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The We the People petition site is back. But what actually changed?

Ready your requests — petitions site We the People is back online.

The site was taken down for “maintenance” purposes in December, with the promise that it would return, petitions and signatures intact, in “late January.” As late as the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 31, the petitions.whitehouse.gov web address still only showed a maintenance message. But come the following morning it was back.

The We the People site during maintenance. (Screenshot)

And the revamped website looks… exactly the same.

Well, there is one obvious difference. At relaunch the new site displayed just 18 of the 75 petitions that appeared before the maintenance on Dec. 18 (according to the Wayback Machine) — now it displays 19 petitions. However the petitions that do appear are arguably the most important — 17 have met the required 100,000 signature threshold to get a White House response.

And as FedScoop noted when the site was taken down, many of these petitions are critical of President Trump — the most popular, with over 1 million signatures, demands that the president release his tax returns.

The Trump White House has not responded to a petition since taking office over a year ago, but that may be about to change. “Following the site’s relaunch, petitions that have reached the required number of signatures will begin receiving responses,” a White House official told FedScoop in December.

But beyond the content considerations, what’s actually changed with the website? When the maintenance began the White House official told FedScoop that the work would “save taxpayers more than $1.3 million a year.”

While this may not represent much from federal budget perspective, the claim still begs the question — how?

On the front end, and from a user experience perspective, the site remains functionally and visually the same. Visitors are greeted by a “create a petition” button at the top of the page, and must create, or log in to, an account to interact with petitions.

It is difficult to divine what may have changed from a backend architecture perspective, or how this might save the promised $1.3 million per year. The open source code for the site, available on GitHub, has not been updated since September 2016, so it is impossible to tell what alterations may have been made to the code. Additionally, FedScoop was unable to determine whether the White House has made any changes to where and how the site is hosted.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

DHS awards $621M CDM cybersecurity contract to Booz Allen

Booz Allen Hamilton has won a six-year, $621 million contract to further develop and implement the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program.

The award is tied to the Dynamic and Evolving Federal Enterprise Network Defense (DEFEND) program, part of the third phase of CDM, a government-wide cybersecurity effort to monitor and protect federal networks.

Booz Allen was among a small group of contractors also involved in prior stages, providing a total of 13 federal departments and agencies with cybersecurity software that can help spot and mitigate malicious activity.

“Our work will expand into new areas of cybersecurity, like incident response and automation,” Marcie Nagel, a Booz Allen principal and leader of the firm’s CDM work, said in a release. “This work aims to help these federal departments and agencies leverage new capabilities that will ultimately empower our clients to defend their networks faster with more flexibility and greater visibility into the network itself.”

SBA innovation program hobbled by database errors, GAO says

The databases for two Small Business Administration research and development programs are riddled with errors, a Government Accountability Office report has found, impacting whether agencies can track if projects are meeting their goals.

The new report details how the SBA benchmarks the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, which award contracts to small businesses for the purpose of promoting R&D and innovation efforts at 11 federal agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Commerce Defense, Homeland Security and others.

But because of inconsistent data filings — which included incomplete information and multiple files for the same contractors — GAO officials said the SBA was unable to sustain proper enforcement of the programs through its databases.

The SBIR program began in 1982, followed by the STTR program in 1992, and have awarded a total of $46 billion in contracts and grants in that time.

Starting in 2011, the SBA and participating agencies were required to establish benchmarks to measure the progress of contractors in developing and commercializing the technologies funded by the programs.

Both programs are tiered over three phases of award:

SBA uses benchmarks to evaluate both contractors’ average advancement to Phase II of the programs, as well as the commercial sales, investment and number patents resulting from Phase II funding. If small business contractors fall below the two benchmarks over a period of fiscal years, they aren’t allowed to participate in Phase I awards for at least a year.

But GAO officials found the databases used by SBA to maintain SBIR and STTR award information contained inaccurate or incomplete data. As a result, the SBA and participating agencies have inaccurately assessed the contractors’ compliance with the Transition Rate Benchmark to Phase II and have only once completed the Commercialization Benchmark, in 2014, “because of challenges in collecting and verifying the accuracy of data.”

The report noted that SBA officials estimated four to seven small business didn’t meet the Transition Rate Benchmark each year and were ruled ineligible, but investigators found the data used to generate the lists were sometimes altered, rendering it inaccurate.

Because agencies can change their award data at any time, GAO officials said there is a possibility that ineligible contractors could remain in the program by escaping SBA’s enforcement eye.

