Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, NGA’s chair, said governors across the nation are ready to work with the Trump administration and the 115th Congress on issues like cybersecurity and more over the course of 2017.

“We have a simple message: Governors are here, we are ready to work with you on an agenda that makes lives better for the people who we all serve,” McAuliffe, a Democrat, said during remarks at the “State of the States” address at the Newseum in Washington. “While partisanship grinds Washington to a halt, we are Democrats, we are Republicans, and we are independents who every day work across party lines to get things done.”

McAuliffe’s initiative as NGA chair centers around helping state governments “meet the [cybersecurity] threat.” In October, he announced the partnership of 26 states that had pledged to work together on a regional cybersecurity initiative.

In 2016, McAuliffe said Virginia was hit with 70 million cyberattacks — or one every four seconds. Turning his focus to Washington, McAuliffe said states should collaborate with the federal government on critical infrastructure protection.

“We can work together to protect our critical infrastructure and data from cyberattacks,” McAuliffe said. “These are real opportunities to bring the pragmatic bipartisan leadership that we practice in our states every day in Washington.”

Sandoval, a Republican, said he appreciated McAuliffe bringing the focus to cybersecurity — something he acted on last week in his own State of the State address with the announcement of the creation of a Nevada cyber-defense center.

“The foundation of today’s economy, national security and the daily operations of government are increasingly dependent upon the security and reliability of communications technology and other digital infrastructure,” Sandoval said.

Sandoval called on the federal government to look to states as primary sources of information and intelligence around cybersecurity, and “full fledged partners” in cyber-intelligence sharing.

On Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, the NGA released its “We the States” platform, which also touched on collaboration with the federal government on cybersecurity.

The plan calls on the Trump administration to provide states with flexibility with regard to cybersecurity, both through collaboration and information sharing. In that plan, governors requested “clear guidance” on the assistance that would be offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies in the event of a cyberattack that exhausts the capabilities of state and local resources.

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The 113th Congress has yet to adjourn, but House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, R-Pa., convened a hearing to start looking at the upcoming 2015 reauthorization bill for the Federal Aviation Administration.

One component of that reauthorization, however, dominated the conversation — the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen.

“Aviation. We invented it,” Shuster said. “We’ve been the leader in aviation for the last 80 years, but we are now starting to lose our edge. If we don’t do something now, we are going to continue to lose our lead in the world when it comes to aviation. On my watch, I don’t want that to happen, and I’m going to continue to work to be able to craft something.”

Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa.

The FAA is currently in the process of rolling out NextGen; however, the planned overhaul of the nation’s air traffic and transportation system remains significantly behind schedule and over budget. The agency’s official target date is 2020. If put in place according to plan, the program would bring runway optimization, enhanced satellite-based communication and performance-based navigation to make routes more efficient, less costly, and safer for pilots and passengers.

“FAA is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar effort to improve the efficiency of the nation’s air traffic control system through NextGen,” FAA Inspector General Calvin Scovel said at the hearing. “FAA’s acquisition reforms have fallen short in improving the delivery of new technologies and new capabilities.”

With new technology as a focal point of the NextGen initiative, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said the FAA needed to ensure that its procurement and acquisition processes can support the purchases it needs to make, and that it can enforce and justify the mandate it made for airlines to be equipped with the updated technology.

“[The FAA is] worse than the Pentagon on procurement,” DeFazio said.

According to Scovel, more than 220,000 aircraft are subject to the FAA’s mandate requiring they be equipped with ADS-B Out technology, which determines an aircraft’s position in real time based on satellite information.

“That will move up and down, but we believe that between now and 2020, those numbers will hold generally firm in that range,” Scovel said.

Although equipping planes with ADS-B technology means they can be monitored in real-time, National Air Traffic Controllers Association President Paul Rinaldi said the planes will still need to employ traditional radar monitoring systems due to the fact that the new systems can be turned off with the flip of a circuit.

“ADS-B shows a tremendous amount of value, but we have to have the necessary redundancy [for safety reasons],” Rinaldi said.

