President Donald Trump has appointed Corey Cooke as senior adviser for cyber and technology to the administrator of the General Services Administration.

GSA said Friday that Cooke will offer strategic guidance on legislation and policies related to the agency’s expanding technology transformation portfolio.

She previously served as counsel and deputy parliamentarian for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, where her work focused on antitrust, appropriations, budget, financial services, parliamentary procedure and regulatory matters.

Cooke also provided legislative advice to the House Small Business Committee on capital, entrepreneurial development, financial services, intellectual property and procurement issues as a counsel of that committee.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a juris doctorate from the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

NASA has decided to pursue its original plan to conduct the first integrated flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft without crew.

The agency said Saturday it is “technically capable” of launching astronauts aboard the Exploration Mission-1 flight test, but it would be difficult to modify plans to make way for a crewed mission at this point.

NASA launched a study in February to explore the potential advantages and disadvantages of flying a crew on EM-1 in 2019.

Engineers will apply lessons learned from the study to the first flight test and integrated systems. NASA noted this is  part of a larger effort to expand human exploration across the solar system.

“We’re considering additional ground testing of the heat shield prior to EM-1 as well as the possibility of advancing the ascent abort test for the Orion launch abort system based on findings from the study,” said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s human exploration and operations mission directorate.

Following a schedule review, NASA also decided to adjust the target launch date of EM-1 in 2019 and identify a new official launch date in the next weeks.

NASA said components for EM-1 are currently being delivered and contractors can move on to the next phase of their work for the crewed Exploration Mission-2.

SLS and Orion flight hardware are in production for both missions and test and development efforts are underway across U.S., according to NASA.

The FBI Agents Association has urged President Donald Trump to consider Mike Rogers, a CNN commentator and former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as a potential candidate to lead the FBI.

“Rogers’ unique and diverse experience will allow him to effectively lead the men and women of the bureau as we work to protect our country from criminal and terrorist threats,” FBIAA Thomas O’Connor said in a statement released Saturday.

“Rogers exemplifies the principles that should be possessed by the next FBI director,” O’Connor added.

Those principles include efforts to make FBI special agents key to the bureau’s core mission, initiative to fight crimes in the 21st century and the importance of seeking agents’ feedback on field-related issues.

Rogers’ endorsement came a week after President Trump fired James Comey as FBI director.

Rogers currently serves as host of CNN’s documentary series Declassified.

He spent 15 years in the House of Representatives, where he also served as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

He is also a former special agent with the FBI and a member of the U.S. Army.

The Department of Homeland Security‘s science and technology directorate will demonstrate eight new cybersecurity technologies built under S&T’s Transition to Practice program at a ‘Demonstration Day’ event in Washington, D.C.

DHS said Thursday that researchers at federally funded laboratories and academic research centers developed the technologies which will be offered to clients in the commercial market.

The TTP program picks potential cybersecurity technologies, from Energy and Defense Department laboratories, federally funded research and development centers, university affiliated research centers and universities, which will be developed with federal funding and incorporated into the transition-to-market program.

The Demonstration Day event will showcase the 2017 batch of products to cybersecurity professionals, developers, integrators, investors and technology companies including those from the energy, financial and government sectors.

DHS will host more demonstration day events in the future. The events are designed to help foster pilot opportunities by bridging concepts with cybersecurity professionals who can help further develop technologies into commercially viable products.

Robert Griffin, acting DHS under secretary for science and technology said the 2017 TTP cohort includes a range of cybersecurity technologies designed to boost cyber defenses of networks in the public and private sectors.

The eight new TTP technologies include:

• Cyber Human Language Technology Analysis, Reasoning and Inference for Online Threats (CHARIOT) addresses the data overload problem cyber-analysts encounter by filtering open-source social media to eliminate irrelevant topics. It was developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL).
• Quantitative Attack Space Analysis and Reasoning (QUASAR) provides visualization and quantitative analytics for determining the security impact of deploying cyber-defenses in an enterprise environment. QUASAR also was developed by MIT LL.
• A Novel Intrusion Prevention System for Android (APE) is an application for Android devices that performs deep-packet inspection and filtering of traffic entering and leaving the device, thus blocking malicious traffic and lowering its attack profile. APE was developed by the Mitre Corporation.
• Akatosh: Automated Cyber Incident Verification and Impact Analysis enables automated, real-time forensic analysis of endpoints after malware-attacks and other cybersecurity incidents by automatically maintaining detailed snapshots of host-level activity on endpoints over time. The technology was developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
• Real-Time Cyber-Physical Attack Detection (CPAD) protects power transmission and distribution and other highly sensitive control systems by performing analytics and automatically inferring underlying physical relationships to detect sensor failures, replay attacks and other data-integrity issues in real time. CPAD also was developed at ORNL.
• StreamWorks: Continuous Pattern Detection on Streaming Data supports continuous detection of emerging patterns in a system of graph-structured data, which are used to detect emerging events in massive netflow or event log data streams. It was developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
• Keylime: Enabling Trusted Platform Module-Based Trust in the Cloud enables users to securely bootstrap secrets (e.g., cryptographic keys, passwords, etc.) and continuously verify trust in their cloud computing resources without needing to trust their cloud provider. Keylime also was developed at MIT LL.
• Policy Enforcement and Access Control for Endpoints (PEACE) protects endpoint devices in an enterprise network by intercepting all new network connections and vetting them at a centralized network controller, allowing administrators to enforce network policy and control access to proactively defend their networks. PEACE was developed at the Worchester Polytechnic Institute.

Peter O’Rourke, senior adviser to the secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been appointed as a senior adviser and the executive director of the newly established office of accountability and whistleblower protection within the VA.

VA said Friday that O’Rourke will bring more than a decade’s worth of leadership experience to aid the department secretary on the use of available authorities to discipline personnel who have failed to carry out their respective duties on behalf of veterans.

He will help determine potential statutory barriers to the VA secretary’s authority to impose disciplinary actions against staff members who have jeopardized the safety of veterans.

The new executive director will also collaborate with various VA components to address veterans’ complaints regarding wrongdoings at the department and help conduct investigations to protect employees who disclose wrongdoings against potential retaliation.

“We need to hold our employees accountable for their actions if they violate the public trust, and at the same time protect whistleblowers from retaliation,” said David Shulkin, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

O’Rourke has held various leadership roles with Calibre Systems, the Association of the U.S. Army, Blackland Aerospace, Strong America Now, Accenture, George Group Consulting, the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy.

He received a bachelor’s degree in political science and government from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and a master’s degree in logistics, materials and supply chain management from the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology.