call for the establishment and expansion of an agency IT acquisition cadre, which involves the development of personnel assigned to IT acquisitions through a specialized Office of Personnel Management-designated career path.
In addition, the bill would mandate that the General Services Administration develop a strategic sourcing initiative to enhance acquisition governmentwide. This initiative could allow software licenses to be shared across agencies.
The original version of FITARA was released in early 2013. It was penned by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and co-authored by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. In an Oversight Committee hearing Wednesday morning, Connolly commended Issa for his service as the panel’s chairman and on the inclusion of FITARA in the NDAA.
“I just want to congratulate you today on the news that the FITARA legislation is in fact headed for passage both in the Senate and in the House,” Connolly said. “It was an honor collaborating with you on such an important topic, and it’s a great way to cap your career as chairman of this committee.”
Could microsatellites be the future of civil Earth observations?
Over the last two years, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has made gathering visible and invisible information about the Earth a priority. Now, the office is looking for a way to capture that data from the sky for less.
In the Federal Register Monday, OSTP posted a request for information about the use of microsatellites — smaller, lighter, more inexpensive satellites — to collect observations from space. The office asked for input on the current and near-term state of microsatellite technology and whether microsatellite systems could be capable of meeting current and future civil Earth observation needs.
“Satellite platforms can be costly, and technology improvements are implemented on lengthy timeframes,” the RFI said. “As microsatellite technology improves, the cost of collecting sustained and scientific observations from space may decrease, not only reducing costs for current observations, but potentially enabling additional missions.”
According to Rich Leshner, the director of government affairs for Planet Labs, a company devoted to the development and deployment of microsatellite technology, the existence of OSTP’s RFI implies that small satellites can do quality data collection at a lower cost.
“I think what OSTP is appropriately trying to learn here is to really get a sense of the breadth of those capabilities,” Leshner said. “While it might be worded in such a way as to ask about feasibility, I think there’s really an appreciation for the feasibility that’s already been proven.”
Leshner said the agency might be most interested in whether the devices can provide data on weather, health, environment and other so-called societal benefit areas. He said they can.
“It would probably come from a mix of different satellites and different constellations with different sensors across them,” Leshner said. “Collectively, the American industry that is working on these problems is going to be able to tackle these challenges for sure.”
According to the RFI, the public input provided to OSTP will inform the agency about the “state of technologies associated with microsatellites to meet the nation’s civil Earth observational requirements.”
Yet, Leshner said, only some microsatellite technology could directly benefit civil Earth observation technology right away; however, the more sensitive and specific data collection methods could be achievable in the near future.
“I think there are some things that could happen relatively quickly and then some things that would take longer and what that depends on is the degree to which certain things might require slightly more sensitive instrumentation, which would require a little more time for development and planning and integration into slightly smaller platforms,” Leshner said. “Certainly some of those things can be done very, very soon.”
The RFI builds on the plan the agency released in July, which established the role the federal government would play in the observations. Last month, OSTP brought its work in Earth observatons to the international stage at the Multinational Group on Earth Observations meeting in Geneva.
Although the use of microsatellites explicitly for civil Earth observations could be new, the use of the systems are not. In 2006, the Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment, which examined the effect of atmospheric drag on spacecraft, employed the use of two spherical microsatellites designed by the Defense Department’s Naval Research Laboratory. The Pentagon has also expressed interest in using the systems for large-scale surveillance; however, the establishment of such a robust system could take more than a decade.
The increased focus on civil Earth observations in the federal government is slow-going as well. In fact, in the Office of Management and Budget’s fiscal year 2016 guidance, the agency called on interagency coordination to ensure that all areas of Earth observation are covered and aligned with the national plan.
Planet Labs hasn’t decided whether it will weigh in on OSTP’s RFI, but Leshner said the benefits of using microsatellites for Earth observation data collection outweigh the costs.
“With advances in so many other areas of technology really pushing boundaries, small spacecraft are now getting to a place where they can utilize a lot of those other advances and take advantage of them and apply them to space in such a way to drive significant improvements for cost and performance,” Leshner said.
