The Defense Department is planning to accept a European-developed identification standard that will allow allied military personnel and contractors to access secure military networks under specific circumstances. Multinational access considerations are part of a draft memo from DOD chief information officer Teresa Takai, said Paul Grant, director of cybersecurity policy in the DOD CIO’s office.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Michele Flournoy, oft rumored as the next Secretary of Defense, called the military’s elaborate planning process “stale,” its training too risk-averse, and its corporate culture in danger of a new “Vietnam syndrome” where it willfully forgets the lessons of the last decade of guerrilla war. Flournoy also threw cold water on the hot concept… Keep reading →

The United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union has taken the unprecedented step of adopting a standard for the Internet that would essentially permit eavesdropping on a global basis. According to a just-published piece on the RT.com web site, ITU members decided to adopt a standard, known as Y.2770, which would permit the inspection of Internet traffic.… Keep reading →

We’ve heard national security leaders at the highest levels say it repeatedly: we are not prepared for cyber war. Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, made it clear when he rated America’s readiness for addressing a catastrophic cyber attack “three on a scale of ten.” Homeland… Keep reading →

The Obama administration is getting ready to change the way the government handles cybersecurity. The White House is preparing an executive order, a draft of which is currently circulating among federal agencies for approval, mirroring cyber legislation that recently failed to get through a Senate vote. Among other things, the order shunts much of the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: While Army forces in Afghanistan have more bandwidth and gadgetry than ever, bases back home still make do with archaic copper-wire telephone switches. As the war winds down and units increasingly operate out of the US, the challenge for the Army’s CIO is to move the whole service to a single set of compatible,… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Congress sometimes has a strange way of rewarding the armed services when they actually manage to save some of the taxpayers’ money. For example, when an Air Force program manager managed to reduce the expected cost of a program in half Congress cut half the funds allocated for his program. That was the complaint… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The head of Air Force Space Command worries that tightening defense budgets and looming force structure cuts could reduce his critical space and cyber capabilities. “Because these capabilities are so vital, and the need to maintain local and global capabilities, space and cyber capability doesn’t really scale well with force structure reductions,” Air Force… Keep reading →

Defense Department and intelligence community officials have been talking about open source software as the next great thing for government technology programs for years. Why all the love? Speaking at a recent industry gathering, government officials described what they like about the software: it’s affordable, flexible, and can be quickly modified by developers because they… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: For years the Air Force has claimed to be the service most suited to understanding and operating in cyberspace and the service fought hard to be the Pentagon’s lead on cyber issues. But top officers recently admitted that the service has never answered key questions such as how it works with the other services… Keep reading →