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Navy SEALs ink deal for anti-drone tech through DIUx acquisition

The Navy SEALs will soon have their six covered when it comes to drones.

The Naval Special Warfare Command, working with the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, awarded a $1.5 million to San Diego-based startup SkySafe to use its counter-unmanned aerial systems technology in battle to stop weaponized drones.

“It’s become a big problem on the military side,” SkySafe CEO Grant Jordan told FedScoop. “ISIS and other terrorist groups have started really weaponizing drones and bringing them into battles in a way that really hasn’t happened before.”

SkySafe uses radio frequency technology for what Jordan called “air space enforcement.”

“It’s all about keeping malicious or reckless drones out of places they’re not supposed to be,” like critical air spaces at airports, prisons, stadiums, critical infrastructure, the border and so on, he said. Essentially, SkySafe can reverse-engineer command over questionable drones in the surrounding airspace.

The problem has been on the minds of leaders at the Pentagon for years, Jordan explained, “but just in the past six months, this is kind of the first time it’s become real in a way on the battlefield.”

Through this contract, the Navy SEALs will mount SkySafe technology to light tactical vehicles for mobile defense against drones. The plan is to test and demonstrate the capabilities before launching them into the field in 2018.

“For us, the real near term focus is to get systems out there in the field with the Navy SEALs to really validate that our system is the solution,” Jordan said. “As we do that, getting that kind of validation is huge for then being able to apply it to other contexts, apply it to other agencies and services.”

Simultaneously with its DIUx contract announcement, the company also announced a series A round of venture capital funding led by Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz.  The funding “is huge for us because the demand for these types of systems and threat has risen drastically just over the last year since we started,” he said.

DIUx partners with various Defense Department entities to help them contract for commercial, innovative national defense solutions in a fraction of the time of normal procurements — usually within 60 days of first contact — using what it calls commercial solutions openings.

Jordan, a former Air Force acquisitions officer who knows how long it can take to do business with the Pentagon and other federal entities, said the contract wouldn’t have been possible for his innovative startup if not for DIUx’s partnership.

“They are working really hard to bridge that divide between startups and the DOD, and doing everything they can to streamline that process, to use modern contract vehicles to get that going and to help kind of push along that connection with customer groups that want these solutions,” he said.

“They really understand just how critical time is to startups and what a difference it makes, the difference between being able to award a contract in 60 days through DIUx and then a traditional contract cycle of 12 or 18 months,” Jordan said. “To a startup, that makes all the difference.”

Rep. Hurd wants a smart border wall, not a dumb one

With the fiscal 2018 budget likely to include early funding for President Trump’s promised border wall — and billions more likely to follow — Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, would like to see more of it spent on improving the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s technology.

“That’s why I get frustrated with all of this talk about a wall, because $24.5 million a mile, that’s a lot of money,” Hurd said at a July 25 House Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on technology use in customs and border operations.

“You can deploy a lot of off-the shelf technology to do [interdiction with integrated technology] for half-a-million dollars a mile. And if we add this out to the additional 1,350 miles of the border that doesn’t have doesn’t have fencing, that’s $33 billion,” he said. “I can use $32 billion of that for other things, like give y’all’s folks more pay for the hard work that they do.”

The president requested $1.6 billion in fiscal 2018 for border wall construction —which the House included in its own budget proposal last week — that includes both primary and secondary fencing, and levee walls over a combined 74 miles of the border, in addition to planning and development.

Hurd said he would like to see the money spent on a “smart wall” that would integrate technology assets through an interoperable network across agency operations, including features like fiber optics on existing fencing to detect tunnels.

When Hurd asked him for his dream technology scenario, acting CBP Deputy Chief Scott Luck said it was integral to have a combination of technologies as part of an integrated environment, something the agency is attempting to do through its acquisition process.

“Based on the threat, having the right mixture of technology that informs and talks to all of the other component pieces that we have within [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] so that information is shared immediately with all components and agents and officers who need it,” he said.

“We have systems out there that are standalone systems that, in my view, need to speak to one another and share that information with whatever piece of technology that is so that we are not redundant in those efforts,” Luck added.

One way to better those efforts is by continuing to improve CBP’s cost estimates for the life cycles of the technologies it acquires, said Rebecca Gambler, the Government Accountability Office’s director of homeland security and justice.

“Although CBP has made progress in technology deployment, we have also reported that CBP could do more to strengthen its management of technology programs and better assess the contributions of surveillance technologies to border security efforts,” she said.

Specifically, Gambler cited her May 24 report that found CBP needed more performance metrics data for the surveillance technologies it is deploying in Arizona.

She added that while the agency has made progress toward assessing its life cycle costs, it would be better served by acquiring technology through the Department of Homeland Security’s acquisition process to vet the components it is buying.

