Energy CTO announces departure

Department of Energy Chief Technology Officer Pete Tseronis is leaving federal service, he announced Thursday.

Tseronis, who has served as Energy’s CTO since 2008, said in a blog post that he’s starting a new chapter in the private sector, though he declined to tell FedScoop where specifically. Energy CIO Michael Johnson confirmed the news in a brief email to staff.

“I have been truly blessed to serve the Federal Government for over twenty-four years in myriad progressive technology and leadership responsibility roles spanning four Administrations and three cabinet-level agencies, culminating as the Energy Department’s first-ever Chief Technology Officer,” he wrote.

While CTO of Energy, Tseronis’ major focuses were deploying new technologies throughout the department, such as cloud, wireless and mobility solutions, and improving cybersecurity. He was also the visionary behind the department’s enterprise IT Strategic Roadmap.

Prior to his time at Energy, he served as CTO and director of network services for the Department of Education.

The CTO is not the only senior IT official to depart Energy lately. Earlier this month, Chief Information Security Officer Rod Turk left the department to take the same role with the Commerce Department.

Tseronis will officially leave Energy effective Nov. 1. In his staff email, Johnson said he’d work on finding a replacement as it gets closer to that date.

“A self-proclaimed ‘Connective Tissue Officer,’ my passion for connecting dots, building bridges, and fostering relationships will continue,” he wrote. “I am committed to help others understand and balance existing and new priorities while conveying technology’s ‘value to the mission!'”

Obama’s College Scorecard faces backlash from conservative schools

Some conservative-leaning colleges are giving President Barack Obama’s new online ranking system for higher education institutions an F.

Several small colleges that refuse to accept money from states or the federal government, which includes grants or student loans, were not listed in the College Scorecard unveiled last week — and officials weren’t shy about taking the Education Department to task.

The colleges include Grove City College, a Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania; Christendom College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley; and Hillsdale College, an independent liberal arts college in Michigan.

“Grove City College is noticeably absent from the U.S. Department of Education’s recently released College Scorecard,” the college’s president, Paul McNulty, said in a statement on Tuesday. “However well-intentioned, the Scorecard as it exists now is incomplete and does not fully disclose comprehensive data that families need to make informed decisions. For now, the Department should, at the very least, include a disclaimer that the Scorecard is not comprehensive or reflective of all colleges and universities.”

But as an article in the Washington Post notes, the colleges do not have to report racial demographics and other data to the federal government, which is stipulated under the Title IV financial aid program — and which the Department of Education uses to compile the information for prospective students. The scorecard allows potential students to compare colleges based on graduation rates, average costs and debt, and median income of alumni.

According to a statement from Christendom obtained by the Post, college officials “were not surprised to be left off the list as Christendom receives no federal money, and as a consequence, files no data under Title IV; without this data, it is impossible for the Scorecard to include Christendom,” according to President Timothy O’Donnell.

An Education Department spokeswoman said in an email to FedScoop that unless colleges send in data as required by Title IV regulations, they would not be listed.

“With the College Scorecard, the Department is committed to doing what the president asked us to do: provide information to families and consumers and help them make a college choice that’s smart for them,” she wrote. “As of now, institutions that do not participate in Title IV federal financial aid are not included on the site because they are not required to send us data. The Department is listening closely to concerns from users and other stakeholders and will work to address those concerns in future updates to the tool.”

Reach the reporter at corinne.lestch@fedscoop.com or follow her on Twitter @clestch.

For privacy officers, feds lag private sector

Privacy offices in government departments tend to be under-resourced, although privacy professionals in general are well-trained, generously paid and enjoy seniority within their organizations, according to a new survey published Thursday by a professional association and a “Big Four” accounting firm.

The International Association of Privacy Professionals-EY Annual Privacy Governance report for 2015 is based on a detailed survey of nearly 800 executives with privacy responsibilities at regulated and unregulated companies and in government departments.

