The Daily Scoop Podcast

Democratic National Committee delegates approved a party platform on Monday that scarcely mentions cybersecurity, reversing a trend from the 2020 version and mirroring the Republican party document. There were just two explicit mentions of cyber in the 2024 Democratic platform, both fairly vague. “We will remove barriers to legal access, combat hate crimes, and counter cyber threats,” the platform vows in one section. And in another it says that the party “will continue to address cyber threats by bolstering the capacity of our intelligence communities and leading the development of rules of the road for technologies like artificial intelligence.” Meanwhile, the FAA on Wednesday published a proposed rulemaking that will add new cybersecurity requirements to the “airworthiness” of a newly built plane. The Biden administration has made cyber mandates for critical infrastructure sectors a priority through the national cybersecurity strategy, which served as an acknowledgment that relying on voluntary measures did not lead to increased security. The new proposal is aimed at standardizing “the FAA’s criteria for addressing cybersecurity threats, reducing certification costs and time while maintaining the same level of safety,” according to the document.

With the long-awaited release of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic standards last week, there’s work ahead for federal agencies to make sure they’re ready for the age of quantum. Nick Polk, senior adviser on cybersecurity in the Office of the Federal CIO, joins the podcast to break down the significance of the new standards, how the White House is coordinating government and industry to take next steps, and what else agencies should be thinking about regarding their cybersecurity in the future. U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Iran of being behind attempts to infiltrate the Trump presidential campaign and said Tehran has also tried to spy on the Biden campaign, according to a statement released Monday. The statement comes after several cybersecurity companies released reports that detailed Iran-linked operations, including fake news campaigns and attempts to phish a high-ranking presidential campaign official. And, Bill Streilein, the Pentagon Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office’s first technology chief who helped set the foundation for that nascent defense tech hub, is departing the Pentagon to return to academia. In a statement shared exclusively with DefenseScoop by a spokesperson Monday morning ahead of the official announcement, CDAO leadership thanked Streilein for “his immense technical leadership over the last two years as he prepares to transition back to MIT Lincoln Labs at the end of the summer.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

As OpenAI looks to make inroads with the federal government, it has struck a deal with the U.S. Agency for International Development as the first agency partner to use its ChatGPT Enterprise platform. Anna Makanju, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs, told FedScoop that USAID plans to use the technology to help reduce administrative burden and “make it easier for new and local organizations” to partner with the agency. Meanwhile, multiple sources told DefenseScoop that Pentagon leadership selected Anduril’s Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicles as part of the second tranche of capabilities to be quickly mass-produced via the high-profile modernization effort known as Replicator. This news marks the first public report of technologies that made the Defense Department’s cut for Replicator 1.2 — and it also follows the company’s recently revealed plans to launch a new factory in Rhode Island to speed up the manufacturing of these advanced uncrewed platforms. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Pentagon cleared a major milestone Thursday on the path to instituting its cybersecurity standards program for contractors known as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0. The Department of Defense submitted a proposed rule that, once approved, would incorporate new cyber requirements into all contracts for vendors who want to do business with the U.S. military that involves sensitive but unclassified information. Under the CMMC 2.0 program, any contractor or subcontractor that does work with the DOD involving what’s referred to as controlled unclassified information or federal contract information must obtain — or in some cases self-attest to — one of three levels of CMMC compliance, depending on the sensitivity of the information involved in the work. Over the past three years, NASA has investigated more than 200 reports of either space agency devices or systems being accessed outside the country without prior authorization, which would violate internal policy regarding where mobile technology units may be brought abroad. The reports of unauthorized foreign access investigations, obtained by FedScoop through a public records request, occur when a NASA device is detected overseas without a clear prior record of a planned trip.

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management issued a new memo on Wednesday calling on federal agencies to to improve the hiring experience for job seekers and officials who hire them. Among the various calls to action in the memo, the guidance orders agencies to develop hiring objectives that are informed by data-driven workforce planning, promote collection and use of data on the time it takes to hire people, and ensure that systems used in hiring are being effectively used to measure and track the priorities in the memo. Last weekend at DEF CON, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency convened 90 teams and asked them to build autonomous agents to probe open-source code bases, find vulnerabilities and automatically fix them as part of its Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge. In the end, the 90 competitors were able to find 22 unique vulnerabilities in major open-source programs like the Linux kernel, automatically patching 15.

