Japan’s space agency is seeking to partner with its U.S. counterpart for the Artemis lunar exploration mission, SpaceNews reported Monday. Yoshikazu Shoji, director of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s international relations and research department, said in a presentation at the agency’s Washington, D.C. office that it wants to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with NASA to provide contributions to the lunar gateway.

JAXA’s areas of interest include providing components for the Gateway’s habitation module, which NASA previously announced may be built by Northrop Grumman. JAXA also plans to provide logistics support for the Gateway and send a lunar lander as well as Japanese astronauts to the moon as part of the agreement.

“We are targeting concluding this MOU in the April/May timeframe,” said Shoji. “So we will, maybe very soon, have an agreement between the U.S. and Japan.”

Previously, NASA Administrator and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient Jim Bridenstine visited Japan and entered into an agreement with JAXA for potential lunar exploration partnerships.

A bipartisan group of legislators has presented a reform bill that promotes civil rights and protection against excessive government surveillance.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., led a team to propose changes in the PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for further regulation, the senator’s office said Thursday.

The proposed bill, known as the Safeguarding Americans’ Private Records Act, would reform the PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 that allowed the National Security Agency to administer a mass surveillance program affecting numerous phone calls nationwide.

“I’m proud our bipartisan coalition is standing up for Americans’ rights and commonsense reforms to protect our people against unnecessary government surveillance,” Wyden said.

Reps. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio; Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; and Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.; and Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont, compose the bipartisan team led by Wyden.

Gen. David Goldfein, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force and 2020 Wash100 Award winner, has said that he is prioritizing efforts to establish an all-domain system driven by advanced software and machine learning.

The Air Force said Monday that the proposed Joint All Domain Command and Control system will incorporate weapons and sensors designed to operate across the land, air, sea, space and cyber domains. Previously, the Air Force partnered with the Army and Navy for a joint exercise to use JADC2 procedures to execute a simulated cruise missile attack.

“First and foremost, we have to connect the joint team,” Goldfein told attendees at a Center for a New American Security event. “We have to have access to common data so we can operate at speeds that will bring all our capabilities against an adversary.”

Speaking about the establishment of the U.S. Space Force, Goldfein said that Congress must earmark sufficient funding for the new service branch to be successful.

“You’ve got to dominate space. You will see some significant investment in space capabilities. It won’t be just enough to be in the ring and take some punches. At some point, you have to be able to punch back.”

Mason McDaniel, chief technology officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said ATF plans to shut down its remaining data center and transition all applications and data to the cloud by the end of fiscal year 2020, FedScoop reported Monday.

He discussed how a snowfall in 2016 served as a wake-up call for ATF to introduce changes to the bureau’s IT environment as well as the efforts of IT officials to communicate to the bureau’s executives the need to advance the move to the cloud.

“The way you have to communicate to the executives who are largely not technical is trying to take whatever the technical debt is you’ve accumulated through not doing stuff in the past and communicate it in business terms,” McDaniel said. “Again if that data center goes away, then all ATF systems drop offline with no primary and failover and no estimate for times to restore.”

McDaniel cited the need to agencies to invest in invisible IT, his team’s efforts to come up with a governance framework to facilitate the cloud adoption and the start of the transition of data and apps to the Amazon Web Services’ cloud platform.

ATF “is a great example of how thinking big can allow government agencies successfully manage the move to cloud, and retire decades of technical debt,” said Dave Levy, vice president of U.S. government at AWS and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner. “We remain committed to supporting the ATF’s critical mission and for technology to continue driving positive mission outcomes.”

Dean Souleles, chief technology adviser at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the U.S. intelligence community is advancing the use of artificial intelligence and one of the organizations adopting AI is the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, Defense One reported Monday.

“Imagine that your job is to read every newspaper in the world, in every language; watch every television news show in every language around the world. You don’t know what’s important, but you need to keep up with all the trends and events,” Souleles said. “That’s the job of the Open Source Enterprise, and they are using technology tools and tradecraft to keep pace. They leverage partnerships with AI machine-learning industry leaders, and they deploy these cutting-edge tools.”

Souleles discussed how AI helps the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency send alerts and navigation data to sailors and mariners and how the technology allows the National Security Agency identify patterns in signals intelligence data.

He also cited training data collection and labeling as one of the challenges to AI adoption.