He added, “It’s all about creating innovation in a small platform, rapidly innovating in that small platform and using the combination of those kinds of innovations to drive down costs, and as a result, enable new missions.”
OSTP did not respond to FedScoop’s requests for comment on the RFI by publication.
FDA official to innovators: be ‘charmingly persistent’
For the Food and Drug Administration, it can be challenging to find, procure and deploy the right technologies, a senior agency official said. So for innovators and members of private industry looking to showcase what they have to offer, Joe Klosky, senior technical adviser at the agency, has some advice: be “charmingly persistent.”
“Honestly, the most efficient way is to approach us at these conferences,” Klosky told FedScoop after serving on a panel during AFCEA Bethesda’s HealthIT Day Tuesday. “We’re here today to do outreach. The least efficient way is to call.”
He added, “You get a thousand calls … You can’t take every call, unfortunately.”
During the panel, Klosky and several other representatives of the federal IT sector discussed the unique challenges of protecting health data and how private industry could help them better reach their goals.
Steven Schliesman, assistant deputy chief information officer for IT project management and product development at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said software developers should make sure products purchased by the federal government meet its security requirements.
“I get the shrink-wrapped software, I get ready to deploy it, I go through security scans and it fails because of all the compliance issues cross-tier,” Schliesman said.
So then he has to return to the developer to make the correction.
“That’s not a business model that the federal government can sustain,” he said. “That’s not a business model that I think you want to be in.”
During the daylong conference, several federal IT heavyweights spoke about their health IT challenges and successes.
Indeed, Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, FDA’s chief health informatics officer, touted the success of OpenFDA, a platform through which developers and researchers can tap into FDA data using an API. About 18,000 devices accessed OpenFDA in the first three months after it was deployed in June, he said during his video keynote address.
Kass-Hout also discussed other possibilities for big data. He said the FDA has been working on a microbe whole-genome sequencing project as a way to target the appearance of pathogens, like salmonella or listeria, in foods and issue recalls earlier.
According to a report from FDA, this work helped agency investigators match a strain of listeria at a food processing facility to samples provided by three patients who fell ill after eating quesito casero.
“From three cases, we are able to identify this problem and be able to geocode where that problem originated from,” he said. “That’s the beauty of how data science and collaboration is able to provide a social good.”
CDC testing big data defense against Ebola
The Ebola epidemic may no longer have the media attention it did months back, but the virus continues to wreak havoc in West Africa. And to mitigate the risk of another spread to the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is using big data to track migrant populations traveling from affected areas across U.S. borders.
For the past four years, CDC has been piloting BioMosaic, a tool that merges health, population and movement data to predict the spread of disease. The agency has used BioMosaic to track several other epidemics for forecasting, testing, targeting, intervention and surveillance, Marty Cetron, director of CDC’s Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, said during a public discussion in Philadelphia Tuesday. But Ebola, particularly because of its geopolitical significance, fits remarkably well with the tool, Cetron said.
“We have the near real-time availability of the global air transportation network, and we’re able to identify, and in a sense target, the risk populations, the diaspora populations from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, where they’re distributed down from the county-and-below levels, so we have a mosaic map of the U.S., and in some cases with other countries’ data,” he said.
CDC layers many data sets atop one another to create “this mosaic map of the diaspora population both on the move and statically in terms of the resident population,” Cetron said. The data comes from typical sources — International Air Transport Association flight data, Department of Homeland Security logs from passports checked at borders — but BioMosaic takes much more into account than just human movement.
“There are a number of big data sets that we access and aggregate, the common feature is that all of them are geo-coded,” Cetron said. “So we bring in weather data, climate data, we bring in global distribution of poultry, we bring in distribution of swine populations, vector disease incidents from [the World Health Organization] and other sets, and pull all these things together and then put them in a way that they can be easily visualized or queried.”
It’s no vaccine and doesn’t physically stop the spread of the disease, but BioMosaic plays a critical role in tracking the about 150 people leaving the affected countries for U.S. ports each day. CDC now funnels those potentially at-risk travelers into the five airports most frequented from those countries, which makes it easier to screen for health ailments on entry before they move on to other states. Officials then track them during the critical 21-day incubation period.
