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BREAKING: Bajinder Paul to become FTC CIO

paulpic Bajinder Paul will leave GSA after 2.5 years to become FTC’s new CIO.

Bajinder Paul, deputy associate administrator of citizen services and innovative technologies at the General Services Administration, is soon leaving the agency, a GSA official with knowledge of the situation told FedScoop.

Paul will take over as chief information officer at the Federal Trade Commission, replacing Jeff Huskey, who stepped down in March. Paul’s last day at GSA will be this Friday, according to a senior official at FTC.

Paul is no stranger to the government CIO role, having served as CIO at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency for four years and as acting CIO and deputy CIO of IT operations at the Housing and Urban Development Department.

He has also held major IT management positions at the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

100 years later, the Constitution app

One of the oldest documents in U.S. history is being modernized.

As the U.S. Constitution on Tuesday turned 226 years old, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office launched a new app and Web publication.

The app makes “Constitution Annotated” — an analysis and interpretation of constitutional case law by library experts — available on mobile devices and computers for free. Anyone researching the Constitution can now easily locate particular topics or court cases on federal or state laws.

The Constitution Annotated was published in 1913 and has been reissued every 10 years with an updated interpretation of judicial cases and issues. Nearly 3,000 pages of complicated analysis is now available on the app, which also provides more frequent updates to the content.

“The United States has the world’s oldest constitution, written over 225 years ago,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., chairman of the Senate rules and administration committee. “The Constitution Annotated app will enable people across America to gain up-to-date, state-of-the-art access to one of the world’s greatest legal documents.”

The new app allows users to browse section by section, and sift through the massive amount of analysis as well as a function allowing users to search all text.

The site can also be accessed on GPO’s Federal Digital System, FDsys, and opened as a searchable PDF.

A potential roadmap to avoid capability deterioration

Without a more strategic approach to managing its purchasing priorities, the U.S. military could lose critical capabilities and face exorbitant costs to regain them in the long term, according to a new study.

Since World War II, the U.S. has generally been able to assume its military capabilities would simply be there. But with declining budgets, sequestration and the drawdown overseas, “it’s not clear that assumption is going to hold in the future,” said Barry Watts, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and author of the study.

Before it’s too late, the Defense Department should attempt to define the core competencies of both itself and the defense industrial base, and focus its budget priorities there “rather than starting with what to reduce or cut for the current budget cycle,” said Watts, who was head of DOD’s Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation from 2001 to 2002.

2013_09_3881222279_7f56345b77_z The Lockheed Martin F-35 is an example of the cutting-edge capabilities in the defense industrial base. (Photo/DOD)

It’s not as if DOD hasn’t tried. But efforts in the last decade have mostly sputtered out, according to Watts. Because of rapid contractor consolidation and disagreements between the services, it’s hard to settle on a concise core competency list for both DOD and the defense industrial base. Watts was at DOD in 2001 when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked for a strategic review of military capabilities.

“We got absolutely nowhere,” Watts said. “Lists like this are very controversial.”

Several years ago, Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy within DOD tried to do a sector-by-sector, tier-by-tier breakdown of all the services. It hasn’t been finished, Watts said.

“Because the Pentagon has not been able to get down to lists like these and really saying what we thing going forward is important, it just generates a lot of uncertainty in the minds of people in the industry,” Watts said.

So Watts, over three months of arguing with colleagues, set down six core competencies each for DOD and the defense industrial base, or DIB.

For DOD:

  1. Global nonnuclear precision strike
  2. Flexible, effective nuclear forces
  3. Capability to protect and sustain combined-arms campaigns at the operational level of war
  4. Access to freedom of action in the global commons — at sea, in orbital space and in the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes cyber
  5. The cryptologic enterprise
  6. Realistic combat training

For DIB:

  1. Precision weapons, strike and defense missiles
  2. Low-signature platforms such as stealthy air vehicles, manned and unmanned
  3. Global intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR (ie. satellites, GPS)
  4. Integrated battle networks that marry ISR with robust command
  5. Electromagnetic spectrum (ie. network attacks, network defense, cryptologic skills)
  6. Large-scale system and network architecture integration

Of course, Watts said, all come with the caveat that knowing which of these supply chain elements require special attention would require a more detailed mapping of DIB only the Pentagon could provide.

Cyber, in particular, is “hard to talk about,” Watts said. Even with the copious leaks, “it’s too classified” to make useful recommendations.

But absent this core competency thought process, DOD might find itself without the necessary design and production capabilities to meet combat requirements in coming years. If that happens and the U.S. is in a pinch, there aren’t many other advanced military producers on par with the U.S.

“Who are we going to go to? China? Russia? We just don’t really have anywhere to go,” Watts said.

FedWire: Inventor conference, asteroid challenge and clean tech

2013_04_fedwire2001FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.

NASA highlights Asteroid Grand Challenge.

Centcom program bridges scientific and tech gaps.

Accelerating broadband infrastructure deployment.

Treasury releases Treasury International Capital data for July 2013.

DOD IG recommends Army reprogram $382 million in procurement and R&D.

How to watch tomorrow’s historic Antares/Cygnus space launch.

USPTO to host annual Independent Inventor Conference.

Obama speaks on the Navy Yard shooting:

#CleanTechNow: America’s clean energy revolution:

USAID’s Stephanie Grosser on lowering the cost of government with open source

Stephanie Grosser, senior adviser, data, technology and communications, Development Credit Authority, USAID, talks with FedScoopTV how open source can help reduce the cost of government.

A plan for DOD’s cyber offensive

When it comes to cyber, the defensive side gets the most attention. But a new report out Monday explores the “poorly understood but possibly revolutionary” offensive side of cyber, suggesting a more delineated path forward for the Defense Department .