Despite the necessity for airlines and the FAA to invest in new technology to make NextGen a reality, Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-Ill., said finances weren’t the only issue at stake here.

“It seems to me that there are two different issues: One is the funding, one is the timing,” Esty said. “We need to find a way to get this done.”

With the number of benchmark items that need to be achieved by 2020, Scovel said it was “a tall order” to suggest that NextGen would be completed on time.

“What happens between now and then is anyone’s game,” Scovel said.

Although the conversation did center around NextGen, members and witnesses did mention the need to consider the integration of unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace, which the FAA is due to consider by the conclusion of 2015. However, the agency’s inspector general has reported that the agency is behind schedule.

Shuster, the committee chair, won re-election earlier this month in western Pennsylvania’s ninth district with nearly 64 percent of the vote. The Republican Steering Committee for the 114th Congress has recommended that he maintain the reign of the House Transportation Committee.

Although Shuster remained optimistic about the committee, the FAA and industry’s effort to improve the NextGen rollout, he said the funding issue was one that not even Congress could solve completely.

“The process doesn’t work as it should,” Shuster said. “The funding’s not there, and if you think Congress is going to be able to fix this, we’re not going to be able to, so we need to look at something different from the funding standpoint, and we have to do it together.”

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Chuck McGann, CISO of the United States Postal Service

USPS Chief Information Security Officer Chuck McGann confirmed the loss of the digital Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) database, but he said a hard copy record of each incident has been retained in the agency’s information security office in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“The requirement was for us to have this information,” McGann told FedScoop in a phone interview. “We had the information. We pointed them to the five file cabinets where we have physical copies of all of the incidents.”

USPS’s data management team backs up its critical databases off-site; however, the CIRT database was classified as an essential database rather than a critical one, according to the IG’s report, which said analysis of historical data and security record maintenance, like CIRT, is considered essential.

“We are issuing this alert to make the Postal Service aware of the need to modify its current backup and storage requirements to ensure that essential, but not critical, data is available,” the report said.

The platter, the magnetic circle in the middle of a hard drive, was responsible for the hardware failure at the United States Postal Service in April 2014 that resulted in the loss of the digital CIRT database. (iStock Photo)

McGann said the specific failure came in the platter of the hard drive containing the backup and the production portions of the CIRT database – the platter is the circular portion of a hard drive where data is magnetically stored.

“Did the platter fail? Yes it did,” McGann said. “Did we in security know that the backup was on the same platter as the production, no we didn’t. Maybe we should’ve. I’m not saying yes or no; I’m not going to throw anybody under the bus.”

It is common practice, McGann said, for the production and backup portions to be stored on separate hard drives, but in this case, it was simply left unchecked.

“Operations 101 says that you don’t keep your backup on the same device that you keep your production,” McGann said. “I guess it was one of those things where, in hindsight, we should’ve checked.”

However, McGann did not know until the failure that backup and production were located on the same platter. In fact, around the time of the hardware failure, McGann and his team were working to migrate the Postal Service to a new system.

The migration was in the works for a while, McGann said, and the agency also discovered the hardware failure during the migration process. Now, in the new system, the agency has backups handled by a separate corporate entitity. In addition, USPS makes its own backup of the information as well.

In the end, due to the existence of the physical backup of the CIRT database, and due to the speed with which the agency addressed the hardware failure, the impact was minimal.

“Although the Postal Service took immediate corrective action for this database by implementing backup procedures on separate hardware, there may be other unidentified databases that are not backed up on separate hardware that could result in a loss of data and the inability to comply with record maintenance requirements,” the report said.

In response, the agency will conduct an audit of its other systems to determine whether or not a similar problem could happen in another database or another system elsewhere in the agency.

The initial hardware failure was discovered during the fiscal year 2014 information technology internal controls audit conducted by Kimberly Benoit, deputy inspector general for information technology and data analysis.

In its final recommendations, the IG recommended that McGann prohibit backups from being stored on the same hardware as the entity being backed up. These changes will be implemented by April 2015, the report said.