One of the longest-tenured CIOs in the government announced this week he is stepping away from federal service. Gundeep Ahluwalia sent a letter to staff stating that Friday will be his last day after more than eight years with the Department of Labor. In his note, Ahluwalia called the department’s biggest accomplishment during his time its “ability to attract talent and create leaders,” saying that Labor’s Office of the CIO is “a formidable leadership factory.” The White House issued a report Monday calling for more funding and interagency coordination for the advancement of international cooperation in quantum information science and technology. The document, released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, details a series of QIST-related recommendations from a subcommittee within the National Science and Technology Council, including that the U.S. government create long-term funding mechanisms for QIST collaboration and cooperation and “establish and track” global metrics for QIST and the competitiveness of “enabling technologies.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence earlier this summer released an information technology roadmap for the intelligence community. The roadmap is meant to provide technological foresight to guide the Intelligence Community to make transformative decisions about the cloud environment, cybersecurity, advanced computing, data analysis, and artificial intelligence among an array of other information technology issues. Dr. Adele Merritt, CIO for the intelligence community, is the official responsible for seeing that intelligence agencies embrace the new roadmap and vision laid out within it. In an interview, Merritt discusses the near-term and long-term goals from the roadmap, her office’s priorities, how the intelligence community is thinking about AI adoption, and more. Also: The National Institute of Standards and Technology has officially released three new encryption standards that are designed to fortify cryptographic protections against future cyberattacks by quantum computers. The finalized standards are meant to prepare for a not-so-far-off future where quantum computing capabilities can crack current methods of encryption, jeopardizing crucial and sensitive information held by organizations and governments worldwide. And, nearly two years after launching its bureau chief data officer program, the Department of State is seeing success and aiming to almost quadruple the size of its current cohort, Farakh Khan, director of communications, culture and training at the agency’s Center for Analytics, told FedScoop in a recent interview. In total, the department wants 52 bureau CDOs in place, one for each bureau or major offices across State. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Federal agencies with highly sensitive workloads now have the opportunity to use OpenAI GPT-4o. Microsoft announced that it received FedRAMP High accreditation to offer the OpenAI generative AI platform through its Azure Government cloud. The FedRAMP High designation denotes that the OpenAI services have met a higher security threshold to work with sensitive civilian datasets, including those in the fields of health care, law enforcement, finance and emergency response, among others. The General Services Administration has a health robotic process automation program, but in some cases, those bots are putting data and systems at risk, the agency’s inspector general found in a recent audit. In a new report, GSA’s Office of the Inspector General stated that the agency’s RPA program did not comply with IT security requirements to “ensure bots are operating securely and properly.” The watchdog found a slew of security issues with the bots ranging from the agency not establishing a process for removing access to decommissioned bots to a lack of monitoring and reporting bot-related activity. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Palantir and Microsoft on Thursday announced an expanded partnership giving national security leaders the ability to leverage a “first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology” to operationalize their missions. In Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments, intelligence and defense officials will be able to utilize the company’s large language models through the Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platform. On top of that, Palantir’s Gotham and Apollo products — a data-driven enterprise mission-planning platform and an operational software deployment control center, respectively — will be installed in Microsoft Azure Government, as well as in the Azure Government Secret (Defense Department Impact Level 6) and Top Secret clouds. Meanwhile, the annual Black Hat conference kicked off this week in Las Vegas, and CISA Director Jen Easterly spoke about how she views the recent CrowdStrike outage that caused millions of computers around the world to malfunction as “a useful exercise” for understanding what Chinese-linked cyber operations focused on sensitive U.S. networks could accomplish. If tensions were to escalate in the Pacific, the U.S. could see Beijing take action via the malicious campaign known as the Volt Typhoon to disrupt critical infrastructure similar to what the CrowdStrike outage caused, but at a more significant and perious scale. “A war in Asia will be accompanied by very serious threats to Americans — the explosion of pipelines, the pollution of water systems, the derailing of our transportation systems, the severing of our communications,” Easterly said. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to be her running mate for vice president. As Walz steps into the spotlight, he brings with him a deep record on cybersecurity issues, including spearheading a 2022 letter urging the Biden administration not to complicate state cybersecurity measures with federal ones and publishing his own executive order on cybersecurity, directing state agencies to upgrade their defenses and use the powers they had to protect critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. And, amid wildfire season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wants to better use satellite data to help federal agencies improve how they detect and track wildfires. A new collaborative agreement between NOAA, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service was announced last month and serves as a step toward developing specific fire-tracking tools with the needs of those agencies in mind. The partnership will maximize the exploitation of NOAA satellites for detecting fires as early as possible and tracking them better over time to make better decisions, according to a NOAA official. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.