The Daily Scoop Podcast

In 2018, a secure communications app known as Anom was released and quickly gained popularity with organized criminals who saw it as a new tool to conduct operations out of the view of law enforcement. But little did they know, the very app they believed gave them a place to hide was secretly being run by the FBI. In his new book Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation, journalist Joseph Cox explores the story of Anom and how it gave U.S. law enforcement and their global counterparts a front-row seat to the underworld. FedScoop’s Madison Alder and Rebecca Heilweil recently spoke with Cox about Dark Wire, how the FBI was able to pull the operation off, if there’s a chance for something like this to happen again, the unconventional ways government can access encrypted messaging today, and much more. Also: The National Labor Relations Board is one of the latest federal agencies to name an AI chief. David Gaston, NLRB’s assistant general counsel, will serve as the agency’s new chief artificial intelligence officer. And, two of the biggest artificial intelligence providers have signed agreements to formally collaborate with the U.S. AI Safety Institute on research, testing and evaluation of their models. The agreements, known as memorandums of understanding, were announced last week by the AI Safety Institute, which called them “first-of-their-kind” government and industry partnerships. Under those agreements, the institute, which is housed at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, will “receive access to major new models from each company prior to and following their public release” and collaborate with the companies on evaluation and risk mitigation.

Pete Waterman, a former Technology Modernization Fund adviser and U.S. Digital Services engineer, has been tapped as the new FedRAMP director, the General Services Administration announced in an internal email Monday. His appointment comes after he served at GSA as a senior technical adviser for TMF until earlier this year. Waterman, who officially started Monday, will report to Lauren Bracey Scheidt, assistant commissioner of the agency’s Technology and Transformation Services Office of Solutions, and work to “build on the FedRAMP team’s considerable transformation momentum, and guide program strategy for 2025 and beyond.” The Biden administration is reporting major progress in its quest to deploy half a million public chargers by the end of the decade. The Energy Department on Tuesday said that there were now more than 192,000 public charging ports available throughout the country and that since the start of President Joe Biden’s term, the number of public EV chargers has doubled. The announcement of those milestones came as the government announced more than half a billion dollars to nearly 30 states, two tribes and Washington, D.C. to build even more charging infrastructure. 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.

Gundeep Ahluwalia, former CIO of the Department of Labor, shares insights from his notable eight-year tenure, spotlighting significant digital transformations. He discusses his new role as chief innovation officer at NuAxis Innovations and emphasizes the need for government services to rival private sector standards. Ahluwalia also reflects on overcoming challenges during the pandemic, the importance of technology in labor services, and innovative approaches to immigration and unemployment processes, ensuring accessibility for rural communities.

The Biden administration has finalized guidance for federal agencies’ 2024 artificial intelligence use case inventories. While much of the document remains the same as the draft, the final version includes several changes, such as narrowing the scope of excluded use cases and adding a section on deadline extension requests for compliance with risk management practices. The guidance also establishes a clear deadline for inventories to be submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget: Dec. 16, 2024. Meanwhile, five leading software and tech advocacy organizations are urging Senate and House leadership to pass bipartisan, bicameral legislation aimed at improving federal agency oversight and management of software purchases before this congressional term comes to a close. In a letter shared exclusively with FedScoop, the tech groups urged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to take action on the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act by the end of this session, referring to the bill to bolster transparency and communication in IT spending across federal agencies as “must-pass legislation.” 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 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.