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Amen Ra Mashariki, 38

Chief Technology Officer, Office of Personnel Management

Amen Ra Mashariki — a graduate of the Brooklyn Technical High School, one of the top technical schools in the country, and a former software engineer at the once mobile phone giant Motorola — has always been a tech guy. But in the federal space, the 38-year-old chief technology officer at the Office of Personnel Management is just starting to craft his legacy.

Amen Ra Mashariki, the CTO for OPM, has been in the federal government for about two years. Despite that, Mashariki looks to use technology to solve some of the world’s problems. (Photo: FedScoop)

“[Motorola was] really where I cut my teeth on technology and really engaged a lot of smart people and did some fun stuff,” Mashariki said.

After he got his doctorate, Mashariki’s nephew was diagnosed with leukemia — an event that caused him to think about how one could use technology to be actionable. At first he thought he would use technology to address medical issues; however, when a friend of his applied for the White House Fellows Program in 2012, Mashariki thought Washington, D.C., was a place where he could make an impact.

As a fellow, Mashariki was placed at OPM. About a year later, after being exposed to the importance of public service from the fellows program, Mashariki was kept on board at OPM as the agency’s first CTO.

“OPM is really in the business of taking on some really tough IT challenges,” Mashariki said. “After my year [at OPM as a fellow] was up, I had the opportunity to stay on as OPM’s first CTO.”

During his first 100 days at OPM, Mashariki worked with the agency’s various stakeholders to develop its first IT strategic plan. Almost a year into the job, Mashariki said he wasn’t going anywhere and will continue implementing the plan.

“Really smart folks came together with the business units and began to create what we saw as the solution. What’s important to me now is the implementation,” Mashariki said. “It’s not necessarily innovative, but it’s certainly important and it’s something that OPM hasn’t had is that sort of structure.”

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According to an interpretation of the special rule for model aircraft posted by the FAA on Regulations.gov, a model aircraft must be flown as a hobby, not weigh more than 55 pounds, not interfere with manned aircraft, not fly within five miles of an airport without prior permission and adhere to a set of community-based guidelines.

In the interpretation, the FAA included this chart classifying the difference between recreational and commercial use of model aircraft.
(Credit: FAA Interpretation of the Special Rule for Model Aircraft)

The special ruling for model aircraft comes from section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which defined them as any unmanned aircraft that fly within the line of sight of the person operating them for hobby or recreational purposes.

Under the act, if an aircraft meets the criteria of a model aircraft, it is not subject to further FAA ruling. In the new interpretation, the agency said if a remote controlled craft does not meet the requirements, it will be classified as an unmanned aircraft and must adhere to any future regulations.

So far, the posting on Regulations.gov has warranted more than 29,000 comments from individuals, anonymous users, think-tanks, organizations and academies.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said in its comment the interpretation of the rule for model aircraft is too narrow and could place unnecessary burdens on recreational model aircraft users.

Specifically, the foundation cites the prohibition on the use of first person view goggles by the FAA because the technology would impede the operators direct line of sight, one of the main classifications for model aircraft.

Instead of issuing blanket interpretations, like prohibiting the use of the goggles for model aircraft, Alan McQuinn, a research assistant for ITIF and co-author of the foundation’s comments to the FAA, told FedScoop the agency should look at new technologies on a case-by-case basis.

“We recommend that the FAA not create rules to stop technologies but address them as each of them come into light, because a lot of this technology is still growing,” McQuinn said. “We recommend that the FAA work with community-based standards that already exist around these technologies and are evolving around these technologies to create a ruling for each of them.”

ITIF also encouraged the agency to use another approach to help distinguish between commercial and noncommercial UAS and establish rules to qualify each before issuing guidance on drones in 2015.

“The distinction is tenuous because if they’re regulating for safety, a drone right now being flown by someone who is just a model aircraft enthusiast who takes it up 300 feet and takes a picture of his house, that’s totally legal,” McQuinn said. “But if he takes that picture and sells it, that’s a $10,000 fine. That is a little ridiculous. So if they’re using those standards going forward, we will continue to file comments and advocate for looking at drones in a commercial light that gives them the ability to innovate within the spectrum.”