“Government programs report low budgets and staff shortages,” reads the report, noting that the median annual budget of a privacy department is highest in unregulated industries. Privacy programs “thrive in unregulated environments where ethical lines remain undrawn,” and “answers are seldom written in law.” Companies in these sectors have to rely on the training and judgment of their privacy officers to “to predict the reaction to a new product, service or app by consumers, regulators, advocates and the press.”

The report finds that government privacy officers, by contrast, are focused on compliance and data loss prevention, deploying privacy impact assessments and interacting with records management departments.

In general, privacy professionals see their industry growing, along with their staff and budgets over the next year, and many report an increasingly senior role for themselves and their departments.

“Increasingly, the leading privacy role, typically a chief privacy officer, is equivalent in seniority to the longer established chief information security officer,” the report states.

This story has been corrected. An earlier version incorrectly referred to accounting firm EY as Ernst and Young.

NFL gets FAA drone green light

The National Football League is the latest commercial entity to receive an exemption from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly unmanned aircraft systems.

The FAA granted the league — specifically its NFL Films unit, which produces the league’s non-live segments — permission last week to use drones to film documentaries and films. But the exemption comes with a catch.

While the NFL is the first major sports league allowed to fly drones over its stadiums, the league cannot film during games or when crowds are gathered in the stadiums.

“NFL Films has a long history of embracing and employing the latest technology to tell its inimitable stories. NFL Films will use the unique visual images captured by drones to enhance their filmmaking and story-telling,” NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy said in a statement to the Washington Post. “They will be used when there are no people present for scenic shots for productions such as NFL Films Presents and Together We Make Football pieces on the Today Show.”

The exemption comes as several NFL teams, like the Dallas Cowboys, New England Patriots and New York Giants, have gotten grief from the FAA for using drones in practice scenarios to give coaches an eye in the sky for film study. The Giants even promoted it in a news article on the team’s official blog, despite it being illegal.

With an empty stadium below, NFL Films’ drones must also adhere to a few more rules: They can’t exceed a total payload of 55 pounds, speeds of 100 mph or altitudes higher than 400 feet, and must adhere to other UAS restrictions, like restricting flight out of the pilot’s line of sight, at night or within 5 nautical miles of airport.

Rep. Darrell Issa on the public’s role in open data laws

If members of the public want to track how the government is spending taxpayer money as easily as they check the weather on their smartphones, they must press those in power to make it possible.

That was the call from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., at a conference Wednesday held by open data advocacy group Data Transparency Coalition. Issa, who has helped shape recent open data legislation, implored people to embrace what is possible.

“Imagine if all the spending in government to all the vendors was made open and available for nonclassified work,” Issa said. “Imagine how quickly we could find out that the government, through no fault of its own, paid 10 different prices for the same product, and in fact, may buy once from the company who manufactures it, once from the distributor and several times from retailers, and not even be aware when they went out with contracts that they did that. Imagine how much savings we could have.”

Issa helped craft the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act — which requires federal agencies to make their financial, budget, payment, grant and contract data interoperable when published to USASpending.gov, the federal government’s hub of publicly available financial data, by May 9, 2017.

This May, Issa also introduced the Financial Transparency Act, which would require the eight major U.S. financial regulatory agencies to make data they collect on existing securities, commodities and banking laws electronically searchable and downloadable in bulk.

Working groups spanning multiple government agencies have been busy implementing DATA Act statutes to stay on deadline. However, in July, the House Oversight Committee asked them to move faster, and questioned the amount of money and time needed to enact the law.

Issa, who has been following the DATA Act’s development, says that pressure will be important as this and other open data laws become commonplace.

“Tightening up standards is a good way of doubling down on an administration in which no amount of money is going to cause them to make this the appropriate priority,” Issa told reporters. “It is an executive branch issue. They will continue to buy new computer systems, they will continue to develop new software that does not comply with the DATA Act, and that’s where strong oversight in the House and the Senate is essential if you’re going to get a government who at the dawn of the computer knew they could have done this and never did.”

Issa wants that oversight to be on all the parts of government involved with DATA Act, including those that watch over how the government is spending its IT dollars. Keeping vendors in check will prevent agencies from depending on vendors who help them with the upkeep of their legacy systems.