Critics of the initial U.S. response to Ebola expressed the idea of a travel ban to the stricken African countries rather than monitoring and managing their migrants’ movement. That likely would’ve undermined BioMosaic’s efforts, Cetron said.
“If you choke the epidemic, not only will you restrict movement of the humanitarian response in and out of the region, which is so critical to control it, you also are likely to drive an economic collapse of these three countries, which could cause a refugee crisis and a mass migration across borders,” he said. “When you drive these full-scale travel bans, you drive all of the human nature of movement underground, people will cross land borders into other countries, find circuitous ways to travel, and we will have lost our ability to assess the risk, to educate, to intervene and to monitor. Diseases don’t have borders.”
Collecting so much data — often personal in nature — about a stigmatizing disease mostly affecting one region of the world is a sensitive issue. It’s critical to protect the privacy of those involved.
“Epidemics of disease are frequently followed and complicated by epidemics of fear and epidemics of stigma,” Cetron said. “It’s a gruesome and merciless diseases; the fear is understandable.”
But Cetron said CDC takes great care of personally identifiable information and uses algorithms to blur identifying elements. For Ebola specifically, he said, CDC has a team whose only job is to look for issues of stigma and overcome them.
For CDC, Cetron said, privacy “goes hand in hand” with data collection and its fight against Ebola.
New law clarifies agency staffers’ use of personal email
President Barack Obama signed a bill before the Thanksgiving holiday that requires agency employees who use a nonagency electronic messaging system for official business to forward copies of the correspondence to their official accounts.
That provision in the legislation, H.R. 1233, was added during a March 2013 mark up, a staffer from the bill sponsor’s office said on background, after news came out that former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used a secondary EPA email account with the alias “Richard Windsor” for official business. It codifies a guidance the National Archives and Records Administration issued last year that made the same recommendation.
The law makes several other updates to existing federal data rules. For one, it amends the Federal Records Act to clearly include electronic records. It’s the first update to the definition set by the 1950 act, which established the framework for records management in federal agencies.
The legislation also confirms that federal electronic records would transfer to the National Archives in electronic form, grants the archivist of the United States final determination as to what constitutes a federal record, and allows the early transfer of permanent electronic federal and presidential records to the National Archives.
In a statement, Archivist of the United States David Ferriero commended lawmakers for “shining a spotlight on the challenges that so many federal agencies and presidential administrations have faced in managing their electronic records.”
A NARA spokeswoman said in an email that the agency will also be taking a close look at the new law, reviewing current regulations and revising accordingly.
How to boost credit card security? Kantara’s Brennan weighs in
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct Joni Brennan’s name.
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, Americans are pulling out their credit or debit cards to buy presents and gifts for loved ones. However, a slate of recent high profile cybersecurity breaches at retailers is casting a bit of a dark shadow over the holiday cheer this year. People rightly worry if using their credit cards in person at stores or when shopping online will expose their personal or financial information to hackers. Nobody wants to have his or her money or identity stolen, yet credit cards are still the most convenient way to pay for goods at stores and one of the only ways to order things online.
To beef up the security of credit cards, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that laid the groundwork for applying new technologies, like having an internal chip applied to the cards. One of the nonprofit groups that is currently vetting and setting up those new security standards is the Kantara Initiative. Working as part of the U.S. National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, Kantara’s role is to certify security for the digital network and bring the U.S. consumer debit and credit card security more in line with the rest of the world.
We took a few moments to talk with Kantara Executive Director Joni Brennan about working on the front lines of credit card security, and how the government effort is working to improve the safety and reliability of credit and debit card transactions.
John Breeden II: Can you tell us how the Kantara Initiative was formed and where it fits into the government’s attempts to tighten security?
Joni Brennan: The Kantara Initiative was formed in 2009 as a nonprofit 501(c)(6) organization. Key digital identity stakeholders formed it as a vehicle to connect business, government, and research and education communities through more trustworthy identity services. The Kantara Initiative Board of Trustees represents a diverse set of leaders, including ForgeRock, Experian, CA Technologies, the Internet Society, NRI and Radiant Logic.
