The Federal Aviation Administration has given its first-ever approval for nighttime small commercial drone operations to Industrial Skyworks for inspections of buildings and roofs in order to detect potential structural issues, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Andy Pasztor writes the FAA handed down its decision weeks before industry observers expect the agency to issue rules on the use of commercial unmanned aerial vehicle in functions such as airborne photography and inspections of power lines, pipelines and cell towers.

According to the Journal, flights will require a notice to the agency days in advance and must fulfill requirements for the drones to have anticollision lights and a traditional pilot operator with a required medical certificate and training for nighttime flights.

FAA officials project hobbyists, average consumers and commercial operators to purchase seven million drones over the next 15 years, Pasztor reports.

The Defense Information Systems Agency will start to take on a series of new mission sets from May 1 as part of its efforts to expand the agency’s scope in technology initiatives for the military.

DISA said Thursday that Tony Montemarano, DISA executive deputy director, told a workshop at the  Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium the agency looks to focus on six aspects such as cybersecurity and network defense, assured identity, mobility, cloud and software-defined networking.

Martin Gross, will lead the agency’s efforts to help replace the Office of Personnel Management‘s background investigation infrastructure.

DISA’s cyber cirectorate will also handle the development of its cyber portfolio that includes the Joint Regional Security Stacks, public key infrastructure services, network operations efforts and software defined networking.

The agency’s Defense Collaboration Services and Global Video Services programs will also deliver the Defense Department‘s web conferencing and video teleconferencing services with a focus on DISA’s planned unified capabilities service named the Defense Enterprise Office System.

The U.S. Digital Service has launched a new Web application that seeks to expedite the disability claims appeals process at the Department of Veteran Affairs, Kavi Harshawat and Mary Ann Brody wrote in a Medium blog post published Friday.

The authors are part of a USDS team within the VA that partnered with the Board of Veterans’ Appeals to develop the Caseflow Certification tool.

Harshawat and Brody wrote the Caseflow app aims to reduce the backlog of more than 450,000 pending claims at the VA using a “human-centered” paperless model.

The USDS team said the current process that was built in the 1980s resets the review of an appeal every time new evidence such as medical records is presented, subsequently delaying the appeal of veterans and beneficiaries as new health problems come up.

Approximately 80,000 veterans have unresolved claims older than five years while 5,000 veterans have pending appeals older than 10 years, the team noted.

Caseflow – built based on the U.S. Web Design Standards – works to check whether necessary documents have been added to an appeal before it moves toward certification to help reduce errors and delays associated with manual processing, Harshawat and Brody said.

The authors said the team spoke with VA employees, observed their process to better understand the current system and went back to the VA offices to test the prototype and gain feedback.

CaseFlow Certification is the first of a series of CaseFlow apps, Harshawat and Brody noted.

A House subcommittee has introduced a proposal that would require the Defense Department to implement measures designed to protect the Joint Information Environment from insider threats, Fedscoop reported Wednesday.

Billy Mitchell writes the House Armed Services Committee’s emerging threats and capabilities subpanel will incorporate the proposal into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.

The Defense Information Systems Agency-operated JIE works to consolidate all information technology systems across DoD into a single network.

Under the proposal, DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen, an inductee into Executive Mosaic‘s Wash100 for 2016, would be required to inform the House committee by the end of the year on how his office would deploy measures to safeguard JIE from insider threats.

“This briefing should address those tools currently planned for incorporation, like digital rights management, as well as identification of any gaps in the architecture where commercial tools for insider threat monitoring might be included into JIE, or into upgrades to key enabling capabilities like the Joint Regional Security Stacks or the Host Based Security System,” according to the proposal obtained by Fedscoop.

The House subcommittee’s proposal also aims to leverage the use of commercial cloud and evaluate Pentagon’s efforts to protect the Internet of Things-based devices from network vulnerabilities, Mitchell reports.

The Department of Homeland Security will conduct a two-day public meeting in May in Anaheim, California, to tackle the draft voluntary standards on the operations of cybersecurity-focused information sharing and analysis organizations.

DHS and the ISAO Standards Organization will meet with standard working groups and their heads on May 18 to discuss the draft documents, the department said in a Federal Register notice posted April 15.

The scheduled May 19 meeting seeks to gather feedback from the general public on the proposed standards.

DHS teamed up with the ISAO Standards Organization through a cooperative agreement in compliance with President Barack Obama’s 2015 executive order that requires government agencies, private firms and nonprofit organizations to facilitate data sharing on cybersecurity risks.

The University of Texas at San Antonio leads the organization, which is also supported by the Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center and the Logistics Management Institute.

The department and the ISAO Standards Organization plan to release for public comment the first set of standards in June and the final guidelines by September.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-M.D.) has unveiled details of a bill that seeks to help update the technology systems used in government process in a move to build up federal agencies’ cybersecurity postures.

Steny wrote in an opinion piece for Mercury News published Tuesday the Information Technology Modernization Act aims to invest in technology modernization efforts in order to protect private information of the U.S. citizens.

The bill would pump $3 billion in upfront investment into an IT Modernization Fund and an independent review board will award agencies grants to implement wholesale system updates.

That board will base the grants on how the modernization effort will affect the intended service and will require agencies to adopt Silicon Valley-like practices for shared services, cloud hosting and agile development, according to Hoyer.

“In such a way, just $3 billion invested today could sustain at least $12 billion worth of upgrades by 2026 — and continue supporting modernization in perpetuity,” Hoyer wrote.