Officials said the Air Force and the Navy are accelerating efforts to deliver new platforms designed to replace legacy systems of the U.S. nuclear triad, National Defense reported Friday.

Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, director of strategic systems programs for the Navy, said the service considers the procurement of Columbia-class submarines a top acquisition priority and plans to have the lead boat ready by 2031.

“Every Ohio that we have to pull up, we will get a Columbia just in time,” Wolfe said. “We pushed that modernization program as far as we can push it.”

The Air Force is pursuing the ground-based strategic deterrent program to replace its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles.

“That acquisition is going very well right now … but we have a long way to go and we have to stay consistent,” Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration at the Air Force, said of GBSD. “We have to continue to be committed to this. And given the current budgetary situation that we’re in, there’s always going to be risks to it.”

Another leg of the triad is the long-range bomber. The Air Force plans to procure more than 100 units of the Northrop Grumman-made B-21 Raider aircraft. The service plans to conduct the initial flight test of B-21 by the end of 2021 and bring the aircraft online by mid-2020s.

Suzette Kent, federal chief information officer and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, said the Federal Data Strategy will help establish a data reskilling pilot in addition to delivering a sense of data literacy to federal employees, Federal News Network reported Friday.

“The data science reskilling is about people who have the hands-on roles in delivering this and the data activities at agencies,” Kent said. “So what are ways that we can upskill and add to people who already understand the mission and the data that the agency has, and bring a finer point to some of those specific skills that we’re seeing in the market and that we need to have.”

Kent noted that the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management are performing “tactical work” to help agencies recruit professionals with data skills.

OMB released in December the final draft of the Federal Data Strategy, which includes four new objectives agencies need to meet in 2020.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that it will integrate the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Privacy Framework into its enterprise risk portfolio to help manage privacy risks.

CFTC said Tuesday the Privacy Framework is a voluntary tool meant to help organizations improve individuals’ privacy through enterprise risk management.

“I am proud the CFTC is taking the lead by becoming the first federal agency to adopt the NIST Privacy Framework,” said CFTC Chairman Heath Tarbert. “Adopting this framework will put us on the cutting edge of data privacy protection.”

NIST issued the final version of the framework in January four months after it released the preliminary draft. The framework is composed of core, profiles and implementation tiers and seeks to secure individuals’ privacy through three efforts, including facilitating communications with regulators and clients about privacy practices.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has recently received control over a pilot program of a camera platform intended to oversee the border between the U.S. and Canada and prevent illegal activity.

The Slash CameraPole uses four infrared cameras to observe its surroundings and employs motion detection technology to avoid false results from wildlife, the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday. Capable of wireless data retrieval, the Slash CameraPole stores data concerning smuggling and illegal crossings for law enforcement officers.

The camera system is resistant to damage from small arms and is powered by solar cells and a backup fuel cell. The pilot’s two Slash CameraPoles are stationed at Swanton Sector, which includes New York, New Hampshire and Vermont. The pilot program was formerly managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory and private firms worked together to develop the Slash CameraPole platform that will be used to monitor a 1,349-mile stretch of land known as the ‘Slash.’

The Slash is part of the 5,525-mile-long border between the U.S. and Canada and is under the jurisdiction of the International Boundary Commission.

“Having the Slash CameraPole system up there, watching for illegal activity around the clock, keeps us all safer,” said Jonathan Mcentee, program manager at the DHS S&T.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining the connection between NSO Group Technologies, an Israeli spyware company, and recent intelligence and cybersecurity incidents involving governments and American corporations and civilians, according to four people knowledgeable about the investigation, Reuters reported Friday.

In May 2018, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ phone began sending out an unusually high amount of data for months after receiving a video from a WhatsApp account associated with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In a report compiled last November, FTI Consulting cited NSO’s Pegasus and Hacking Team’s Galileo spyware as being capable of extracting information.

FTI Consulting, which was hired by Amazon to assess the situation, also stated that the incident was conducted “possibly via tools procured by Saud al Qahtani,” who was a known friend of the crown prince as well as the president of the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones, at the time Bezos’ phone was hacked.

Last October, Facebook filed a lawsuit against NSO for allegedly hacking 1.4K Facebook users through a vulnerability in Facebook’s WhatsApp instant messaging platform, according to two people who spoke about the subject with agents or Department of Justice personnel. NSO said that it was not aware of any inquiry by U.S. law enforcement regarding Facebook.

NSO’s website states that its spyware is intended to investigate terrorism and help governments keep the public safe. The FBI is attempting to ascertain whether government officials of the U.S. or allied countries have been hacked through the use of NSO software as well as which nations perpetrated the cyber attacks.

NASA has decommissioned its Lockheed Martin-built Spitzer Space Telescope after over 16 years of observatory operations.

The agency said Friday it launched Spitzer in 2003 and was able to study and discover asteroids, planetary collisions and the TRAPPIST-1 system of Earth-sized planets through the telescope. 

The platform, operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is one of NASA's Great Observatories along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. All of the data gathered through Spitzer are available for public access in a data archive, according to NASA.

"This Great Observatory has also identified some important and new questions and tantalizing objects for further study, mapping a path for future investigations to follow,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate. “Its immense impact on science certainly will last well beyond the end of its mission."

NASA originally intended to conclude Spitzer’s operations in 2018 in preparation for the launch of the Northrop Grumman and Ball Aerospace-manufactured James Webb Telescope. The decommissioning was rescheduled to make room for further preparations for Webb’s launching, which is currently slated for 2021.

The Federal Communications Commission intends to allot $20B in funds to support the fielding of high-speed broadband networks in rural areas.

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund seeks to implement gigabit-speed broadband services within the next 10 years via a two-phase reverse auction effort, FCC said Thursday.

The project's initial phase will prioritize the integration of broadband services with a fixed speed of 25 megabits-per-second to unserved areas, while the second phase will cover partially-served locations. FCC has estimated that around 6M rural homes will be covered under phase 1.

The agency will provide $16B for the first phase of the program, while $4.4B will be given for phase 2.

In line with the funding opportunity, FCC is looking for bidders that can commit to low-latency services and meet minimum speed requirements.