“Imagine a world in which government stops making that progress and goes back — what do we do about it,” he said. “You can quickly imagine that if Congress takes its eyes off of the oversight, then the weeks, months, years, decades will go by, and we will still have legacy programs and post-legacy programs, and we can pay a huge price for it.”

Those outside of government can also provide a layer of oversight. Once the DATA Act is in place, Issa believes that Freedom of Information Act requests will drop because requested information will be available via search.

“We envision that metadata will be so easily searched, that when you are looking for it, you won’t have to ask for a FOIA,” he said. “FOIA will be limited to ‘I looked at the data, the data indicates something more, and I have a right to some portion of what’s redacted.’”

But however the future shakes out, Issa said that wide adoption of open data is not going to come overnight. It’s going to take multiple administrations and sessions of Congress to get open data laws right, he said.

“If the next president serves eight years and makes it the highest priority, raising it to the level of Cabinet focus, every part of transparency and compliance, he or she will leave a legacy of a half-done program,” Issa said. “This is where Congress and a continuous body has to work with the executive branch to make sure every step is a step forward, not a step sideways or backwards.”

Pentagon asks for industry’s help on cloud email

The Pentagon has asked for industry’s help converting its unclassified legacy email system to a secure, cloud-hosted solution capable of supporting as many as 4.5 million users.

In a request for information posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website last week, the DOD outlined its plans to institute a next-generation platform upgrading its current DOD Enterprise Email service, which supports 1.6 million users. The Defense Information Systems Agency currently manages all employee email aggregation services and billing on the system, which the notice states has become outdated since its implementation in 2012.

The request for information comes amid a flurry of cybersecurity policy upgrades across federal government. Agencies have been widely criticized for their lack of progress in bolstering security after the recent breaches to the Office of Personnel Management’s systems; last week, the Lexington Institute released a report condemning DOD’s data management systems as still vulnerable to attack.

The DOD has been quick to respond to the call to arms. Earlier this month, U.S. Cyber Command chief Adm. Michael Rogers unveiled a plan to revamp the nation’s sword and shield in the cyber domain.

“As cyberspace has grown and become more pervasive, military art has changed,” the report says. “No one today can exert or maintain national power without acute sensitivity to the digital networks that underpin the world’s communications, prosperity, and security.”

Of particular interest to agencies looking to enhance security while simultaneously cutting costs and streamlining efficiency has been the burgeoning cloud services market. In a field hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s IT Subcommittee in Texas on Tuesday, lawmakers complained that the government hasn’t done enough to embrace the cloud.

“We deserve a federal government that harnesses innovative solutions such as the cloud to modernize record keeping, improve critical government functions, maximize security, and be wise stewards of our tax dollars,” said Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, subcommittee chairman.

The notice makes special mention of cloud solutions as a primary initiative of the service. It also strongly encourages “small and small disadvantaged businesses” to contribute.

FCC commissioner throws weight behind new ‘homework gap’ bill

Two congressmen introduced their own Digital Learning Equity Act in the House last week, modeled after proposed Senate legislation, which would try to close the so-called “homework gap” and provide low-income students with access to technology outside of the classroom.

But the announcement was given a high-profile boost Tuesday with the presence of a Federal Communications Commission official, who did not have a hand in crafting the legislation but who has shown up to numerous events and written op-eds to highlight the issue.

Jessica Rosenworcel, who has been an outspoken advocate for families and students unable to access the Internet after school hours for homework, appeared alongside bill co-sponsor Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., during the announcement at Hunt Middle School in Burlington, Vermont.

The other co-sponsor of the legislation, Rep. David McKinley, R-W.V., was not at the event. A spokesman for the congressman did not respond to questions about his whereabouts.

The bill would establish broadband services in community centers, nonprofits, libraries and other places kids typically frequent after school, like the Boys and Girls Club, so that they can get work done after school.

“We know that seven in 10 teachers assign homework that requires Internet access, but data … says that one in three households does not have that access,” said Rosenworcel, according to local news channel WPTZ.

