Information sharing

  • \"A resounding victory for Edward Snowden.\" That\'s how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the passage of the USA Freedom Act late yesterday. The legislation, signed by President Barack Obama, will phase out the NSA\'s bulk phone records collection program over the next six months. Instead, phone records will stay at the phone companies and the government will need a warrant to access them. Stewart Baker is a partner at the law firm Steptoe and Johnson. He was the first assistant secretary for policy at Homeland Security and earlier spent two years as the NSA\'s general counsel. He also publishes a podcast on cyber law policy. He joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive to talk about what\'s next for the NSA.

    June 03, 2015
  • President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order giving agencies the ability to recommend economic sanctions against cyber attackers and their supporters. As the President signed this latest order, Congress seems closer than ever to passing a cyber information sharing bill.

    April 02, 2015
  • The government has started releasing comprehensive indexes of data showing how agencies operate and conduct oversight. That's in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Sunlight Foundation. It's been more than a year in the making, and most of the data has never been publicly identified before. Matt Rumsey, the director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency at the Sunlight Foundation, joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive with more on just what's in those indexes.

    March 20, 2015
  • By CALVIN WOODWARD Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department’s internal watchdog has found that many department employees are not preserving emails for the public record as required by the government. That could mean…

    March 12, 2015
  • The agencies that account for 90 percent of Freedom of Information Act requests received by the federal government continue to struggle in processing those requests in a timely manner, according to a new report from the Center for Effective Government.

    March 10, 2015
  • A new secure online collaboration tool is up and running at the Defense Department. The open source solution enables access card users to chat, message and conference securely with others around the world. Karl Kurz is the program manager for Defense Collaboration Services at the Defense Information Systems Agency. He joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to explain more about the new tool and what came before it.

    March 09, 2015
  • The forthcoming Cyber Threat Intelligence Center would not only serve as a centralized hub for cyber intelligence, but also would fuse cyber information with other intelligence sources and serve as a central point for declassifying secret data about cyber threats.

    February 25, 2015
  • Information sharing is a two-way street with road hazards in both directions. President Barack Obama held the first White House Cybersecurity Summit last week and issued an Executive Order with hopes of fostering a more open exchange between government and the private sector. Jeff Schilling is the chief security officer for FireHost. He once directed the global Security Operations Center under U.S. Army Cyber Command and has seen the challenges from both sides. On the Federal Drive with Tom Temin, he pointed out cybersecurity was only one of the topics the glitterati actually discussed.

    February 19, 2015
  • The White House announced Tuesday the creation of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Center to improve coordination and collaboration of information about computer network security. The Director of National Intelligence will oversee the CTIC, and it will be modeled after the National Counterterrorism Center.

    February 11, 2015
  • A call for more transparency in federal spending, the Taxpayers Right To Know Act would create a central database for financial data and performance metrics for every federal program. The bill cleared the House and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last year. But it has yet to have a full vote in the Senate. Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition, joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive to offer one view on this bill.

    February 06, 2015
  • The hackers that went after Sony wanted the company to know it was under attack and they wanted to do it harm, says Rob Roy of HP Enterprise Security Products. In a new commentary, Roy says the attack was a watershed moment in cybersecurity, marking a change in attackers' motives.

    January 22, 2015
  • Criminal justice agencies collect a variety of information and use it in multiple ways. Their datasets are often large and complex. And many crime analysts find it difficult to present this data in an easy-to-understand way. That's the problem the National Institute of Justice is tackling with its new Data Visualization Challenge. Dr. Nancy Merritt, senior policy advisor at NIJ, joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive with more details on the challenge.

    January 09, 2015
  • Agencies should consider these six steps to help keep their employees safe and informed during emergencies, says Aviv Siegel, the CTO and co-founder of AtHoc, in a new commentary for Federal News Radio.

    January 07, 2015
  • Agencies haven't quite found the right balance between cybersecurity and accessibility when it comes to their data. It's been two years since the White House issued its strategy on information sharing and safeguarding. And the Information Sharing Environment continues to steer efforts to achieve the administration's goals. Kshemendra Paul is the program manager of the ISE. In part 2 of his interview with executive editor Jason Miller on the Federal Drive, Paul says there is movement on the security and ease of access question.

    December 30, 2014