“DHS’s acquisition management process is a robust, valid knowledge-based process, but CBP hasn’t always ensured that technology programs have moved through that process consistently,” Gambler said.

GAO also recommended applying performance metrics to measure the return on investment on both technology and physical border structures, like fencing and the proposed border wall.

Luck added that in addition to technology, applying border structures depends largely on terrain, with physical barriers proving useful in urban settings, and watchtowers and technology more useful in rural ones.

“It’s a part of a package that we are concentrating on as part of our news strategy as it relates to the executive order [on Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements] as it relates to operational control,” he said.

Eastern Foundry is bringing a little startup shine to the government contracting space

In the D.C. suburbs, giant government contractors like Booz Allen, Boeing and Northrop Grumman occupy shiny high-rise buildings with floors and floors of cubicles and corner offices. Nearby, in Rosslyn, 138 small government contractors share one open-plan floor of another shiny high-rise, hoping to amplify their voices and expertise by joining forces.

Welcome to Eastern Foundry, D.C.’s incubator and coworking space for small government contractors.

In tech, porting a business model from one market to another is so popular it’s become a meme — let’s call it “Uber for X.” The practice has produced some pretty fantastically laughable pitches, but at its core, the idea of sharing concepts across industries is not a bad one.

It was this kind of idea that struck co-founder Geoff Orazem in 2014 when, after trying and largely failing to start his own federal contracting company, he realized a private sector tech mechanism might be able to help. Starting a business is never easy, but advice from those who have gone before can smooth particularly rough patches. At least that’s the theory behind a booming cottage industry of coworking spaces, incubators and accelerators.

While new accelerators and incubators seem to pop up every day, the programs largely focus on private sector software companies. But Orazem and cofounder Andrew Chang saw promise for the model in the government contracting space, a market frequently vilified for its confusing web of bureaucracy. Despite the challenge, startups want to sell to the government, for at least one big reason — money.

So Eastern Foundry set out to help startups get in on the action. Orazem has a metaphor ready and everything: federal contracting is a puzzle, and Eastern Foundry gives its members access to the cover of the box.

“The inspiration and core of the business model are rooted in the proven incubator and accelerator models modified to the dynamics of the government contracting market,” Orazem told FedScoop.

Eastern Foundry has two office locations in Arlington, Virginia — the one in Rosslyn and another in Crystal City. The company offers memberships that give small businesses access to the space as well as in-person and online educational content. Earlier this summer the Foundry launched the online platform Federal Foundry, a bid at expanding its educational footprint.

Bringing small companies together to one physical location is an important piece of the equation. “I think that the government sector suffers from the fragmentation caused by the highly regulated environment we operate in,” Orazem said. “Coworking allows us to consolidate the buying and resources of a community of small businesses so that we can engage with the market effectively.”

It wasn’t a direct conversion from traditional incubator to Eastern Foundry, though. Government contractors have some unique needs. “The growth cycle for government companies is quite long so we had to have a model that supported companies over years,” Orazem told FedScoop, reflecting on how Eastern Foundry is different from private sector tech incubators.

Bringing companies together also means asking them to let go of what Orazem sees as an in-built fear of competition. “In the private sector and startup world buyers and sellers are anxious to share their needs and capabilities,” Orazem said. “Government is extraordinarily reluctant to share anything about their needs or to communicate with the vendor community in general, and this permeates the contracting community that frequently shies away from sharing what they can do.”

As a contrast, Orazem is trying to get his members to embrace sharing and collaboration.

Isaac Barnes, an Eastern Foundry member with his company Eminent IT, says the goals of tech companies looking to be federal contractors are just different from the goals of private sector tech companies. “Most companies in our space aren’t pursuing funding,” he told FedScoop in a phone conversation. “We’re just pursuing customers.”

This is a distinction, Barnes said, that most traditional incubators aren’t equipped to handle. Barnes was a member of a Founder Institute cohort in 2011 with a previous company, but the focus on raising funds didn’t speak to him.

Differences aside, “the core insight the small businesses can accelerate their success through coordination and collaboration” is as true for Eastern Foundry as it is for any incubator, Orazem told FedScoop. And despite the challenges of adapting the model for a new environment, Orazem has ideas for other things he can borrow from private sector tech — growth capital, for instance. “There is so much green space to move into,” he said.

Gov Actually Episode 15: Summer of Gov

It’s hot outside, and Washingtonians are trading in their business attire for flip flops and swimsuits. Summer for many in D.C. means it’s dead season — time for a needed reprieve from the hustle and bustle, especially the traffic.

But not for rank-and-file civil servants. In this week’s episode, hosts Danny Werfel and Dan Tangherlini explain how “for the Gov Actually crowd, summer is the busiest time of the year.”