Investigators also found instances where awards data was incomplete or missing.

“For example, based on our review of the award data from 2007 through 2016, we identified more than 2,700 small businesses that had multiple records with different spellings of the same business’s name,” the report said. “Furthermore, we identified more than 1,400 instances in which a unique identification number had errors, such as having an incorrect number of digits, all zeros or hyphens.”

Agencies also told GAO officials that because the data needed to assess the Commercialization Benchmark isn’t consistent across agencies and projects, it’s difficult to verify it.

The GAO offered 11 recommendations, several on requiring better information and revising the benchmark guidelines and consequence policy.

SBA and the participating agencies concurred with GAO’s recommendations.

As DISA’s Lynn retires, Pentagon network defense becomes fully operational

As Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn retires this week as director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, he leaves behind a fully operational Pentagon defense network.

The Defense Department announced Wednesday that after more than three years, the Joint Force Headquarters Department of Defense Information Network, also known as JFHQ-DoDIN, has reached full operational capability.

As the head of DISA, Lynn was also tasked with leading the JFHQ-DoDIN, a component of the U.S. Cyber Command stood up in 2014 to secure, operate and defend DOD’s global network, which is made up of roughly 15,000 networks with 3 million users.

As JFHQ commander, he oversaw nearly the entirety of the unit’s development and maturity from its January 2015 initial operating capacity into a fully functioning DOD network defense mechanism.

“The JFHQ-DoDIN team has worked hard since inception in 2014 to reach this milestone,” Lynn said in a statement. “A highlight for me was to see the organization take the reins of actively defending the DoDIN in real-world threat and attack conditions.”

The U.S. Army and Navy announced last November their Cyber Mission Force teams reached full operation in support of JFHQ-DoDIN. The remainder of the 133 Cyber Mission Force teams are expected to reach full operations by September.

In an article released by DISA for Lynn’s retirement, he explained that the agency and JFHQ are “changing the landscape of how we do business and making sure we can protect ourselves better, If the bad guys come into our terrain, now we know who’s supposed to be fighting them off.”

He expects that soon enough, JFHQ-DoDIN will be securing networks “better than anyone in the world.”

“From the technical side, we’ve done some amazing things,” Lynn said. “From my perspective, I think we’ve changed the world. Our little corner of it.”

With Lynn’s retirement, Rear Adm. Nancy Norton will take over as director of DISA and commander of JFHQ-DoDIN.

Evolving identity management crucial for federal cybersecurity, but budget woes slow adoption

A new survey of federal IT leaders cites identity management as one of the most important methods for protecting agency networks, but slimmed-down budgets make it hard to implement effectively.

The survey, conducted by Market Connections and sponsored by Unisys, queried 200 federal IT executives about agency IT vulnerabilities, challenges and the role identity management — how networks validate the access of the people working on them — plays in those.

More than half of those respondents pointed to sophisticated external threats and possible breaches from increased mobile device use as their top concerns for IT security in the last year. Another 44 percent cited software vulnerability patching as their top worry.

Identity management could help some of those concerns — 68 percent of respondents said better controls on access provides a major benefit to increased cybersecurity.

However, the technology is evolving, and agencies may have a tough time keeping up.

“Without over-dramatizing, I think we now have a crisis of what we call digital trust,” Venkatapathi Puvvada, president of Unisys Federal, said the company’s Federal Digital Trust Symposium Wednesday. “The crisis is because of the complexity of what we are dealing with. IT used to be simple, you used to have a mainframe, you used to have terminals. You had to come to the office to do everything.

“Now in the world of cloud, microservices and digital services probably everywhere, it’s pretty complex,” he said. “So this crisis is because it’s really hard to get a holistic understanding of security risk. There are a lot of attack vectors.”

With the growing proliferation of mobile devices and the accessibility of new technology, experts said that identity management has moved beyond the personal identity verification smartcard technology established by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 in 2004 and should now be considered an ecosystem comprised of trusted devices, services, connectivity and identities. To address that, the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued new guidelines for agencies to manage digital identity this past June under its SP 800-63 revision.

But with slim and uncertain budgets, updating the technology needed to meet those guidelines could provide a tough hurdle.

Thirty-eight percent of the survey respondents said budget limitations provided a significant challenge to migrating their networks to an identity-based security management system, and only 16 percent said that current identity-based tools are fully automated and integrated with their networks.

