The Wrap: Warner’s Election Blues; Bright Spots in Skinny Budgets; Cyber Strategy Progress
Welcome to The Wrap for Tuesday, March 5!
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From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:
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Warner’s Election Blues
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is looking at 2024 elections operations and doesn't like what he sees. The senator – who knows more than most about possible mischief from his perch as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee – today pounded home his concerns about the possibility of AI technologies being used for malign impact, and possible interference from overseas. “If you asked me what are a couple of my hot-button issues that I am concerned about, one of the ones that comes first to mind for me is election security this year,” Sen. Warner said today during a Professional Services Council (PSC) event. “I would even argue the point that we are less prepared in March of 2024 under President Biden for foreign malign influence interference in our election than we were in March 2020 under President Trump,” he added. Why would adversaries mess with U.S. elections? Because they know it’s cheaper to interfere in an election than it is to “buy tanks and guns and ships and planes,” the senator said.
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Super Tuesday Cyber Calm
On the brighter side of election security news , a senior official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told reporters today that the agency had not seen as of late morning any credible cybersecurity-related threats to Super Tuesday election operations around the country. Asked about some social media outages reported this morning on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms, the CISA official replied that the agency was aware of the outages, but not of any “malicious cyber activities” that would have caused them. More generally on the election security front, the CISA official discussed the ongoing potential of problems arising from AI-generated robocalls, ransomware attacks, and distributed denial of service attacks as areas of concern but did not tie any of those to today’s elections.
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Tech Budget – USDA
Based on the first six FY2024 appropriations bills released by the Senate and House Appropriations committees, belt-tightening across agencies and in some technology project agendas may become all the rage at least until the Sept. 30 end of the current fiscal year. But there are some brighter spots within the gloom for technology modernization and citizen service improvements. One of those appears to be at work in the Agriculture Department’s proposed budget, which features $58 million of funding to make improvements to USDA’s Farmer.gov website using an enterprise data analytics platform and toolset. The project – for which the agency still needs to submit some planning work – would enable USDA customers to accomplish a ton of interactions with the agency including making program applications, receiving program payments, and enabling electronic income reporting between USDA and the IRS.
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Tech Budget – FAA
And over at the Transportation Department, the Federal Aviation Administration is in line for a $1.2 billion funding boost for FY2024 in part to help pay for a hiring surge for air traffic controllers, along with some pressing technology fixes . Those include funding to improve the condition and reliability of critical IT and telecommunications legacy systems – such as the NOTAM system. A NOTAM system?outage ?in early 2023 caused the FAA to pause all flights nationwide, delaying thousands of flights in the U.S. and triggering the first nationwide ground-stop since Sept. 11, 2001. The tech-fix category features: $65 million for the critical Terminal Flight Data Manager, $69 million for DataComm programs which will improve the efficiency of air traffic control and lead to fewer flight delays, $33 million for airport ground surveillance, $340 million for telecommunications infrastructure, and $29 million for NOTAM.
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NCD Coker Checking his List
It’s been a really quick year since the Biden-Harris administration released its National Cybersecurity Strategy, and National Cyber Director Harry Coker is pointing to some solid progress on that to-do list since then. In a March 4?blog post , Coker said Federal agencies have made progress on the 69 initiatives identified in the first iteration of the?strategy’s implementation plan released in July , and noted that more than 20 of those tasks are already completed. There’s more to come later this year, the NCD said. “While the Strategy is enduring, its implementation is iterative. We’ll be sharing the next version of the implementation plan soon,” Coker said.
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Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy. And finally, please hit the news tip jar [with leads, breaking news, or simply your two cents] at [email protected] .