“It’s when budgets are being developed for the next year, it’s when the appropriations process is in high swing — all the fancy people are gone, but all the people who are doing the work and grinding away, getting those reports written, getting those hearings scheduled” are still around, Tangherlini explains. “If you’re an acquisition person, you’ve never seen Martha’s Vineyard.”

Dan and Danny discuss how the seeming lulls of a D.C. summer for some equate to the busy season for others, along with some summer movie references and recommendations for fun.

Hear that and more on the latest episode of Gov Actually, and catch all of the episodes on iTunes and SoundCloud.

Let us know what you think in the comments on iTunes.

NASA issues $145M solicitation for headquarters IT and cloud services

NASA has launched the highly anticipated $145 million solicitation for IT and cloud computing services at its headquarters.

The agency issued a request for proposals July 18 for its Headquarters Information Technology Support Services III contract.

The procurement is the long-anticipated follow-up to NASA’s previous HITSS II contract, awarded to Digital Management, Inc in 2012. That current contract has a maximum value of $177 million and is set to expire this year.

The new request calls for contractor-provided IT and cloud operations for the Headquarters Information Technology and Communications Division, which supports NASA’s administrator and chief information officer, as well as mission directorates.

“ITCD’s vision is to deliver reliable, innovative and respected IT solutions. Its key organizational values are integrity, responsibility, helpfulness, effectiveness and collaboration,” the document says.

The performance work statement requests that contractors provide personnel, equipment and support for a full slate of IT operations, which includes:

NASA officials said the acquisition would be handled as a set-aside competition under the 8(a) Business Development Program, providing a hybrid cost-plus-incentive fee and an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract.

The contract has a one-year base period with four year options. Contractors will also be expected to collaborate with the agency’s strategic sourcing and shared services entities, IT Infrastructure Integration Program and NASA Shared Services Center.

NASA officials originally released the HITSS presolicitation Feb. 28 for a comment period.

Contractors will have until noon on Aug. 18 to submit proposals.

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services shines in website clarity ranking

Government-ese persists on federal websites, and it can be tough to eradicate, but it’s possible for agencies to rid their pages of long-winded sentences, passive voice and other problems.

The website of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the Department of Justice, for example, had an impressive transformation in just one year. A recent ranking of writing clarity on 30 federal agency websites, conducted by the company VisibleThread, placed COPS at No. 3 — a giant leap from its 2016 ranking, in which the office was dead last.

So what was the agency’s secret?

“The COPS Office has made plain writing a top priority since the 2016 rankings were released,” a spokesperson told FedScoop in an email. “Along with making other improvements to our website, we spent quite a bit of time editing, removing, and updating the language and layout of the site to improve readability and overall visual aesthetics.”

Additionally, COPS has tried to make sure that all employees are aware of plain writing requirements. “We have implemented a Plain Writing Team Site available to all staff via our intranet, which includes links to federal laws and guidelines,” the spokesperson said.

There is some official incentive for agencies to polish up the text on their websites: The Plain Writing Act of 2010 mandated that agencies write in a clear and concise way. Implementing the law, however, can be tough.

For COPS, it’s a continuous effort. The agency “measures improvement in plain writing by actively and consistently updating and reviewing our website and all the documents that are made available on our website,” the spokesperson wrote. “We have simplified many of our public-facing documents, and have made extensive effort to remove broken/dead links and shorten and remove unnecessary language.”

Visible Thread’s 2017 ranking is a follow-up to rankings from 2016 and 2011, and consists of a scan of 100 randomly selected website pages for readability, long sentences, passive voice and density of complex words.

The ranking shows that while the COPS site is still home to lots of long sentences, the office scores well in readability, avoidance of the passive voice and limiting complex sentences. “COPS is a testament to the improvements that can be made when clear writing is put into practice,” the report declares.

The National Archives, Centers for Disease Control, Smithsonian and Federal Aviation Administration join COPS in VisibleThread’s top five for 2017.

The FBI website and the website for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration at the Department of Health and Human Services rank among the last in the 2017 report. The latter is particularly concerning, VisibleThread CEO Fergal McGovern told Fedscoop, because of the information it provides for very vulnerable Americans.

McGovern told FedScoop in an interview that over the years he’s noticed it is fairly common for agency websites to improve in one of the four measured areas, sometimes at the expense of others. When they can manage to improve across multiple areas, though, that’s “the golden ticket.”

Sonny Bhagowalia out as CIO at Treasury

After close to three years as CIO of the Department of Treasury, Sonny Bhagowalia is out.

He’s not leaving the agency, though — rather he has been reassigned as a detailee at the Bureau of Fiscal Services, a spokesperson confirmed to FedScoop.

