Defense

  • Pieces of the suicide bomber\'s car were strewn across the street. Three police cars and a handful of civilian cars and shops in the area were destroyed by the blast in Kabul Monday. In a statement, President Hamid Karzi condemned the midday attack. But the incident and others like it highlight the wobbly state of security in Afghanistan as that weak nation tries to build a security force and stomp out insurgents hiding in Afghanistan\'s rugged terrain and porous borders.

    December 28, 2010
  • The last policeman standing or in this case policewoman has gone down in a strip of border towns in the Juarez Valley of Mexico. Gunmen stormed into the home of Erika Gándara in the town of Guadalupe about 6 o\'clock am. two days before Christmas and kidnapped her. The 28 year ood Gándara, was the only police officer in the municipality of Guadalupe which is about two miles from the Texas border. All the rest of the police, the men, had fled the town, giving in to the powerful drug cartels and their henchmen. No word on her condition.

    December 28, 2010
  • Self-proclaimed \"technogeeks\" at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, after determining the nature of the cybersecurity threat, have created programs to tackle them and, most importantly they say, surprise would-be cyber crooks. Officials at DARPA say the agency\'s sole mission since its inception in 1958 has been to prevent technological surprises. Two of the agency\'s recent cybersecurity programs, called CRASH and PROCEED, were created for that purpose. CRASH - the Clean-slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts program - seeks to build new computer systems that resist cyberattacks. After successful attacks they learn from the attack, adapt and repair themselves. The program evolved from a workshop DARPA held earlier this year that pulled together experts in cybersecurity and operating-system as well as infectious-disease biologists.

    December 27, 2010
  • Who\'s behind blasts at embassies across Europe. Package bombs exploded at the Swiss and Chilean Embassies and were found at others. No one immediately claimed responsibility, but authorities appeared to discount domestic anarchists or protesters. Rome\'s Mayor Gianni Alemanno \"It\'s a wave of terrorism against embassies, something much more worrisome than a single attack,\" Last month, suspected Greek radical anarchists sent fourteen mail bombs to foreign embassies in Athens.

    December 27, 2010
  • The Post reports that a draft executive order will kill the 10-year-old FCIP in March.

    December 27, 2010
  • The agency is using service level agreements to help ensure hiring managers are involved in all parts of the process. VA cut the amount of time it takes to hire a new employee by 20 days. VA hopes to get the average time down below the governmentwide goal of 80 days in 2011.

    December 27, 2010
  • Cloud computing began to take center stage in the federal IT community during the last few months of 2010. And Ed Meagher thinks that trend will continue in 2011. Meagher is the former deputy chief information officer at the Veterans Affairs Department and the Interior Department. He’s now vice president of health care strategy at [...]

    December 26, 2010
  • Language in the defense authorization bill passed this week will require the Army to submit a transportation plan to Congress in the next 90 days, addressing how 6,400 new Pentagon workers will commute to a new office with no access to Metro.

    December 24, 2010
  • The deadline for servicemembers and veterans seeking stop loss pay from September 11th, 2001 and September 30th, 2009 now have until March 4, 2011.

    December 23, 2010
  • Assistant secretary Baker said he can\'t let doctors store veterans\' data on unsecured systems in the cloud. But Baker said he wants to figure out how to solve this problem because the ability to access data anywhere, anytime is necessary. VA shutdown facilities usage of common commercial cloud applications.

    December 23, 2010
  • In a meeting with members of Congress and industry association leaders this week, DoD officials said proposed cuts to Defense contracting will only impact a small subset of the department\'s service contracting budget. DoD officials said they are looking at contracts that support staff augmentation and other similar support service contracts.

    December 23, 2010
  • March 4, 2011, is the new deadline to apply for Retroactive Stop Loss Pay.

    December 22, 2010
  • The Veterans Affairs Department continues to find rogue instances of data storage on unapproved systems in the cloud. Roger Baker, VA’s assistant secretary in the Office of Information and Technology and chief information officer, said…

    December 22, 2010
  • Former deputy CIO of Interior and VA Ed Meagher said his top story of the year is cloud computing.

    December 22, 2010