Sue Gordon, principal deputy director of national intelligence and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the intelligence community needs to reassess how it adopts data and digital connectedness as it faces a new inflection point, C4ISRNET reported Monday. 

“We find ourselves again at a point where we have to reimagine how this magical mission of intelligence is going to be effective, because this is a world where the threats are to and through information,” Gordon said during her keynote speech at the GEOINT 2019 Conference in San Antonio. “It is a world of ubiquitous technology, of digital connectedness and data abundance and those three things are so different and will challenge so many things that we thought,” she added.

Gordon said she believes the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has been the first agency within IC to consider how to use data and become more open to commercial innovation.

The U.S. Marine Corps wants to make the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial systems permanent in its inventory through President Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget proposal, National Defense Magazine reported Friday. The service requested $117 million in funding to buy three Reapers in the coming year and additional three for fiscal year 2021.

Officials said the UAS will enable the Marines to bring new weapons to the field and conduct missions currently unsupported by its existing systems. Capt. Christopher Harrison, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, said the service currently operates the Reapers under a contractor-owned, contractor-operated agreement.

“The MQ-9 Reaper provides increased lethality to the Marine Air-Ground Task Force by providing persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and strike capability, which the Marine Corps has not previously possessed in an unmanned system,” Harrison said. 

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the drones would support the service in surveillance and electronic warfare in the South China Sea, armed reconnaissance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Africa and power competition against Russia and China. Congress has yet to approve the funding for the FY20 budget proposal. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration unveiled an online tool to help users prepare and handle the effects of coastal flooding. The Coastal Inundation Dashboard is designed to deliver 48-hour water level forecasts, storm surge information and historic flooding data through the use of real-time information gathered from 200 coastal water level stations, NOAA said Friday. 

“The Coastal Inundation Dashboard, like OceanReports and other National Ocean Service online tools, brings vast amounts of NOAA’s data together to benefit businesses and communities that drive our nation’s blue economy,” said Nicole LeBoeuf, acting director of national ocean service at NOAA.

The agency noted that the platform will help coastal residents and decision makers validate flooding risks and allow fishermen to secure tidal information. The platform will also enable access to Storm QuickLook, an information tool built to provide cyclone track forecast and storm surge warnings to users.

The Social Security Administration will open the enrollment period for an electronic system developed to help permitted entities accept electronic consents. The Consent Based Social Security Number Verification tool works to validate if an SSN holder’s information matches social security records, the agency said Friday.

The system will require the SSN holder to provide a written and signed consent to show social security information. In addition, the platform will provide a notification if the SSN holder is deceased. Permitted entities may submit their applications from July 17 through July 31 and will be required to provide payment to assist in the development of the platform. SSA intends to launch eCBSV in June 2020 with further plans to expand the user count within six months.

Col. Stoney Trent, chief of operations at the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said that commercial entities are “poorly incentivized” to conduct AI development and testing during a recent C4ISRNET conference, C4ISRNET reported Sunday. Trent noted that the DoD needs to encourage private sector partners to develop better AI testing tools and methods that can be used in potential activities relevant to national security.

“Hopefully, the nation will be at peace long enough to not have a high bandwidth of experiences with weapons implementations, but when that happens, we need them to absolutely work. That’s a quality of commercial technology development,” he said.

Kara Frederick, associate fellow for the Center for a New American Security’s technology and national security program, said the Pentagon can also spur industry participation by providing a conducive environment for AI development. She cited better information technology environments, common data processing standards and uniform industry interaction procedures as factors to support this effort.

Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent said government agencies are showing progress around cloud efforts for collaboration and email tools, Federal News Network reported Friday. Kent, a 2019 Wash100 winner, said on the network’s Ask the CIO that application rationalization is vital since it goes in concert with data center-related initiatives. 

“By understanding what our technical environment and application environment needs are, that will help us get that last mile on the data centers both from a closure perspective as well as optimizing the ones we believe there is a reason to keep them there,” she said. “All of these things are part of our effort around re-skilling on the workforce side. We will over the summer and going into the fall complete the execution of a lot of these pilot programs and then we will turn our attention on how to scale them.” 

Kent noted that the Office of Management and Budget will issue new data on cloud and other IT modernization metrics later this month and that her office is collaborating with the Government Accountability Office and lawmakers to update the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act scorecard. She also provided updates on the quality service management office and the Trusted Internet Connections policy.