Jose Arrieta, chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said HHS plans to team up with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to leverage the HHS Accelerate blockchain procurement system in identity management, Federal News Network reported Thursday. Arrieta said he plans to meet with DISA officials to discuss a pilot project to link the blockchain tool to a user’s mobile phone or wearable device to better track behavioral data for identity verification.

“They have the wireless device, they have the behavioral capability to actually determine identity with a high-level confidence score. Now they need a network of nodes to test that,” he said of the proposed project.

He said the pilot project, if successful, could enable first responders to skip multi-factor authentication to establish connectivity to secure networks. Arietta said HHS is also in discussions with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army to invest in the blockchain technology to facilitate data processing and sharing operations.

This article was written by Clay Goldwein and John Nemoto of CGI Federal. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) earlier this month released its 2020 to 2025 Strategy document which focuses on three main goals, the third of which outlines how the agency will invest in technology and partnerships to confront emerging threats. Based on this reveal, we thought it topical to outline not only the mission-specific challenges that are driving this IT modernization but also ways to help ease CBP’s transition to a secure cloud environment—a.k.a. the true enabler of IT modernization—as it shapes the future of the agency. In this article we’d like to outline what we believe are CBP’s challenges to this new approach, and in part 2, we’d like to follow up with a phased strategy ideally suited to help transition CBP to a hybrid cloud environment.

The opportunity for IT evolution at CBP is vast, as some of CBP’s systems are older and do not adequately support the 24/7 nature of CBP’s mission. Additionally, current systems were not designed to fully leverage the massive amounts of data available to agents and officers today. In this environment, IT modernization is not a luxury, but rather a necessity. For instance, Border Patrol agents would benefit significantly from more integrated, highly available systems with increased accessibility or offline capabilities in remote areas with limited connectivity. This sort of technology needs to be fully portable and connected, fitting on a phone or tablet rather than a laptop; and should help agents and officers collect data seamlessly and turn this data into near immediate tactical knowledge.

CBP’s IT modernization project must help the agency solve those everyday issues in addition to back-office (e.g., financial systems) applications that are sorely in need of upgrades. A shared platform featuring a standardized enterprise architecture will help agents and officers better solve challenges they face every day, as well as unseen ones they will encounter in the future.

While it’s important to implement a results-driven approach, it’s equally important to address the cultural challenges sure to follow in addition to the never-ending slew of legislative and regulatory changes. CBP and its technology partners will need to thread the needle just so to successfully help agents and officers navigate this culture change.

The critical piece to overcoming the cultural challenges will be effective, consistent, and frequent communication with the right people.  Within CBP, this process involves opening a two-way dialogue between CBP’s IT community and the Offices that execute the agency’s mission. From the operator at the border who depends on technology to perform their job duties on a daily basis to the Executive Assistant Commissioner who needs the right information to make financial decisions, establishing an aligning narrative across CBP’s strategic, operational, and tactical elements, where all CBP stakeholders “buy in” to the proposed solution, must be performed in parallel with implementation.

CBP will continue to reap the benefit from fully embracing SecDevOps as an incremental approach that can support a transition to implementation of an Agile methodology. Utilizing this approach shortens the systems development life cycle while rapidly delivering new features, adding repeatability and precision with regard to testing new applications.  It improves uptime, reduces time to market, and leads to higher quality software while reducing technical debt, positioning CBP to better address evolving challenges on the front lines. SecDevOps can also have a positive effect in the implementation of a cloud environment.

Cindy Daniell, director of research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said NGA plans to use machines and other technologies to enable analysts to automate routine tasks to focus on the decision-making process, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.

“This is, the way we see it, a true human-machine partnership. It’s harnessing the scale, the speed, the power of the computer processing and the human cognition both doing the best at their particular capabilities,” Daniell said Monday at a panel during the GEOINT 2019 symposium.

She said the agency plans to advance the human-machine partnership through handheld devices designed to process geospatial intelligence data for warfighters on the battlefield and carry out their missions.

“They all need to be able to have geospatial intelligence to interact with their world. At Research, we see the future that the NGA will deliver persistent, real time, on demand, secure GEOINT to the field for tactical and strategic missions,” said Daniell.

Daniell said NGA is developing an analytic tool that could help troops identify and locate adversaries.

The Department of Energy teamed up with researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory to create a cybersecurity technology to secure an electric power grid through the visualization of intelligence data. The Structured Threat Intelligence Graph is intended to allow utility operators and owners to share, build and edit cyberattack information, INL said Wednesday. 

“This software helps analysts process new threat information rapidly and makes it easier for them to find or create relationships between pieces of information,” said Jed Haile, cybersecurity researcher and tool developer at INL. 

The team has also collaborated with Southern California Edison to test the application on Southern California’s 50,000-square mile electricity grid. INL released the platform’s open-source code on GitHub to encourage other developers to update the technology and help secure U.S. critical infrastructure systems.

NASA plans to address the digging limitation of the InSight Mars robot’s heat probe that results from structures blocking the lander’s cameras. The heat probe is a hammering spike originally geared to dig up to 16 feet under Martian ground. However, misplaced support structures have limited the probe to no more than 12 inches of digging, the space agency said Wednesday.

A team of scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have analyzed the problem for months and are hypothesizing the cause to be a lack in soil friction around the InSight lander. JPL is working to address the problem with the German Aerospace Center, provider of the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package that the probe is part of.

NASA personnel plan to use the lander’s robotic arm to move the structures out of the camera’s field of view. The space agency may push through with the plan in late June. Tilman Spohn, HP3 principal investigator at the German Aerospace Center, said using the robotic arm would address the lack of soil friction, based on calculations.

Information technology professionals are calling on the government to invest in blockchain and take steps to better understand the technology, Federal Times reported Thursday.

Alan McQuinn, senior policy analyst for the IT and Innovation Foundation, said that the U.S. needs to be more competitive and promote the use of blockchain, which can help simplify auditing and supply chain operations for large agencies like the departments of Defense and State during the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology Forum in Washington, D.C.

“You have a network where people often have to submit paper files that can be faked and then it’s up to the government agency to decipher whether something is real or not,” said McQuinn. 

According to Cointelegraph, China has launched efforts to establish a city centered around blockchain technology.