News

The Homeland Security Department will institute near real-time deep packet inspection of traffic coming to or from .gov federal Internet protocol addresses, DHS says in an April 19 privacy impact analysis (.pdf). Information collected under deep packet inspection can be used for secondary purposes and shared with federal, state or local law enforcement, the assessment says.

As the Agriculture Department focuses on information technology consolidation, its chief information officer and chief human capital officer have to work more closely than ever, according to Cheryl Cook, the newly appointed CIO at USDA.

In an April 12 report (.pdf), the Energy Department  office of inspector finds much to laud--noting that recent vulnerability scans turned up just 335 high- and medium-risk vulnerabilities, as opposed to a July 2011 scan that turned up about 9,000 such vulnerabilities. But tracking, prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities is problematic at the program, which is responsible for the safety of naval nuclear propulsion systems.

Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel delivered the keynote address at an AFCEA Bethesda breakfast April 19.

The House of Representatives approved the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act by an April 18 vote of 288 to 127. The bill (H.R. 624), similar to a bill of the same name the House approved in 2012, now goes to the Senate--which didn't forward the bill past committee stage last year.

Taxpayers are electronically filing returns at a slightly higher proportion than last year, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says, based on interim filing season data. In a newly released March 29 report (.pdf), TIGTA says that as of March 9, 2013, 91.3 percent of taxpayers submitted an e-filed return, as opposed to 89.5 percent of taxpayers on that date last year.

The Defense Information Systems Agency announced April 16 it has achieved initial operational capacity as the commercial cloud computing middleman for the Defense Department--despite its acknowledgment that it has yet to fully approve for DoD use any FedRAMP-authorized commercial cloud service providers.

The Federal Information Security Amendments Act of 2013 (H.R. 1163), secured a 416-0 vote with 16 representatives not present; it would amend the Federal Information Security Management Act in ways similar to legislation the House approved in 2012 but which the Senate did not take up.

The White House veto threat (.pdf), issued before the rules committee approved the final rule via voice vote, cites CISPA's (H.R. 624) broad authorization of information sharing between companies and the federal government, stating that the Homeland Security Department should be the point of entry for private sector threat information. CISPA would permit civilian, military or intelligence agencies to directly receive private sector threat information, a feature opponents say would undermine civilian control of national cybersecurity measures and amount to surveillance of Internet users.