Amy Hess, executive assistant director of the FBI’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch, said the bureau has combined traditional techniques with new technological applications to speed up investigations and address today’s cyber crimes, Nextgov reported Monday.

“And some of the techniques that are used are still the same that we have been using for over 110 years,” Hess said. “But some tactics have adapted with technology and we’ve built new tools to find criminal activity on the internet,” she said at a Digital Government Institute event in Washington.

She discussed how a high-tech organized crime unit that was created to address fraudulent cyber schemes and other activities on the darknet led to the establishment of the Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement team.

Hess mentioned how technical applications helped change the bureau’s behavioral analysis unit and cited how case link analysis and technical profiling allowed the FBI to link different versions of ransomware attacks to the same authors.

The FBI created new positions for digital operations specialists, data analysts and scientists this year and Hess said the bureau intends to recruit more employees with technical skills to support investigation work.

Scott Bowman, acting deputy chief information officer at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told FedTech in an interview published Monday about the technologies FEMA employs to facilitate communications during disaster response efforts.

“Radio is the communication mechanism when we can’t use cellular. If we deploy to an area that doesn’t have readily available communications, we’ll use satellite communications. That’s kind of the last resort,” Bowman said.

He said FEMA continually tests technologies and trains staff with regard to the use of such platforms to accelerate responses when disasters strike. “We issue smartphones and laptops to our employees so that they are ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.”

Bowman noted that FEMA uses smartphones and coordinated radio spectrum to communicate with local, state and federal officials and works to protect personal information and other sensitive data through mobile device management and use of firewall software and anti-malware platforms.

He said the agency is working to upgrade its data, voice and video infrastructure and network with plans to further advance cloud migration efforts.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plans to invest in biotechnology research that applies genetic engineering to health monitoring. DARPA said Friday that its Detect It with Gene Editing Technologies or DIGET program aims to support medical response, elevate military care standards and prevent disease outbreaks and geopolitical effects.

The effort would inform medical officials on health threats across the globe to help the military conduct diagnoses and maintain physical readiness among troops. The agency intends to use a disposable, handheld pathogen-screening device and a multiplexed detector to address the program’s needs.

The multiplexed detector would work to simultaneously scan over 1K targets. Both tools are designed with adaptability to accommodate changing requirements.

DARPA will administer a proposer’s day event Dec. 11 in Atlanta to further inform interested parties about the program.

Maj. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Command’s Combined Force Space Component Command, said that plans are in place for the Department of Commerce to oversee space traffic management, Space News reported Sunday.

The department requested for $10M to establish an Office of Space Commerce to support the transition in fiscal 2020. The move comes after the Trump administration issued Space Policy Directive 3 mandating the department to handle basic space traffic management operations directly or through a partnership with a nongovernment entity.

Whiting noted at a Mitchell Institute event that the transfer of space traffic management responsibilities would allow Space Command to “focus on our military unique mission”. However, the department would still have to secure their resources to support the transition.

According to Whiting, an official from the department is meeting with 18th Space Control Squadron leaders at Vandenberg Air Force Base as part of the planned transition.

Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said that artificial intelligence efforts should focus on collating large amounts of data to be used at the tactical-edge level, C4ISRnet reported Saturday.

Smith, also the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told attendees an AFCEA event that integrating AI and machine learning into military systems must also involve connecting them to the internet to leverage a broader pool of information. He noted that platforms like the IBM Watson computer can conduct advanced AI and ML efforts due to their capacity for internet connectivity.

“You can’t do AI when the machine can’t learn from one pool of data,” he said.

According to Smith, the Marine Corps is looking for bandwidth and signtaure management capabilities that can help transmit data to Marine systems in the Philippines which may be surrounded by Chinese forces.