She also released a statement later in the afternoon that echoed comments she has made at past events.

“The homework gap is the cruelest part of the digital divide,” she said, according to the statement. “Today, too many students are unable to complete their school assignments because they do not have Internet access at home.”

This was the first time Rosenworcel appeared alongside a lawmaker during an announcement of a bill that was introduced, Travis Litman, one of her legal advisers, told FedScoop Wednesday.

“The congressman invited her to speak on it as he unveiled his bill,” Litman said. “She is open to traveling anywhere to talk about the homework gap, so it was a great opportunity.”

Rosenworcel has also spearheaded efforts to update the FCC’s Lifeline program to provide the option of a $9.25 subsidy, normally used by low-income Americans for landline or cell phone service, for broadband service.

The commission voted 3-2 on the revisions in June. The first round of public comments was accepted last month, and the next round will be considered this month.

Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or iNACOL, told FedScoop that Rosenworcel’s voice on the issue has been significant.

“We’ve seen Commissioner Rosenworcel be a very strong advocate for digital equity,” said Patrick, who also praised her work on modernizing the FCC’s E-rate program, which allows schools to subsidize broadband services. “The Internet is certainly becoming as important as most basic utilities are for running schools, like water and electricity. It’s certainly an important utility for learning.”

The digital equity legislation comes after Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V., introduced a similar bill in June. If enacted, the Department of Education would have to conduct a national study on the so-called “digital divide,” including detailed information about how a lack of Wi-Fi in poor families’ homes impact student achievement and outcomes.

Reach the reporter at corinne.lestch@fedscoop.com or follow her on Twitter @clestch.

​The Identity of Things

The concept of identity — which the dictionary defines as “who you are” — is changing, in part because of technology. Today, as much as any other factor, our data defines us, and its unauthorized use we call “identity theft,” as if hackers might steal our personalities along with our credit card and Social Security numbers.

Now the Internet of Things promises to expand the notion of identity even further, connecting us not only with our friends and finances but also with our objects.

You are what you own. This is true in a metaphoric sense: The clothes we wear and the cars we drive help to define us. And as more of our possessions go online — some 5 billion connected devices this year, according to Gartner — a new kind of identity emerges, at once intimately personal and vastly public. The details of our personal lives are now on record, collected by our phones, sensors in our clothing, GPS in our cars, by our thermostats and toothbrushes and bed pillows, and not necessarily for our eyes only. Our schedules, routines, habits and preferences may also be shared with manufacturers, health care providers, advertisers, public agencies, and more. In the Internet of Things, you own what you are, as well.

But who owns what, and vice versa? As our things become more autonomous, sending prompts not only to us but also elsewhere on our behalf — as emails, texts, phone calls and other notifications — we can expect to see a blurring of the lines between owner and owned, between subject and object, between identifier and identified.

The new identity

What makes us who we are? In his book “The Storytelling Animal,” scholar Jonathan Gottschall argues that stories — the stories of our lives — make us human. Since no two people share the same story, our personal narratives provide each of us with a unique identity.

Objects have stories, too, though. The film “The Red Violin” follows a concert violin from its creation in 17th-century Italy through three centuries, where it is played in concert halls, a monastery and in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Oh, the stories our things could tell, if only they could talk!

Soon, it seems, they’ll be able to. Sensors, chips and other forms of digitalization already are turning commonplace objects into data collectors. Many a newer model car could, if tapped, provide information about when and where it was manufactured, how often the oil has been changed, and where it has traveled. In short, it has a story to tell — a “who I am.” An identity.

Linking our objects to the digital universe, the Internet of Things promises to take object-identity to a new level. Suddenly, a coffee maker isn’t just a coffee maker — it’s your coffee maker, and it already knows how many cups you want it to brew and when, how strong you like your coffee, and which beans you prefer — information it shares with the grocery store as it orders more.

Connecting ordinary things gives them the extraordinary ability to tell their stories, expressing their unique identities, which, while we own them, intertwine inextricably with ours. Our vehicles soon may share traffic information in real time with other cars, and use the data others share to avoid traffic jams or construction sites. In this manner, our cars stand to create their own narratives that help to shape our stories, making decisions for us such as which route to take from one place to another, and where and when to re-fuel and to park.