Opinions — both legal and normative — vary on when, how or even if the U.S. can use such offensive cyber-methods. Regardless, the Center for Strategic and International Studies report points out the U.S. has already approved offensive cyber-capabilities, “though under tight restrictions.” But as the study highlights, there is no set plan across DOD to experiment and create guidelines for offensive cyber-weapons, which have the potential to “scale dramatically” and save the military considerable money in a fiscally tight era.

“A single algorithm could disable a whole class of adversary systems, for example,” writes report author Maren Leed, a senior adviser at CSIS and former senior adviser to the Army chief of staff. “They can operate at the speed of light, providing a timeliness that is increasingly necessary but difficult to achieve with shrinking inventories of far-flung traditional platforms.”

Cyber-weapons are versatile, beneficial in warfare and reconstruction. But the military has yet to define exactly what legal guidelines apply to cyber-weapons and the offensive cyber-capabilities are not yet fully developed. So while the potential exists, even offensive cyber-proponents are “trapped by circular logic,” according to the report. Without the capabilities, considering possible future uses seems rash, which makes it easier to avoid the conversation about exactly when these cyber-tools might be used. Nothing happens.

“This paper recommends steps to break this cycle by establishing a more explicit plan for robust experimentation,” the report reads.

First, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel should be clear that offensive cyber-capabilities that support operational and tactical commanders are consistent with current law and policy. Second, Hagel should create a department-wide plan to “experiment and exercise” offensive cyber tools.

But for now these experiments should stay high level, with only U.S. Cyber Command commanders having the authority to conduct offensive cyber-attacks. As Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey has acknowledged, it’s still unclear what each service’s role is in cyber-warfare, making it difficult to decide what offensive cyber-capabilities to give to service-specific commanders.

For all the legal and policy uncertainty around offensive cyber-tools, the study found a “general consensus” among legal and policy experts that service-specific commanders could eventually receive this responsibility.

Opinions on the technical details remain divided, however.

“Lack of consensus in areas such as technical feasibility, intelligence equities and capacity and resource requirements suggest that additional experimentation and application is needed, in controlled settings, to enable an informed decision on greater decentralization of attack authorities,” the report concludes.

Energy high as health IT week kicks off in DC

With Monday marking the kickoff of National Health IT Week, U.S. CTO Todd Park took the opportunity to bring his trademark enthusiasm to an already-energetic crowd at the Health and Human Services Department.

The Consumer Health IT Summit brought together an audience to discuss the Blue Button app, which allows patients to view and download their personal health records and access them securely. Agencies including the Defense Department, HHS and the Veterans Affairs Department have already implemented this capability for their beneficiaries.

Three first-round participants from the Presidential Innovation Fellows program — Henry Wei, Matt McCall and Ryan Panchadsaram — worked on the Blue Button for America project. Their work focused on making health records as complete as possible and creating a model that could easily transfer over to a nationwide system.

Park said the Blue Button app is an entrepreneurial opportunity for investors and developers to innovate. In a blog post, McCall and Wei said more than 115 million people would have access to Blue Button by the end of 2013.

“There has never been a better time to be an innovator,” Park said at the event.

The Blue Button initiative also gels with the administration’s digital strategy and open government policies — releasing meaningful data to entrepreneurs and opening up more data sets for citizens.

Park praised the Blue Button app, saying it is saving lives and enables citizens in “getting their own data, using it and sharing it in whatever fashion they wish, and doing it securely.”

The optimism Park expressed was reciprocated; the crowd often interjected, shouting out support, affirmation and bouts of applause throughout speech.

As National Health IT Week continues tomorrow, several government officials will be speaking at the HIMSS National Health IT Week Press Conference, 1:30 p.m. in the Capitol Visitors Center.

Navy’s ‘lessons learned’ database gets facelift

The Navy announced Monday it had upgraded the Navy Lessons Information System, a searchable database of information to help fleet readiness.

The NLLIS updates will make the database — which has more than 90,000 documents — more user friendly by improving the search function and categorization of data.

“As the comprehensive source of Navy Lessons Learned, NLLIS is an important destination for the fleet to learn from past lessons when planning future tasks or missions,” said Rear Adm. Scott Jerabek, commander of the Navy Warfare Development Command, which manages NLLIS. “The improved features will benefit users through faster, more comprehensive and organized searches.”

Specifically, keyword filters have been added to the search function, users can identify which type of data they are searching for and results will be divvied up by type, such as observations, port visits and after-action reports.

The personalized feature, “binders,” which allows users to create individual sets of information, was also redesigned “for easier use, including improved search features, breadcrumb navigation and enhanced displays views,” according to a release.

NLLIS administrators will also be able to put more information into the database because they will now have the capability to restrict certain documents to specific organizations or groups.

NLLIS is hosted on the Joint Lessons Learned Information System: https://www.jllis.mil.

FedWire: Health IT Week, DOD nomination and investment summit

2013_04_fedwire2001FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.

Pentagon offers resources as Navy shooting response continues.

New center for innovation and science launched.

Tent tech? Yes, tent tech.

FCC celebrates National Health IT Week.

Air Force official nominated to key DOD role.

Participants from 60+ countries to attend SelectUSA 2013 Investment Summit.

Progress made since the financial crisis.

NARA celebrates tomorrow the 226th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution.

FedMentors: Mark Day, acting deputy assistant commissioner, ITS, GSA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEmU3EahheY

Mark Day, acting deputy assistant commissioner, Integrated Technology Service, General Services Administration, shares career advice in this FedScoopTV interview.