President Joe Biden told Congress that his administration will initiate a process to review the existing presidential policy directive on the security and resilience of the country’s critical infrastructure.

In his note to selected congressional leaders, Biden said the policy is due for an update as U.S. infrastructure increasingly adopts digitalization and automation.

Since the enactment of the directive in 2013, security threats have evolved and become more sophisticated. Revisions would protect critical facilities from being compromised by U.S. adversaries, foster private-public partnerships, and tailor a more environmentally friendly approach to automation, Biden said.

The plan would involve the Sector Risk Management Agencies of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, guided by the National Security Council and the Office of the National Cyber Director.

The national effort essentially endorses the recommendations of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas submitted in November 2021.

The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command Europe conducted on Wednesday a live-fire demonstration of a capability meant to field long-range cruise missiles through airdrop procedures at Andoya Air Station in Norway.

The demonstration for Operational Series ATREUS used an MC-130J Commando II aircraft to deploy the Rapid Dragon Palletized Effects System containing Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range weapons on a Norwegian range, Air Force Materiel Command said Wednesday.

In April 2021, ATREUS started to carry out training on capabilities to provide U.S. and NATO allies with rapid response options. The demo in Norway is the seventh ATREUS iteration conducted in the European theater.

Dean Evans, Rapid Dragon program manager, said the demo reflects the team’s efforts to rapidly deploy systems to meet the needs of warfighters.

“The Rapid Dragon Experimentation Program is appropriately named, as it advanced rapidly from a concept on paper to a live fire using a developmental prototype in 24 months. Now less than three years from the program inception, Rapid Dragon is being used by SOCEUR in the Arctic Circle,” Evans noted.

Apart from the Air Force Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation office and SOCEUR, Lockheed Martin’s missiles and fire business, Systima Technologies, ASR-Pioneer, Naval Surface Warfare Center-Dahlgren, SOCOM Det 1, Air Force Special Operations Command and Norway’s Andoya Space Center also supported the event.

National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers have come up with a technique that can simultaneously identify individual defects in microcircuits on the same chip.

The method, dubbed remote bias-induced electrostatic force microscopy, involves the application of specific alternating current voltages to neighboring wires instead of to the atomic force microscope’s tip, NIST said Thursday.

According to NIST, an AFM comes with an ultrasharp tip connected to a cantilever that “vibrates like a diving board.” Under the existing method, AC voltage is applied to the AFM tip as it screens across wires buried beneath the surface of a chip and a flaw in a wire will emerge marked by the change in the tip’s vibration.

With the new technique, researchers applied out-of-phase AC voltages to neighboring wires and were able to detect the flaws and produce clear images of defects in wires.

The technique was developed by NIST scientists Joseph Kopanski, Evgheni Strelcov and Lin You.

“Applying a voltage to the wires instead of the AFM tip may seem like a small innovation, but it makes a big difference,” said Kopanski.

“The method does not require a new instrument and could be easily implemented by the semiconductor industry,” he added.

Lindsay Steel, chief of Freedom of Information Act compliance staff at the Department of Justice’s office of information policy, said DOJ and the National Archives and Records Administration are working with the General Services Administration to come up with shared business standards for FOIA to ensure compliance with FOIA’s processing requests and procedural requirements, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

“It would also facilitate easier compliance with reporting obligations, along with improved data quality. It can also help agencies keep up with increasing requests and reducing backlogs, overall, facilitating better customer service for the public,” Steel said of those shared FOIA standards.

She said those tech standards could serve as an assessment tool and could aid agencies in their procurement of FOIA platforms. She noted that case management systems will be the initial focus area for the shared standards.

“We think this is a type of technology that is the most wide-ranging in terms of different agencies needing some type of case management tool,” Steel said. 

“This focus will allow us to define data requirements that support FOIA compliance and reporting, as well as defining workflows and perhaps some other functionality and baked-in logic that can help facilitate efficiency,” she added.