David Temoshok, senior policy adviser for NIST’s IT Laboratories, said that the next step for the agency is to release implementation guidance for the 800-63 guidelines to provide both agencies and industry a pathway forward to procure new technology that is best tailored for their needs.

“The implementation guidance is intended to give not alternatives but guidance on how best do you go about satisfying these requirements in a way that’s going to meet your environment, your control needs, your agency mission needs and also your costs in designing your risk management approach,” he said.

Puvvada also added that artificial intelligence could help facilitate developing the identity management ecosystem, but developing it will take ongoing collaboration between government and industry to make it possible.

“I think there is a lot more that needs to be done in bringing together all of this,” he said. “Whether it’s through an identity center of excellence or making this to be a more new generation [of identity access]. It’s not about the PIV card anymore, it’s not about [public key infrastructure] anymore. It’s about this whole combination of these things.”

Emerging Tech 2018: 7 technologies poised to disrupt government

If 2017 was the year federal agencies began to seriously explore adopting cutting-edge emerging technologies, 2018 could, in many senses, be the year many of those innovations become commonplace around government.

As agencies look to move from legacy systems to modern platforms capable of supporting new, transformational technologies, they are beginning to grasp practical uses for things that until recently were just buzzwords — artificial intelligence, virtual reality and more.

In fact, the General Services Administration has created an emerging tech office for the explicit purpose of helping other agencies “evaluate, test and implement IT modernization initiatives with emerging technologies.” And in other pockets around government, especially on the defense side, leadership is warming up to the idea of embracing new innovations to drive operational efficiency and mission effectiveness.

FedScoop spoke to leading experts in and outside government about the top emerging technologies that they see on the horizon in the coming year and beyond, resulting in a list of the top seven. The purpose of the list is to generate a better understanding of the realistic impacts of these technologies, which are often overhyped, in a federal context, while juxtaposing their perceived benefits and drawbacks in the near term.

Click through to the list below to explore what those experts have to say on the impact of emerging technology in 2018, starting with blockchain.

FedScoop’s Emerging Tech List 2018

Tajha Chappellet-Lanier, Carten Cordell and Billy Mitchell contributed to this report. 

Emerging Tech 2018: Blockchain

Tech experts are thrilled for blockchain’s potential in government but at the same time completely perplexed by it.

That is, they believe blockchain — a distributed ledger-based technology that rose to the spotlight as the basis for the cryptocurrency bitcoin — will have a major impact in the federal government, but they’re not completely sure yet where that will be.

“I think there is interest but there’s a lot of uncertainty and confusion,” said Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

“I do think it will have a pretty big impact,” Dcode founder Meagan Metzger says of blockchain technology in the federal government.

Newly retired Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn, formerly director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, spent part of his waning days at the defense IT agency “trying to work it into with what we do with identity [management].”

“If nothing else, it’s kind of a one-time check on who you are for a group that you may or may not trust as opposed to a group that is in this identity platform, if you will,” Lynn said recently. “So I think there’s potential there. I’m sure there’s a lot of potential there. It’s obvious in the financial world, where there’s really potential, but I think for identity there might be some potential.”

John Hill of the Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation at the Treasury’s Fiscal Service agrees that it is early days for blockchain. He’s running a pilot program in his office but says “it’s too early to tell” how blockchain will have a major play in the federal government. That said, it’s “certainly worthy of evaluation,” he added.

To Mark Fisk, a partner at IBM Global Services Public Sector, Fiscal Service’s pilot is right on track with what he’s seeing more broadly.

“The first half of the last year was all about education,” Fisk told FedScoop. “I think we’ve now kind of taken that turn, and now when I talk to clients — some of it’s education and what blockchain can do for them — but it’s really about exploring capabilities and actually thinking about proof of concepts.”

He added: “This will be the year of proof of concepts and then, hopefully, moving those proof of concepts into production pilots by the mid to end of 2018.”

Blockchain pilots can be found elsewhere around government, like at the General Services Administration, the Navy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But blockchain, like all emerging tech, is not without barriers.

Metzger points to a cultural shift from centralized control and oversight. Castro sees the same challenge around the decentralization to blockchain, which he said still generates “a lot of uncertainty and confusion,” despite its buzz.

“What’s really interesting about blockchain is it decentralizes authority,” Castro said. “And that’s traditionally been the responsibility of government. So there’s a lot of questions about will any government agency basically cannibalize its mission by creating some sort of blockchain authoritative source use that gets rid of its purpose, or maybe one of its purposes.”