The Kantara Initiative operates as the premier U.S. government trust framework provider for the Federal Identity and Credential Access Management program of the General Services Administration. A trust framework provider develops rules, tools and technology profiles for adoption by communities as a means to verify trust in identity and service providers. The Kantara Initiative’s program has verified identity services offered by industry leaders, including Experian, Symantec, Verizon and ID.me.
JBII: Does the Kantara Initiative look at all aspects of security or just specific ones?
JB: The Kantara Initiative explicitly focuses on digital identity and its intersection with security and privacy practices. That said, our new areas of focus for innovation are centered around identity relationships between people, entities and things as part of the connected life that the Internet of Things (IoT) will enable.
JBII: Why is the group called the Kantara Initiative?
JB: Kantara has roots in the Arabic word meaning to bridge as well as in the Swahili word meaning harmony. The organization was founded with a vision of bringing together varying stakeholders to work to harmonize approaches to digital identity standardization. The goal was not to create one solution but rather to create bridges that enable connections between partners and markets, businesses and consumers, and governments and citizens.
JBII: Looking at debit and credit cards specifically, what is the presidential initiative that is driving the change and what does it call for?
JB: The executive order discusses debit cards and implementation of chip and PIN technology. Chip and PIN technology is not new. In fact, it is the standard in most parts of the world. The executive order seeks to bring the U.S. consumer debit card experience and security more in line with the rest of the world. While debit cards are one part of a transaction-based ecosystem, digital identity is another part. The executive order also references the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. The executive order may be responding to the many consumer personal data and monetary breaches that we have seen in the news. These breaches lower user trust in Internet and technology services. The NSTIC aims to help create an ecosystem of trust for digital identity issuance, acceptance and general use that would enable better protection for security and personal privacy, as well as a more intuitive user experience with usernames and passwords than what exists today. The Kantara Initiative programs are aligned not only with the U.S. NSTIC but also with other national strategies from around the world. This is an area where the Kantara Initiative seeks an innovative solution for borderless digital identity experiences.
JBII: Would the addition of the chip to credit cards do anything to protect online purchases?
JB: Potentially. Our digital and physical worlds are more and more connected. Bringing better security practice to any part of the ecosystem will help improve the ecosystem as a whole and raise the collective bar for all participants in the market, creating a more predictable and trustworthy environment. This delicate trust and seamless predictability is the foundation for innovation and consumer engagement.
JBII: What are some of the steps that will drive the digital identity infrastructure to mature more rapidly, with a focus on security and authentication, that can move us beyond the era of user IDs and passwords?
JB: I suggest that the presidential executive order is actually providing a step in this direction. Governments can provide leadership and take initiative to implement the type of solutions that advance the market. The last section of the executive order calls for agencies to develop a plan to be delivered in 90 days to move U.S. government agencies forward, beyond user IDs and passwords. The agencies will have 18 months to implement the order. Raising the bar beyond user IDs and passwords for government-agency-to-citizen interaction will raise the bar for vendors as well. The order will help set a target that can be an incentive and serve as proof of concept well beyond government use cases.
In addition, providing businesses with more incentives to see identity as an opportunity rather than as a technical problem helps to drive innovation. The simple fact is that innovating your identity service and strategy is and will be more and more of a key market differentiator. Businesses that do identity well will have a better and more engaged relationship with their customers, and that leads to better loyalty and more opportunities. Shifting our collective mindsets from challenges to opportunities will bring more partners to the table.
FAA to upgrade contingency systems after Chicago blaze
An internal review of the Federal Aviation Administration’s response to the fire that destroyed critical telecommunications equipment at Chicago Center’s air traffic control hub in September calls on the FAA to improve its contingency systems and make upgrades that can help the agency get critical systems back online faster.