The Academy of Model Aeronautics also found some areas of the FAA’s interpretation objectionable and said the language of the law — which refers to community-based guidelines, some of which were created by the AMA —required no interpretation.

“The interpretive rule specifically addresses model aircraft operated within the safety programming of a nationwide community-based organization, AMA,” the academy said in its comments. “[The FAA] effectively establishes new rules to which model aircraft were not previously subjected.”

AMA also requested the FAA extend the comment period on the Regulations.gov posting from July 25 until Sept. 23. The FAA granted that request.

The agency’s model aircraft interpretation comes as it plans to release guidelines for the use of unmanned aircraft systems, commonly referred to as drones, in the coming months. The agency’s inspector general reported last month, however, that the guidelines could be delayed.

There have also been reports of an executive order in the works from President Barack Obama that would create a set of privacy guidelines for commercially operated drones.

According to a source familiar with the potential executive order, the White House National Security Council organized an intergovernmental working group last year to examine the issue. The group then tasked the National Telecommunications and Information Administration with developing and enforcing a set of privacy guidelines.

NSC spokesperson Ned Price told FedScoop via email the White House had no comment on any potential executive order but that an interagency review of the issue was underway.

During a July 24 press gaggle in Los Angeles, deputy White House press secretary Eric Schultz would not comment on the specifics of an executive order regulating privacy for commercial drones.

“What we have said on this issue in the past is that the interagency continues to develop and review policies concerning the domestic use of unmanned aircraft systems, and that remains the case,” Schultz said.

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“The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 4923, making appropriations for energy and water development and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes,” the statement said. “If the President were presented with H.R. 4923, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.”

According to the statement, the $34 billion funding bill calls for unacceptable cuts in technology-related funding for the Energy Department and other funding for the Army Corps of Engineers and the Interior Department.

The appropriations bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, June 20 and has yet to be considered on the House floor. Simpson chairs the Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on House Energy and Water Development Appropriations.

At the Energy Department, the bill cuts $500 million from the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which works on the development and deployment of efficient and renewable technologies. The president’s fiscal year 2015 budget requested $2.3 billion for the office.

The administration’s statement also asks Congress to fully fund the president’s request for the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA-E, which is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency focuses on “high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private sector investment,” according to its website. 

The bill provides $280 million for ARPA-E, a cut of $45 million from the president’s budget request of $325 million.

“The $45 million reduction would impact investments and delay improvements in technologies that reduce energy-related emissions, increase energy efficiency across multiple economic sectors, and reduce energy imports,” the statement said.

The bill also calls for a $40 million reduction for DOE’s Office of Science, which support’s the department’s fundamental scientific research.

“The $40 million reduction would reduce the number of grants to academic investigators and funding for staff at DOE laboratories working on fundamental discovery science and research that underpins advances in clean energy,” the statement said.

The administration “strongly objects” to a reduction in funding for the Naval Reactors program, which the bill plans to fund at $1.2 billion, as opposed to a requested $1.4billion. The program operates under DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration and provides for the Navy’s fleet of nuclear-powered ships.

“Together with the $151 million reduction in the FY 2014 enacted bill, this reduction would continue to put the U.S. Navy’s nuclear powered fleet at risk and would jeopardize the program’s ability to train nuclear-qualified sailors,” the statement said. “The bill also continues to underfund the Spent Fuel Handling Facility Recapitalization Project in Idaho, risking the operational availability of aircraft carriers and submarines and increasing costs to the Department of Defense.”

But the administration’s statement fails to tell the entire story. In it, there’s no mention of a $42 million loan guarantee for innovative technologies or a $4 million loan guarantee program for advanced technology vehicle manufacturing that were contained in the appropriations bill.

“[The bill] prioritizes the maintenance and safety of our nuclear weapons stockpile, while also funding important infrastructure projects and research that will increase U.S. economic competitiveness and growth,” Simpson said in the release.

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