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Emerging Tech 2018: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Think less Skynet and more process automation and chatbots when it comes to federal agencies adopting artificial intelligence.

Experts point to the federal government as one of the sectors that’s most likely to benefit from advances in AI and machine learning in the near term, in large part because both are rooted in big data — something agencies tend to have lots of.

There are a number of agencies that already use early forms of the technologies:

Andrew McMahon, director of strategic partnerships for gov tech accelerator Dcode, sees the potential for AI in government as stemming from recent investments (like the DATA Act) in categorizing and structuring government data. “The government has made quite a bit of investment on the data side,” McMahon said. “Without structured data, and without a lot of data, AI isn’t really that interesting. So the big thing for government here is to understand that AI isn’t that far of a jump from whatever you’re doing around big data.”

“Out of all the programs that we did last year [AI] surprised me the most,” Dcode founder Meagan Metzger said. Solutions in AI and big data that came through the accelerator’s program, she added, simply saw the most adoption. A big driver of the federal interest in AI solutions? Budget cuts. So as federal budgets shrink, Metzger said, “I think we’ll see an even bigger uptick.”

But there’s also fear that AI will breed massive job loss. But a new Deloitte report concludes that won’t happen — at least yet. “In the near term, our analysis suggests, large government job losses are unlikely,” the report states. “But cognitive technologies will change the nature of many jobs — both what gets done and how workers go about doing it — freeing up to one quarter of many workers’ time to focus on other activities.”

Players like Deloitte and others argue that this stage of artificial intelligence — process automation — is actually positive for human employees. Bots that are programmed to take care of basic, rote tasks, like George Washington at the NASA Shared Services Center, free up human time to focus on bigger, more interesting jobs.

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Emerging Tech 2018: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Virtual and augmented reality are eye-catching technologies. And they certainly have exciting use cases in the federal government — like the team at NASA Goddard that’s creating virtual environments for earth scientists to continue their work after returning from the field.

But does VR have a broad play in the government? “Probably not,” Dcode’s Meagan Metzger says. She sees these technologies as more of a “nice to have” versus a “must have.”

“It doesn’t have a huge amount of applicability across most agencies,” Dcode’s Andrew McMahon added. “But I think it could be interesting for some citizen-facing work.” That, and employee trainings, he suggests.

Joey Cathey, founder at the D.C.-based VR company Capitol Interactive, is more bullish on the tech. His team has worked with the U.S. Postal Service and taken meetings with other agencies like the Department of State, where there’s interest in using VR for public diplomacy. “They’re really starting to get into it now that the market is starting to prove itself,” he said. ”Personally I see it as a tool in government for solving really complex problems.”

A recent ACT-IAC event on the future of AR and VR in government focused heavily on the former. McLean, Va.-based company INADEV, for example, worked with the Battle Monuments Commission and the National Park Service to develop xplor — an “immersive mobile experience” for visitors to certain monuments on the National Mall. It’s a niche-use case, but one that could resonate for agencies with significant citizen-facing missions.

Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation,  thinks “it’s still somewhat of an elusive technology, or most people don’t have access to it. I think we’re going to see a lot of it in museums or educational environments. I think the biggest questions would be if there’s some kind of event that is able to be captured in virtual reality and recorded so that it changes perceptions about some kind of issue. I think that’s where we’re more likely to see it.”

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Emerging Tech 2018: Drones

Drones have a broad slate of very different use cases within the government — depending on who you talked to last, your association with the technology might range from potentially illegal federal surveillance by law enforcement agencies to the U.S. Forest Service’s use of these unmanned systems to fight wildfires.

Despite these various uses, though, Dcode’s Andrew McMahon doesn’t see drones permeating the federal space in the same way other emerging technologies might.

“They’ll have niche use,” McMahon said. For example, bridge inspections, natural disaster surveys or other dangerous tasks currently performed by humans could be taken over by drones, he said. And like IoT, drones have the capacity to be important data collectors, which may feed into the government’s AI capacities down the road.

Of course, the federal government interacts with drones for more than just its own use — the Federal Aviation Administration is also tasked with regulating drone use by private sector companies and hobbyists. The agency has continuously tried to strike a balance between innovation and safety, but the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, under President Trump, has expressed concern that regulation holds private drone manufacturers back. Doing away with unnecessary regulations, and streamlining the drone testing process, appears to be a key focus for OSTP Deputy CTO Michael Kratsios.

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