At our service

When our objects communicate with one another and with us, the story that is our everyday lives may flow more smoothly. Imagine this scenario:

Knowing the traffic conditions — and precisely how long it will take to get to work today — the car starts itself, opens the garage, and alerts us when it’s time to leave. As we walk to the car, it unlocks itself and signals the house to turn off the lights, change the thermostat, and lock the doors. We don’t have to worry whether we’ve left the stove on: It will switch itself off. On the way to the office, we can relax, read the news, check emails, and sip our coffee until the car drops us off and leaves to park itself. During the day, our robots are cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, perhaps even cooking dinner. When it’s time to go home, we summon the car. It tells the house that we’re on our way, and learns from the refrigerator that we’re nearly out of milk. After notifying the grocery store, the car pulls up at the drive-thru window to collect our milk, then carries us home, where the lights are already on, music is playing, the temperature is comfortable and dinner is on the stove.

And after we’ve gone to bed at night, who knows? Once our pillow has detected that we’re in deep sleep, perhaps our things will begin sharing the adventures of their day with one another, telling their stories — which are our stories, as well. And maybe we’ll sleep a bit more soundly, knowing that, should anything happen in the night, our house will awaken us and call the authorities. Like an extended family, our Identified Things are not only taking care of us, they’re watching out for us, as well. That’s cybersecurity.

JR Reagan is the global chief information security officer of Deloitte. He also serves as professional faculty at Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Columbia universities. Follow him @IdeaXplorer. Read more from JR Reagan.

Feds prep for possible shutdown

The Office of Management and Budget reached out to agencies this week to begin preparing for a possible government shutdown Oct. 1.

Following a plan it released earlier this year, OMB convened a conference call to discuss orderly shutdown plans with agency senior officials Monday — ahead of the looming Sept. 30 deadline for Congress to pass a continuing funding resolution.

Though administration officials believe a budget lapse shouldn’t occur, and hope it can be avoided, “prudent management requires that the government plan for the possibility of a lapse and OMB is working with agencies to take appropriate action,” an OMB spokeswoman said in a statement.

“This includes agencies reviewing relevant legal requirements and updating their plans for executing an orderly shutdown,” she said. “Determinations about specific programs are being actively reviewed as agencies undertake this process.”

In 2013, the budget lapse snuck up on many federal agencies, which hadn’t experienced a shutdown since 1995, when the government was still a very paper-based enterprise. But this time around, just two years removed from the prior lapse and with operating plans still fresh, agencies are more prepared. OMB, as part of its update to Circular A-11, also required that agencies submit updated shutdown plans by Aug. 1 and continue to do so every two years.

It’s in these shutdown plans that agencies describe which personnel are considered essential — and must operate normally through the appropriations lapse without pay — and which are nonessential, meaning after a half day of closing procedures they will be sent home indefinitely without pay until the shutdown is resolved. These plans vary by agency depending on importance of mission and appropriation types for different programs. For instance, programs related to national security and public safety will continue on if a shutdown occurs, whereas the national parks around the country will be closed.

“There hadn’t been a shutdown since 1995-1996 before 2013,” John Cooney, a partner with law firm Venable LLP and former counsel for OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the 1980s, said Monday at an event sponsored by the Professional Services Council. “And everything had changed within the agencies because of the introduction of computerized databases, more work being contracted out, computerized communications systems … agencies had to rethink many things.”

“Since the experience is only two years behind them now, I think the agencies make the rational assumption that what happens this time around will more or less be the same as 2013,” Cooney added. “The government learned a lot of lessons from what happened in 2013.”

The Defense Department is in that boat. DOD Press Secretary Peter Cook said Tuesday that the department is undergoing “prudent planning” but holding out hope that it won’t have to endure the same impacts it did two years ago.

“As you can imagine we have, unfortunately, gone through this before. We are conducting the prudent planning that would be needed in the invent something like that happens, we do have some experience at that,” Cook said.