The report, released last week, stems from an incident in September when an air traffic control center employee set fire to a critical part of the Chicago Center air traffic control hub, leading to flight delays and cancellations throughout the Midwest. As part of their recommendations, the FAA’s Office of Security and Hazardous Materials Safety and the Air Traffic Organization established a process to help the agency respond to, and avoid, other potential security incidents through the establishment of more technology systems to allow air traffic to achieve 90 percent normal operations within 24 hours of a major event like the Chicago Center fire.
The report called on the agency to improve its telecommunication and automation systems so radars, voice radios, flight planning data, weather and other aeronautical information are more available if a switch to a contingency system is required. The improvement will speed up responses to incidents; however, air traffic control facilities would still be limited in operational flexibility while operating on a temporary basis. According to the report, current contingency systems are not sustainable beyond a few weeks.
And even if contingency systems are sustainable for a few weeks, it takes several days to switch operations over to a contingency plan, the report said. However, through the upgrade of telecommunication and automation systems, within 12 months, the FAA can reduce that operation switch delay from days to hours.
“Current infrastructure can be reconfigured to adapt in emergency situations, but the time it takes is measured in days, when today’s system demands that it be measured in hours,” the report said.
In addition to making contingency systems more rapidly deployable, the report called on the FAA to provide more options to reconfigure airspace in the event of a problem that could put one or more facilities out of service. Improvements in the system and acceleration of the roll out of planned technology will could increase a contingency facility’s ability to sustain operations for several months instead of weeks. The new airspace reconfigurations will be made through the re-creation of the sectors and services from the offline facility and maintained by controllers who will travel to surrounding facilities to aid in the integration of the contingency plan.
The new technology, which involves automation of flight data distribution and interfacility hand offs, will couple with acceleration of the national airspace’s voice system, which expand systemwide information management for internal weather and flight data distribution. The FAA plans to have the upgrades in place by 2018.
“This capability will significantly increase the potential to restore a much wider range of sustained disruptions, while maintaining an extremely high operational efficiency rate,” the report said.
Although the establishment of new contingency plans and the modification of existing ones fall outside the realm of technologies that will be established under the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, the report said that the new air traffic control system, due to be in place by 2020, would build on the enhancements planned for contingency operations and provide airspace flexibility.
“This incident in Chicago is a stark reminder of the reasons the FAA is working toward an even more robust and scalable system,” the report said. “The FAA is examining how to best utilize NextGen capabilities to meet resiliency, contingency and continuity needs so that services could be made available quickly if capabilities are lost.”
In response to the Chicago Center incident, teams of workers worked around the clock for 17 days “to completely rebuild and replace the destroyed communications equipment,” the report said. All in all, more than 20 racks of equipment, 835 telecommunications circuits and more than 10 miles of cable were installed.
“We hope to never see an event like this again,” FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said in a release. “But, we must be prepared. The capabilities delivered through NextGen will allow us to maintain the highest levels of safety and restore normal operations quickly as a result of a major event like the one at Chicago Center.”
Exclusive: Carter to get Defense secretary, but Work will lead the post-war transformation
Editor’s Note: This story was updated Dec. 2 to reflect breaking news of President Obama’s decision to nominate Ashton Carter to be the next secretary of Defense.
News trickled out of the White House and Capitol Hill Tuesday morning that President Obama plans to nominate former Pentagon official Ashton Carter to replace Chuck Hagel as Defense secretary. But Carter’s confirmation is unlikely to have an impact on the Defense Innovation Initiative or the third offset strategy — both of which are being led by Robert Work, the No. 2 official at the Pentagon and an enterprise visionary who’s played a key role in the military’s postwar transition strategies.
Although Work has only been in the No. 2 position at the Pentagon for six months, the former undersecretary of the Navy has championed a vision for a Defense Department that is more technologically agile and globally engaged beyond the Gordian knot that is Middle Eastern tribal hatreds. FedScoop recently got the opportunity to question Work about his vision for maintaining the U.S. military’s battlefield advantage. And that vision is centered squarely in the ongoing rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region and the growing importance of cyberspace to military operations.