In his new role, Bhagowalia will work on “a series of important cybersecurity and technology projects,” the spokesperson told FedScoop via email.

Deputy CIO Eric Olson will step into an acting CIO role.

It’s an abrupt move for Bhagowalia, who has had a long career in high-level IT roles in government. Previously to joining Treasury in 2014, he was CIO and the governor’s chief advisor on technology for the state of Hawaii. Prior to that he was deputy assistant administrator at the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, and CIO of the Department of the Interior, among other positions.

The spokesperson didn’t comment on the specifics of Bhagowalia’s role or how long it will last.

NASA is trying to figure out just how annoying drone noise is

In the not-too-distant future, we’re told, Amazon will deliver our Whole Foods shopping, to our doorstep, by drone. Sounds convenient, but what kind of noise pollution will widespread drone use contribute to our already-loud cityscapes?

NASA thinks there’s a good chance it could be quite bothersome.

In a recently released study, the agency tests the “Psychoacoustic Properties of Small Unmanned Aerial System Noise,” or in other words, how annoying drone sounds are to humans.

For reasonable comparison, the NASA study tests the flight sounds from small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) against the sounds made by “contemporary” delivery machines, i.e. trucks. To do this, NASA researchers collected sounds from several sUAS, like the DAx8 and the Stingray 500. Then the researchers took recordings of a variety of ground vehicles, from a Subaru Impreza Sport to a Grumman Kurbmaster/Utilimaster step van.

Next, the researchers brought 38 test subjects to NASA Langley to have them listen to all the recordings and rate their annoyance on a sliding scale from “not at all annoying” to “extremely annoying.”

The results? People do respond differently to sUAS noise as compared to the ground vehicle noise. “The data suggests a lack of parity between the noise of the recorded sUAS and that of a set of road vehicles,” the report states.

“Initial analysis of the data from this test indicates that there may be a systematic difference between the annoyance response generated by the noise of the sUAS and the road vehicles included in this study,” the report concludes. “It is unknown as of now whether this difference can be accounted for by other factors, or whether it is being generated by qualitative differences between the sound of road vehicles and sUAS. This result casts doubt on the idea that sUAS operators can expect their operations to be greeted with minimal noise-based opposition as long as the sound of their systems are ‘no louder than’ conventional package delivery solutions.”

In essence, further research is needed — NASA is already analyzing this existing data for more information, and plans do conduct a further study this year.

18F is looking for crowdsourced penetration testing systems to hit login.gov

The General Services Administration’s 18F digital team is making strides in developing the open-source login.gov, a single sign-on for government services, and is now looking to do some penetration testing.

GSA released a sources sought notice late last week in an attempt to “identify potential crowd sourced penetration testing providers who can support 18F’s login.gov product.”

“The system is expected to be widely targeted by attackers,” the statement of work document explains. “GSA requires Crowdsourced Security and Penetration Testing service that mimics attacks and detects the security flaws that real-world hackers use to breach the Login.gov platform.”

Potential sources should have two years of experience doing penetration testing for major tech companies and adhere to a host of other requirements. To respond to the sources sought notice, potential contractors must describe their methodology, testing timeline and expected outcomes.

The login.gov initiative kicked off in May 2016 as a follow-on to Connect.gov, GSA’s prior identity management project. It was deployed in April 2017, and in May, according to the U.S. Digital Service’s recent report to Congress, the Customs and Border Protection at the Department of Homeland Security became the first agency to use login.gov on its recruitment website.

In the past login.gov has been criticized for needlessly duplicating private sector solutions, but 18F is forging ahead.

Lawmaker pushes DHS to adopt secure email authentication protocol

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wants the federal government to adopt a protocol that would defend and protect government offices from email spoofing and phishing attempts.

Wyden sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security acting Deputy Undersecretary of Cybersecurity Jeanette Manfra urging for the adoption of Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, widely known as DMARC, a technical standard finalized in 2015 by contributors including Google, Yahoo, Mail.ru, JPMorganChase and Symantec.

As CyberScoop’s Patrick O’Neill reports, the push for widespread adoption of DMARC is particularly timely now in the wake of a June 2017 report concluding that less than one-third of the largest 98 public and private hospitals in the United States secure their email with the technology. The same email-based threats faced by private enterprise have hit the U.S. government, especially in the last year.

“The threat posed by criminals and foreign governments impersonating U.S. government agencies is real,” Wyden wrote. “For example, in May, news reports revealed an active phishing campaign in which hackers were sending emails purporting to come from the Defense Security Service. Likewise, in 2016, the Internal Revenue Service reported a 400 percent increase in attempts by criminals to impersonate the agency through phishing.”

DHS is tasked with defending federal networks and has the authority, under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, to mandate agencies enable DMARC.

Read more About Wyden’s letter on CyberScoop.