He added, “We’re not at that stage right now that we need to be alarming or concerning employees with it. We still believe that there’s time to reach a resolution, but we have to do prudent planning, and the comptroller has been doing that. Others within this department taking those steps necessary in the event, not only that we potentially see a budget shut-down, but also even a continuing resolution.”

What will happen when the clock strikes midnight Oct. 1 is still up in the air. Despite its preparations, OMB hopes “that this work will ultimately be unnecessary and that there will be no lapse in appropriations,” the spokeswoman said.

“There is enough time for Congress to prevent a lapse in appropriations, and the Administration is willing to accept a clean, short-term continuing resolution to fund Government operations and allow Congress more time to negotiate an agreement that invests in middle-class economic priorities and helps our entire economy grow,” she said.

Others are not so confident that the gridlock will get worked out in time.

PSC’s last-minute meeting Monday was well attended by members of the contracting community worried they’ll be refused entry to their job sites and defunded Oct. 1. And several of the speakers gave their best predictions of what will occur, ranging from a short shutdown effective Oct. 1 to a longer shutdown extending off and on with stopgap funding bringing the government in and out of closure.

California Rep. Darrell Issa, part of the House Republican contingent blamed for this shutdown saga, wouldn’t say if he thought the shutdown would happen, but he did say he’d do everything he could to vote to keep government running.

“I will vote to keep the government open,” Issa told FedScoop. “I will not leave here during a government shutdown. I will vote for something every day if I get a chance that will keep the government open and operating,” displacing the blame on to the president and Senate.

But, in a new column on his Forbes blog, Stan Collender, executive vice president at Washington, D.C.-based Qorvis MSLGROUP and former congressional budget staffer, puts the probability of a shutdown at 75 percent.

“So, with less than 10 calendar days left before the fiscal year begins, congressional Republicans still have to negotiate with each other before they even begin to negotiate with House and Senate Democrats and the White House … and there’s no obvious (or perhaps possible) resolution in sight,” Collender wrote. “That makes my 75 percent estimate of a shutdown seem optimistic.”

Greg Otto contributed to this story.

E.U. court set to overturn data Safe Harbor deal with U.S.

A European court is set to upend a long-standing data privacy agreement with the U.S., throwing into turmoil the basis under which American Internet companies have operated in the European Union for a decade and a half.

If the Wednesday opinion, written by the European Court of Justice Advocate General Yves Bot, is confirmed by the court — as is the usual practice — it will be binding in all 28 E.U. countries. It will enable national privacy regulators in E.U. member states to ignore the June 2000 U.S.-E.U. Safe Harbor Agreement on data flows. Currently that deal requires them to treat self-certified American firms as if they were following strict E.U. laws on privacy.

Bot’s opinion comes in a long-running case brought by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems against Facebook, following mega-leaker Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the NSA’s PRISM program, under which the agency had direct access to data held by Facebook and more than a dozen other U.S. Internet companies. Facebook’s European headquarters are in Ireland, but it stores data from its European customers in the U.S. When Irish regulators declined to take up Schrems’ privacy complaint, citing the Safe Harbor deal, he brought his case to the ECJ in Luxembourg.

Bot’s opinion says, in effect, that the secret mass surveillance of the Internet by the NSA that Snowden revealed, invalidates the Safe Harbor agreement.

Schrems’ lawyer Herwig Hofmann told reporters at the court that if the opinion is confirmed, Facebook and any other U.S. company that collects data on E.U. citizens “would be barred from processing its data in the U.S., but would have to process its data in a place where those data are not subject to NSA mass-surveillance,” according to Bloomberg News.

Facebook denies that it grants access to user data to U.S. agencies except in response to court orders. The company “operates in compliance with E.U. Data Protection law. Like the thousands of other companies who operate data transfers across the Atlantic we await the full judgment,” spokeswoman Sally Aldous told Bloomberg.

The court generally takes four to six months to publish its own decision, and more than 4,000 U.S. companies are certified under the Safe Harbor deal.