“As a Pacific nation, the United States has long-standing commitments and ties in the Asia-Pacific region. And we face an increasingly complex security environment in this part of the world, with challenges that include the rise of new powers, growing North Korean ballistic missile capabilities, maritime disputes and widespread natural disasters,” Work said. “The Asia-Pacific is a region of ever-increasing importance and a growing focus for the entire U.S. government, as reflected in the president’s strategy of rebalancing our political, economic, and military engagements in the region. The Department of Defense has committed to ensuring our finest and newest capabilities will go to the Asia-Pacific region first,” he said referring specifically to capabilities like the new F-35s, tilt rotor Ospreys, Littoral Combat Ship and the TPY-2 missile defense radar.
“We’ve also taken steps to enhance our defense posture through rebalancing our air and naval assets toward the Pacific and adding new rotational deployments to Australia, Singapore and the Philippines,” Work told Fedscoop. “I recently traveled to the region in August and can personally attest that we are very much welcome as a resident Pacific power, and we intend to remain one. As the department continues to develop innovative technologies and new concepts of operation, we are continuously working to ensure these capabilities are suited to address the full change of challenges we face in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Those new technologies and operational concepts are the central focus of the Pentagon’s third major offset strategy, which Work is spearheading at the request of Hagel. At the heart of that strategy is the Defense Innovation Initiative, a high-tech re-tooling effort unveiled Nov. 15 to ensure U.S. forces can maintain their technological superiority against China, Russia and other potential adversaries who have been investing heavily in capabilities specifically designed to counter areas where the U.S. currently dominates. The ink on Hagel’s innovation memorandum was barely dry when Work began to take the message public.
“We’ve ridden the Cold War strategy of fielding conventional forces with the ability to hit anything they aim at to the point where potential adversaries are now beginning to develop similar capabilities to match U.S. forces,” Work said, speaking Nov. 19 at a defense industry conference in Washington, D.C. “The whole idea of the third offset is how do you get your head around that? It is an operational problem that is central to our ability to project power. Part of the third offset will be to try to identify the key technologies that we think will give us a particular operational advantage. DOD will need to be able to operate at greater range, and with more stealth. And will have to be able to defend against the emerging targeting capabilities of adversaries,” he said.
But Work acknowledged there will be difficulties and challenges associated with the new offset strategy that previous strategies did not have to worry about. From the space race of the 1960s through the stealth and microelectronics revolutions of the 1970s and the large-scale systems engineering of the 1980s, the U.S. military had few, if any, peer competitors to worry about. The current offset strategy, however, forces the Pentagon to pursue innovations and technologies that can be easily replicated quickly around the world. “One of the things we’re looking for is demonstrations, as well as prototyping for rapid fielding to avoid losing ground to near-peer competitors,” Work said in November. “Maybe … it’s biotechnology, maybe it’s robotics. Maybe it is doing very small systems that we can generate distributed effects at scale. We are also reinvigorating war gaming, which has really, really gone down over the last 12 years.”
The Pentagon will be looking to the private sector for most of the game-changing technological breakthroughs. And while the conceptual framework and the specific research and development programs are still in their infancy, Work acknowledged to Fedscoop that cyberspace and cyberforce development remain common threads throughout.
“We are deployed across the world and continue to address a range of contingencies and unpredictable crises,” said Work. “That means we must face the rise of new technologies, national powers and nonstate actors; sophisticated, deadly and often asymmetric emerging threats ranging from cyberattacks to transnational criminal networks; as well as persistent, volatile threats we have faced for years.”
In the 1990s, the U.S. military enjoyed conventional dominance across the spectrum of conflict, Work said. “Our global command and control network was not under the threat of cyber attack. Our space assets, which provided us with global command and control and the ability to set up theater-guided munition battle networks, weren’t threatened. We enjoyed freedom of access on land, in the air, and on the seas.” But that dominance is no longer guaranteed, said Work. “Today, our potential challengers are investing heavily in capabilities and weapons that challenge us in all of the domains. That puts our space assets at risk and our global command and control system at risk also,” he said. “So, our technological dominance is no longer assured. The department must sustain and expand our advantages as we deal with limited resources. The innovation initiative is a departmentwide effort to identify and invest in innovative ways to sustain and advance our military dominance for the 21st century. Cyber is an important part of that.”